I enjoyed this a lot, though I think it needs quite a bit of reorganization. Or at the very least: this is not as straightforward as How to Read Literature felt. I can see someone picking this up and putting it aside quickly because it takes several chapters, including a whole chapter on Russian Formalists, to get to the material “how” of reading a poem. As a person who has read Eagleton’s other literary studies books, I think it fit in nicely (sure wish the Formalism chapter existed in Literary Theory: An Introduction!) into that larger collection of work.

All of that said, I did once again learn a lot, and I think the strongest chapters probably are the last two, where he stops kind of retreading previous ground (if you’ve read his others books—if you haven’t, it’s all new!) and gets into the meat of things. He suggests reading the chapters out of order, but I wonder why it was this specific order he went with. Still good, solid explanations, funny, just not my favorite of Eagleton’s. ( )

Misleading title. You read a poem using your eyes and whatever it is that makes your heart go boom. ( )