I was having a hard time with Hart Crane so I dug this out of it's little hidden cubby and decided to actually read it(its a miracle I remembered where it was). It was a good little essay introduction for me although I still haven't read enough poetry in the past to really make reading Hart Crane a totally fulfilling experience (at least according to Bloom). I can't say I "got" everything in this little book, again due to my lack of poetic reading. It seems like something you could go back to time and time again as your gained more depth in poetry. Someone who took more poetry classes in university might find this worthless or all BS, I don't know enough to say. I stuck to prose in college and avoided poetry like the plague. ( )

Although I had already read and been very disappointed with the author's How to read and why in 2012, I still putchased this book in 2014, and am likewise disappointed. This slim booklet offers just the scantest introduction to reading poetry. Most of it's 82 pages is taken up by long quotations. In fact, just the recommended reading section of names of poets and recommended poems takes up more than a third of the total number of pages. Thus, the text portion written by the author is negligeable. Besides, the author recommends many very obscure poets, and over-emphasizes American poetry, dwelling too long on what are probably his favourites, such as Hart Crane. ( )

While Harold Bloom might be able to artfully expatiate upon the tragic flaws of various and sundry Shakespeare heroes, he commits one of his own here: he hasn't the faintest idea of his audience. Too sophisticated for a tyro and a mere introduction for anyone that attended sophomore English, Bloom commits the ultimate act of literary hamartia - which, staying true to the Aristotelian spirit of tragedy, he doesn't realize.

Bloom begins by noting that poetry is essentially figurative speech, going on to further note (smartly) that prosaic speech is figuration, too, but figuration whose immediacy as such as been lost. For a large portion of the volume, he reads several poems through the lens of Kenneth Burke's understanding of the four figurative tropes: irony, synecdoche, metonymy, and metaphor. Do you already know what these words mean? Assuming that you do (I'm guessing that most people who don't wouldn't know who Harold Bloom is), the vast majority of this book will be nothing new.

Bloom does manage to make some interesting points about the roles of allusion and intertextuality in poetry, giving examples of how some poems consciously mimic others stylistically (the scorn he heaps upon the "self-pitying and metrically maladroit" Poe is hilarious). He ends the book with the consideration that poetry is basically an exercise in which we encounter, in the words of Owen Barfield, "in contact with a different kind of consciousness from our own," which Bloom construes as a sort of cognitive "strangeness." This definition, while perhaps already glaringly obvious to the serious reader of poetry, has always rung true with me.

The strangeness of this book, however, is of quite another sort. We are offered interpretation after interpretation, without being offered even the rudimentary mechanics of how to "read a poem" suggested in the title, if such a mechanics are even available. Maybe his emphasis was on the "art" instead of the "reading poetry." ( )

Not for everyone this one. It is aimed at the intelligent reader and it will probably go over the heads of those who only read poetry because they think it impresses girls. But for the sophisticated reader, this is highly articulate analysis. An intelligent reader will get more from reading poetry after reading this - but the operative word here is intelligent. ( )

This was a bit 'above' me, I'm afraid. I had to keep referring to a dictionary -- not your standard pocket variety, a REAL dictionary -- to wrap my head round, no, even more basic: pronounce words like "synecdoche" and "metonymy". This book is a mere 56 pages long, plus another 26 pages of recommended works to read. I recognized less than a dozen of the titles. I am a mere recreational reader of poetry who happens to have a 2-year degree in Forestry. The Art of Reading Poetry was written more for the person on the cusp of achieving a Masters in English Literature. I didn't finish the book. There are others that I own that will need to read before I take another stab at this one. To be sure, this is a well written analysis and critique referencing several different (and not so different) works. For those who have the background, I'm sure it's a worthy read. For the kid who read and wrote poetry decades ago, and is now rediscovering the art, it's a bit much. ( )