Recently I heard an NPR report that poetry had been given a new life and new popularity with the internet, with YouTube, public readings, poetry slams, and even apps (yes, I love the app from Poetry magazine). Years ago, as an English major in college, I read numerous books and reviews that discussed poetry almost as if it were some sort of rare earth or a tarnished but cherished antique, appreciated only by the few. In How to Read a Poem, Edward Hirsch celebrates the lyric poem as if it were a compelling song, an ode to life itself, a toast to the ecstasy and sorrow of the world.
The lyric poem is the poem of the song, with rhythm kept on the lyre, and words wrung from the heart. It is of course the same word, lyric, we use for the words of a song and with the same purpose: to heighten and deepen the emotional experience. No critic I read in those years of college expressed a greater emotional attachment to poetry than Hirsch, who relates not just the construction of the poem itself, but of his powerful reaction to it.
Hirsch says that at the most critical level, the lyric poem depends on metaphor. It is as if we really cannot explain a deep human emotion with ordinary words but must turn to symbolic language. A poem is a song, a poem is ship on the ocean of time, the first cry of a newborn child, the smile of a grandmother, the long shadow of an Autumn evening, a minuet and a dirge.
This book is particularly useful in its examination of the poetry of Europe and the South American poets. The author introduced me to the “Postcards” of Miklos Radnoti, the final one, so tragic, written as he takes his last painful steps toward execution and found in his cloak next to his heart. His love of Pablo Neruda and his affecting response to this poetic master is fresh and delightful. The erudite Robert Graves claimed that the metrics of Anglo-Saxon poetry (the topic of my Master’s thesis) was sung with the rhythms of the oar in water.
He helped me understand Wallace Stevens, always somewhat recondite yet captivating. Hirsch makes obvious his great love for Walt Whitman who loved America so well and the American people that he left us with a body of work that speaks to the unique soul of the people of the New World. The love for poetry of Hirsch is inspiring and he subtitles How the Read a Poem as …And Fall in Love with Poetry. Certainly Edward Hirsch, and I suppose his readers, are deep in that love.
Two Strikes 