How do we read modern poetry? Michael Schmidt--editor, critic, teacher, and poet--argues that reading poetry is a skill and a passion, developed and perfected through sensitive reading of the poetry of the past.
How can we hear clearly the poems of Ted Hughes if we have not heard Shakespeare and the Jacobeans, or Thom Gunn if we have not heard Ben Jonson? Schmidt insists on hearing, the unarguable aesthetic test. He examines the techniques of language that different poets develop in relation to their mentors and to the colloquial usage of their own class and time.
Schmidt discriminates between judgement and taste, inviting readers to look beyond the subjective and the familiar and to take up the challenge of 'difficult' poetry which opens the ear to unexpected sounds and sources. He is harsh about the currently fashionable terms 'voice', 'narrative', and 'self-expression', suggesting that the terminology of popular and specialized criticism is in need of an overhaul.
Central to his argument is a distinction between convention and tradition in writing. Philip Larkin and William Carlos Williams, he contends, share a tradition, and skilled readers will perceive the marginality of their imitators.
The tyranny of 'schools', 'movements', and--significantly--'nations' here gives way to a sense of particular writers working in a shared medium, and of particular readers who develop their imaginative and intuitive abilities alongside a sharpened critical and historical sense. The book makes the case for poems at a time when criticism--journalistic and theoretical--pushes poems behind a hedge of personality or jargon.