How to read a poem by Cambridge

1. HOW TO READ A POEM
Close Reading and Practical Criticism
Wednesday 31st January 2024
Robinson Access Programme
Dr Claire Wilkinson
Fellow in English and Admissions Tutor
Robinson College
Robinson Access Programme
2024

2. Introduction
• About 30 minutes
• Interactive: chat function / raise Zoom hand
• Mainly English: but relevant to all humanities
subjects
• Based on a first year lecture for undergraduates
• Don’t use Google 

3. WHAT IS CLOSE READING?

4. Close Reading, or, ‘Practical Criticism’
• Reading with a focus on the text itself
• Consideration of style, language, form and structure
• A movement away from background knowledge
(context, history, an author’s previous works)
• The construction of a logical representation and
argument in response to a piece of writing
• Use of evidence from the text to support claims made
• It is sometimes appropriate to make use of historical
and / or contextual knowledge – but make sure you
don’t impose a view that isn’t substantiated by the
text itself.

5. History
• Before the 1890s…
• University of Cambridge, 1920s, I. A. Richards
• A turn away from philology (broadly: the historical study of
literary writing), towards the text... but it’s not
revolutionary
• Adopted by the New Critics (Cleanth Brooks, John Crowe
Ransom, Robert Penn Warren, T. S. Eliot too)
• Still important today – the foundation of literary studies;
although pure practical criticism is relatively rare now

6. Priorities (in Richards’s words)
1. Making out the plain sense of poetry
2. Understanding the difficulties of sensuous
apprehension
3. Mapping the visual imagery of a poem
4. Resisting mnemonic irrelevances (intrusion of
personal/private)
5. Resisting stock responses
6. Locating sentimentality appropriately
7. Dealing with inhibition
8. Considering doctrinal adhesion
9. Navigating technical presuppositions
10.Reprioritising general critical perceptions

7. Some short poems
a.
O Goddess! hear these tuneless numbers, wrung
By sweet enforcement and remembrance dear,
And pardon that thy secrets should be sung
Even into thine own soft-conchèd ear
b.
Who will remember, passing through this Gate,
The unheroic Dead who fed the guns?
Who shall absolve the foulness of their fate,—
Those doomed, conscripted, unvictorious ones?
c.
The soote season, that bud and bloom forth brings,
With green hath clad the hill and eke the vale;
The nightingale with feathers new she sings
The turtle to her make hath told her tale
d.
Some days in May, little stars
Winked all over the ocean. The blue
Barely changed all morning and afternoon:
The chimes of the bank’s bronze clock;
The hoarse voice of Cookie, hawking
The Daily Record for thirty-five years.
• Try to put these in order of their
age without looking them up
• Key question: why? (evidence)
Starting points
• Language
• Topic
• Metre

8. And a longer example…
Pastel
The light of our cigarettes
Went and came in the gloom:
It was dark in the little room.
Dark, and then in the dark,
Sudden, a flash, a glow,
And a hand and a ring I know.
And then, through the dark, a flush
Ruddy and vague, the grace
(A rose!) of her lyric face.
Questions
• What seems to be happening in
the poem? How do you know?
• Who do you think is speaking?
What evidence is there for your
argument?
• How does repetition work in the
poem?
• Are there any strange or
unusual or unexpected words?
Which ones? Why? What do
they add?

9. Building a toolkit for close reading
As you become more familiar with close reading, you’ll develop
techniques that work for you. Here are some general tips for getting
started. This is important for work with all types of sources in the
humanities:
• Use a dictionary, even for words you are familiar with
• Think about language and register
• Poetic features (metre, rhythm, rhyme, form, line divisions,
type...)
• Rhetorical features (metaphor, hyperbole...)
• Grammatical features (tense, active/passive voice, speaker)
• Allusions and references (to the classics, the bible,
contemporaries)
• Word use – are any words repeated and varied? How about
puns?
• Tone: how does the piece of writing feel? And, critically, why?
And something you shouldn’t do: feature spotting is not very useful: always say what
a poem is doing and then how it does that.

10. Questions
(English / applying to Uni / A Levels and
choices / the humanities / reading
poems / anything!)