Review of Stephanie Burt, Don’t Read Poetry. A Book About How to Read Poems.

In an increasingly polarised and digitalised world, universities, and society at large, suffer from a profound lack of courses about poetry poetic education.This is but one of the many conclusions readers may draw after engaging with Stephanie Burt's Don't Read Poetry.A Book About How To Read Poems, published in 2019 by Basic Books.Through an illuminating perspective attuned to the contemporary reader -whether versed in the art of poetry or not at all-and the textures of everyday life, this essay offers an exploration of a myriad of poetic voices drawing predominantly from the distinguished literary traditions of British and US poetry, and ranging from George Herbert to Marianne Moore, passing through A. R. Ammons and T. S. Eliot, whose reflections on the art of writing permeate the chapters.Beneath an ironic title chosen with deliberate intent, Burt encourages readers not to fear an encounter with the lyric text, whether mystical or social, performative or confessional.For poetry, of all literary genres, comes closest to the intimacy of the human being, to solitude itself, and thus to the universality of feeling.As the pages unfold, the author increasingly grounds herself in the conviction that "to read lyric poetry is to discover commonalities of human feeling-however approximate, however conjectural-across time and space" (32).