The lecture opens with what feels like a warning: experiencing poetry cannot be taught—it must be lived. Close Reading Poetry makes the case that no amount of analytical rigor or critical summary can substitute for the actual encounter with a poem. This isn't just about technique; it's about surrendering your imagination to the text, something he illustrates through Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself." The claim is bold and counterintuitive in an instructional context—usually, lectures promise to decode complexity, but here he's saying the real work happens only when you stop trying to decode and start actually feeling. This framing matters because it reframes what close reading actually means: not just examining language on the page, but examining your own response to that language.
The Sensual Impression
The lecturer immediately complicates our understanding of imagery analysis by distinguishing between observing words and experiencing them. He writes about how "you really have to experience you cannot take somebody else's a literary critic or a summary or someone else's summary of the poem as the experience of the poem itself." This is the lecture's central provocation—that we must encounter poetry directly, not through secondhand interpretation. The language he uses here carries real weight: it's about possession and originality, about taking things "second or third hand," which feels almost like a moral argument against passive consumption.
He then introduces Samuel Johnson's concept of impressions—"left behind by the poem on the imagination on the memory on the Consciousness they are What Remain with us after we read the poem." This framework is useful because it names what happens emotionally after reading: not understanding, but impression. Three categories follow—the sensual appeal to senses through imagery and sound, the emotional experience of tone and mood, and finally moral impressions that are "much more ambiguous." Critics might note this classification feels neat, but experience often defies such tidy sorting—sometimes an image sticks not because it's beautiful but because it disturbs.
Imagery in Shakespeare
The lecture turns to Shakespeare's Sonnet 60 as a concrete example of how imagery works. The lecturer walks through the poem line by line, showing how the first quatrain uses a simile comparing waves to minutes hastening toward their end—"the predominant image of the sea or of the ocean." But what makes this analysis sing is his close attention to language: "Nativity once in the main of light crawls to maturity" contains the word Main, which he explains has double meaning—it means both strength and the sea. This hinge between two images—youth and ocean—is what Close Reading Poetry calls a "hinge on which it turns." He then shows how the poem moves from this overlapping imagery to eclipses and finally to time as the Grim Reaper with a scythe, all these images binding together through repetition.
The analysis is effective because it's genuinely close reading—he's not summarizing the sonnet but showing how its imagery works dynamically. This is where the lecture earns its claim that imagery provides "hinges upon which to turn"—the metaphor itself demonstrates what he's describing.
Sound as Art
Moving to sound, he argues poetry "is not just a visual art it's also a Sonic art." The shift feels natural after analyzing imagery—he wants readers to understand that poems live through multiple senses. He introduces Lady Anne Finch's A Nocturnal Revere, which describes a horse approaching through pasture sounds: "torn up forage in his teeth we hear"—the repetition of T and F consonants creates an almost audible image of grass being ripped from the ground.
His point about this poem is that it introduced something unprecedented into poetry—"this kind of description is unprecedented" among previous pastorals. This matters because he's showing how a poet contributes to the tradition: not by imitating what came before, but by adding something genuinely new. When he says "that's an image that sticks it's a sound that sticks," he's making the argument practical—what stays with you after reading?
Wordsworth and Sensation
He then turns to William Wordsworth's early poem describing overwhelming sensation through accumulated description—"this dizzying effect of this overwhelming Sublime experience of all the motion and all the sound." The language here is key: he uses words like "dizzying," "overwhelming," and "sublime" to describe what the poem attempts. His point about the accumulation or catalog of description being part of the technique shows how form itself creates meaning—repetition mirrors exhaustion.
Emotional Impressions
The emotional impression section begins with a definition: "understanding the emotional impression of the poem sometimes involves understanding tone that is what is the attitude of the speaker towards a particular subject in the poem." This is classic formalist analysis—tone as speaker's attitude—and he applies it to Edgar Allan Poe's sonnet to science.
The reading reveals the argument through diction and meter: "science oh it's a troche instead of an I am and we're expecting shall I compare the two so we're we're expecting something melodious and instead we get this grating word science it just sounds bad." He shows how the poem's emotional tone is negative—"the attitude towards science is negative does not like science but harasses him almost follows him around keeps him from flying." The imagery builds: vulture, predator, dragging Diana from her car, driving dryads from the woods, tearing elephants from grass, and finally "from me science has driven the summer dream Beneath The Tamarind Tree."
This analysis is effective because it demonstrates rather than just claims—listening to how the poem sounds reveals its attitude. His conclusion: "we know the emotional state here is disgust towards science exasperation almost anger even in resentment"—the tone is unmistakable through his close reading.
Nostalgia and Memory
The final section analyzes Trumbull Stickney's nemeseen, which uses a refrain of "I remember" to create nostalgia. He describes it as "quintessential American Nostalgia," about memory and the difference between what was and what is—"remembrance we have this refrain in the country I remember being reinforcing this sense of contrast." The poem achieves its tone partly through varying use of present and past tense verbs, creating a tension between now and then.
The reference to nemeseen as the Greek titaness who gave birth to the nine Muses—and specifically as the god of memory—adds mythological weight: "memories very important for poetry it is also very important to this experience which we all feel sometimes of nostalgia." This framing elevates personal feeling into something almost archetypal.
Poetry isn't just visual—it lives through sound, and what stays with you matters more than what you analyze.
The lecturer's strongest move is arguing that impressions—sensual, emotional, moral—are what remain after reading. But this framework has a vulnerability: it suggests experience happens after interpretation, which feels reductive to anyone who believes good close reading IS the experience. Critics might note that Close Reading Poetry conflates personal response with literary analysis—the most useful reading often happens at the intersection.
Bottom Line
The lecture's core argument—that you cannot study a poem without actually experiencing it—isn't contradictory; it's practical advice disguised as philosophy. His strongest analysis comes from demonstrating how imagery works in Shakespeare and how tone reveals itself through diction in Poe—these are genuinely close readings. The biggest risk is that his framework could justify skipping the hard analytical work by calling it secondhand interpretation, but his own demonstrations prove the opposite: you need both rigorous attention to language AND genuine emotional response to fully encounter a poem.