How to Analyze a Poem | Close Reading Poetry for Beginners

hi everyone in this video I'm going to talk about the five steps of close reading the future lectures will follow each one of these steps but now I just want to give you a survey if you look in the description below you should find a link that's where you can download the handout for this this is basically what it looks like it's it's just the five steps of close reading but I want to introduce what close reading is and why it's important close reading as it became a practice in the 20th century with critics like T.S Eliot and I a Richards and cleonth Brooks and the poet and critic Robert Penn Warren and others as they began to introduce this method of reading poetry it became quite popular and part of the success of close reading was that it was now very easy to teach a poem to high school students to college students and they introduced a way of talking about poetry that was really compelling prior to the new critics are the formalists you have critics like Samuel Johnson in the 18th century sir Philip Sydney you have Giovanni boccaccio you have even Aristotle all of these literary critics examined poetry not just by its parts or components but also the way in which a poem is dynamic and an encounter and is reflexive in a way so as close reading practice became more popular in the 20th century it became more exclusive critics were starting to say that a poem is an organic Unity that is only made up of its parts of language therefore it doesn't matter what the author thinks doesn't matter how you feel about it it doesn't matter about the historical context or the biographical context all that matters is the language and that's a little bit too far so in this method of close reading I don't want to resurrect close reading practices of the mid 20th century I want to take what's best from those practices and what's best from the ancient practices and give you kind of a well-rounded way of approaching a poem so in the handout in the link and I'm going to walk through these steps you'll find a set of questions and an outline about what each step involves now I came up with this approach through teaching undergraduates at Harvard ...