I confess, after struggling for over a year to get to 35% finished, I decided to DNF this one. I picked it up because I wanted to learn more about what makes a poem a poem, but I've since determined that the best way to fall in love with poetry is to read a poem itself. While I suppose much of this commentary is lovely and useful if one thinks about it, there's so much flowery enthusiasm that I find myself merely skimming to try to find study-able segments, but there are few. I wouldn't like a step-by-step guide to reading poetry by any means, but this book takes it too far.

An introduction to the depth and breadth of poetry. I would suggest for anyone who reads poetry and wants to know more about poets and poetry. Includes pieces of poems by many different poets. There is an excellent listing of poets by country in the back.

I like seeing why other people read poems and how they interpret poems. I would take a star off for the paragraphs that felt like a contest for how many people he could quote. He earns the star back for conveying a genuine love and excitement for poetry.

I mostly used this book to discover new poems to love. Among them: Yehuda Amichai's "A Pity. We Were Such a Good Invention," Delmore Schwartz's "Baudelaire," the last lines of Robert Frost's "Desert Places," Nazim Hikmet's "Some Advice to Those Who Will Serve Time in Prison" and "On Living," Tadeusz Rozewicz's "In the Midst of Life," Wislawa Szymborska's "Children of Our Age" and "Reality Demands," WCW's "Aspohdel, That Greeny Flower," and reawakened my interest in Anglo-Saxon poetry.

Somebody tell Mr. Hirsch that not all prose needs to read like poetry. Some insightful thinking here, and some incredible examples I would never have found on my own.