Product Description

The Poetry Handbook is a lucid and entertaining guide to the poet's craft, and an invaluable introduction to practical criticism for students. Chapters on each element of poetry, from metre to gender, offer a wide-ranging general account, and end by looking at two or three poems from a small group (including works by Donne, Elizabeth Bishop, Geoffrey Hill, and Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott), to build up sustained analytical readings. Thorough and compact, with notes and quotations supplemented by detailed reference to the Norton Anthology of Poetry and a companion website with texts, links, and further discussion, The Poetry Handbook is indispensable for all school and undergraduate students of English. A final chapter addresses examinations of all kinds, and sample essays by undergraduates are posted on the website. Critical and scholarly terms are italicised and clearly explained, both in the text and in a complete glossary; the volume also includes suggestions for further reading. The first edition, widely praised by teachers and students, showed how the pleasures of poetry are heightened by rigorous understanding and made that understanding readily available. This second edition -- revised, expanded, updated, and supported by a new companion website - confirm The Poetry Handbook as the best guide to poetry available in English.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #62779 in Books
• Published on: 2006-01-05
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 444 pages

The Observer, February 2006
"Very readable... gives and excellent overview of poetry in English and will explain rhythm, metre and style."

Review
Lennard succeeds in being as exhaustive as he can possibly be... (Caroline Bertoneche, Universite de Provence )

Very readable... gives and excellent overview of poetry in English and will explain rhythm, metre and style. (The Observer, February 2006 )

About the Author
John Lennard has taught at the universities of London and Cambridge, and for the Open University. He has published three books: But I Digress (1991), the best-selling Poetry Handbook (1996) and The Drama Handbook (2002). He is presently Dean of the Shakespeare Programme at the British-American Drama Academy in London; on the Global Virtual Faculty of Fairleigh Dickinson University; and teaches for the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge.

Customer Reviews

More is less
While this book is undeniably comprehensive, it is over-written and the author's voice is very intrusive and off-putting. The sub-chapters are not broken down into easy-to-use sections (I wanted to find out more about free verse and was left wading through pages of indulgent waffle); and for a book which claims to have been written as a 'crib' for students, I won't be using it as a reference book in future with any relish.

For beginners to intermediates, I would recommend Stephen Fry's excellent, witty 'The Ode less Travelled' which is much more accessible and enjoyable to read, and makes writing your own poetry pleasantly challenging. It's also much cheaper.

Terry Eagleton's 'How to read a Poem' is aimed at a similar, academic market to 'The Poetry Handbook' and I found that book far preferable and more persuasive, although admittedly not as thorough.

Overall, I was very disappointed with this book, particularly as I'd come to expect more from Oxford. If you have to read it, then good luck: if you don't, shop around first.

Buy this fabulous book
The first edition of John Lennard's The Poetry Handbook (it was red) changed my whole approach to reading and writing, so that I wonder now whether I actually was reading at all before Lennard taught me how. Anybody who reads or writes would benefit from attending to The Poetry Handbook, especially if you don't much like poetry.
If you are a student of English, either at A level or at university, and you are not using The Poetry Handbook then you are not at the races. The candidates who have are athletes on stanozolol. Have a look round the exam room: Lennard's readers are the ones who have been coached in Practical Criticism and can perform; if you don't know this stuff then you are just … busking.
And if you love Poetry, Lennard will widen hugely the range of poems you can get into your bloodstream.
The book is poem in its own right. Elizabeth Bishop’s Sestina is tetrametric when most are pentametric and thus have more room for manoeuvre between the repeated endwords. Lennard calls this “a wider slalom”: once read, never forgotten.

This new edition (it’s blue) is porkier than its predecessor, which is great for the ordinary enthusiastic reader like me: it's got even more delicious ingredients, more poems, more ingenious readings that are none the less NAILED to the texts. So for the ordinary reader Blue Lennard is porkier in a good way. Buy Blue Lennard because you enjoyed Red Lennard.
For the teacher Blue Lennard is very obviously an improvement on what was already a good textbook: there are exercises at the end of each chapter and many more examples. For a teacher running a class it's a technically a much better sausage for being porkier.
But if you are a student and nobody seems to want to teach you actually to do practical criticism, then get hold of a Red Lennard second hand, read it, google the referenced poems and in a week you will be so much better at Practical Criticism that you'll never have to download a lousy essay again. Then buy tis second edition and read it for fun.
I suppose I think that for the student on their own, Blue Lennard may be porkier in a bad way, because it is double the size, even cleverer, and even more confidently witty than Red Lennard, so maybe not so useful in an emergency. Red Lennard was a speed boat disguised as a life raft; blue Lennard is an aircraft carrier which will improve the teaching of practical criticism wherever it is deployed, and I suspect will simply redefine what can be expected of the students if they are properly taught. Blue Lennard will be hegemonic and will be a goldmine for the OUP and John Lennard.
Inside Blue Lennard, the spine of a thin man wildly signalling inside fat man, the speedboat inside the life raft that has been eaten by the aircraft carrier, is the original core of Red Lennard, an analysis of Derek Walcott’s Nearing Forty, tied to each chapter of the text. This is a detective story that let’s you follow the younger Lennard make a series of fascinating discoveries with his humane but forensic approaches: Cracker. In making Blue Lennard hegemonic, this fascinating detective work (every word of which remains in Blue Lennard but no longer as a spine) gets lost. Red Lennard said to the engaged reader: “read this forensic manual and you will be able to have adventures like I had with Nearing Forty”. Blue Lennard will have lots more (maybe ten times more, but the sky’s the limit: every student of English in the world should have The Poetry Handbook) but less-engaged readers who will become much better at reading and writing and much better at Practical Criticism. The Benthamite calculus is that Blue Lennard will do more good to a hugely greater number than did Red Lennard, but the average amount of good done per reader will be less. “You must read this book because it sets and exposits the standard of practical criticism that will be expected in this department of English”.
Red Lennard changed my life. It was a completely creative book that just looked like a manual. Blue Lennard will sell in far greater numbers because it is a much better textbook even than Red Lennard was, and it will by in that way have far more leverage and make many more students more articulate and alive through their reading. I just hope their teachers draw to their attention Lennard’s account of his inspiring adventures with Nearing Forty.