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Craft essay · Reading as craft
Why poets read poets — what the reading does for the writing, and how to read in a way that does it.
By Poets of The Household5 min read
Most working poets, asked how someone might learn to write poems, suggest the same first thing: read poems. The suggestion is sometimes received as a deflection — as if the questioner had asked for a shortcut and been handed the long road. It is not a deflection. Reading is the long road; there is no shortcut and there has never been one in any tradition the editor of this essay is aware of.
The editor's bias here is toward reading as the part of the writing practice that does the largest amount of invisible work. The visible work is the drafting and the revision. The invisible work is the slow accumulation, over years, of a sense of what a poem can do — what a line break can do, what a comma can do, what the third stanza of a sonnet can do that the first cannot. That sense is built almost entirely from reading.
T. S. Eliot, in Tradition and the Individual Talent (1919), argued that no poet has their meaning alone — that every poem stands in relation to every poem that has come before it, and that the poet's job is partly to develop a "historical sense" of that relation. The essay is over a century old and the argument is still partly contested, but the practical claim under it has aged well: the poet who has read widely writes inside a larger conversation, and the writing borrows weight from the conversation it sits inside.
W. H. Auden, asked how he read a poem, said he asked himself: Here is a verbal contraption. How does it work? The framing is utilitarian by design. Auden's reading is interested in the technical machinery — how the rhyme is doing its job, how the meter is shifting, how the syntax leans into the next line. Many poets find that a reading attentive in this way produces, slowly, an internal library of working solutions to common writing problems. The library is not consciously consulted at the desk; it shows up in the writing, anonymously, as instinct.
Seamus Heaney, on his own apprenticeship (in Feeling into Words, his Royal Society lecture and the essays in Preoccupations, Faber & Faber, 1980), described the years before Death of a Naturalist as years of reading more than writing — Eliot, Auden, Hopkins, the Anglo-Saxon and Middle English poets, eventually Mandelstam and Miłosz. The reading is what gave him, by his own account, the permission to claim his own subject. He had to know what other poets had done with their own ground before he could trust himself to write about his.
The question of what to read does not have a single answer. Different poets recommend different starting points; most of them recommend more than the questioner expected. A few non-prescriptive observations:
Choose one short poem by a poet you admire and one by a poet you barely know. Read each three times, with an hour between readings. After each third reading, write a single paragraph: what does the poem assume; what does it leave out; where does it turn.
Eliot's foundational essay on the historical sense; the argument that no poet has their meaning alone is the source for the conversation-with-the-tradition reading the essay develops.
Includes 'Feeling into Words' and other essays where Heaney describes his own years of reading before Death of a Naturalist; useful for the apprenticeship-via-reading model the essay reads.
Auden's collection where 'Reading' and 'Writing' appear; source for the 'verbal contraption' framing the essay quotes.
Hirsch's working essay on reading practice; useful as a more methodical complement to the broad-reading argument above.
The transfer from reading to writing is usually slow and almost never literal. Many young poets imitate poets they have just discovered; many older poets find that the influences they can name are not the influences most visible in their own poems. The reading is doing its work somewhere under conscious attention.
A few things to notice, however, when reading with writing in view:
Not all reading does the work the essay is recommending. Skimming for examples to imitate tends to produce poems that read like the source. Reading only what is currently being published in literary magazines tends to produce poems that fit the present moment exactly and age poorly. Reading only criticism, without reading the poems the criticism is about, tends to produce poems that argue rather than enact.
The reading that seems to do the most for the writing is slow, repeated, broad, and grounded in primary sources (the poems themselves) rather than secondary ones (the essays about the poems). The essays — including this one — are useful as company. They are not a substitute for the poems.