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Chicago Style: How to Read a Poem

The difference between knowing how to read and really knowing how to read has been a particularly vexing issue ever since academic departments in Britain and the United States began making reading and interpretation a serious business. In the eighteenth century literary criticism mainly involved assessment; it was the work of reviewers. Only lawyers, divines, and medical doctors needed to explain why they thought a text meant what they thought it did. Their close reading was professional, professionalized, andprofessionalizing. In the twentieth century, however, literature departments came to think that their mission was to teach any and all students how to read “accurately and skillfully,” as Rob Hume puts it in this issue (435). As academic departments made critical reading a feature of all university education, literature professors became active as coaches to real reading. Such reading is different from the simple literacy that people developed as children when they learned their ABCs and made their way through age-graded primers. It is said to require instruction of the kind that would transform a child’s untutored running into the expertise of a sprinter. As Rousseau said of Emile’s education when Emile reached puberty, an education in reading needs to begin again for those of us who study literary texts. In the service of this initiation (or renewed initiation) to reading, scholars have provided many books that are for all intents and purposes advice books about reading. Writers such as Mortimer Adler, who taught at the University of Chicago in the Hutchins era, felt impelled to supply us with titles such asHow to Read a Book (1940), and others followed suit. Such books often alarmingly evoke all that you, poor reader, have been blithely ignorant of in your earlier forays into literary texts before reassuring you