How to Read Poetry Like a Professor: A Quippy and Sonorous Guide to Verse

Foster views the famous 14-line, iambic pentameter form of the sonnet as a satisfying easily recognizable square shape. While Foster maintains that enjoyment and not analysis should predicate people’s engagement with poetry, “one of the additional pleasures is seeing how the poet worked that magic on you,” especially when it comes to examining the form of a poem that has been part of the English poetic tradition since the 1500s (102).

There are two major types of sonnet—Petrarchan and Shakespearean. The Petrarchan version, invented by 14th-century Italian Francesco Petrarch, consists of an octave (eight lines) followed by a sestet (six lines) with a specific rhyme scheme. The octave introduces a topic while the ninth line introduces a turn or resolution to the theme, which the sestet addresses.

In contrast, the Shakespearean sonnet, which is formed of three quatrains and a rhyming couplet, departs from Petrarch’s notion of two movements. To Foster’s mind “lines nine through twelve form their own statement that is self-contained, and then the final two constitute a conclusion. And when we’re talking about loving life all the more because the awareness of death is a full-time reality, there is nothing more conclusive than that” (110).