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The Secret Life of Poems: A Poetry Primer
The Secret Life of Poems is a primer which offers a poem—or on occasion an excerpt—on the left–hand page, together with facing commentary. Rhythm, form, metre, sources are the order of the day, not ethical commentary or descriptive paraphrase. This brief engagement with 45 poems seeks to explain how poetry works by bringing into view the hidden order of specific poems.
320 pages, Hardcover
First published January 17, 2008
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About the author
Tom Paulin
80 books7 followersTom (Thomas Neilson) Paulin is a poet, critic and playwright. He was raised in Belfast in Northern Ireland where his father was the headmaster of a grammar school, and his mother was a doctor. He was educated at Hull University and Lincoln College, Oxford.
He lectured in English at the University of Nottingham from 1972 until 1989, and was Reader in Poetry from 1989 until 1994. He was a director of Field Day Theatre Company in Derry, Northern Ireland. He has also taught at the University of Virginia and was Fellow in Creative Writing at the University of Reading. He is now G. M. Young Lecturer in English at Hertford College, Oxford. He is a well-known broadcaster and a regular member of the panel for the BBC Television arts programme 'Newsnight Review'.
Much of his early poetry reflects the political situation in Northern Ireland and the sectarian violence which has beset the province since the late 1960s. His collections include A State of Justice (1977), winner of a Somerset Maugham Award; The Strange Museum (1980), which won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize; Liberty Tree (1983) and the acclaimed Fivemiletown (1987), which explores Northern Irish Protestant culture and identities. Later collections include Walking a Line (1994) and The Wind Dog (1999), which was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize. The Invasion Handbook (2002) is the first instalment of an epic poem about the Second World War. His latest collection is The Road to Inver: Translations, Versions and Imitations 1975-2003 (2004), which brings together work from four decades.
His non-fiction includes Ireland and the English Crisis (1984), Minotaur: Poetry and the Nation State (1992), The Day-Star of Liberty: William Hazlitt's Radical Style (1998), a critical study of the nineteenth-century essayist and radical, and (with Amit Chaudhuri), D. H. Lawrence and "Difference": The Poetry of the Present (2003), a study exploring Lawrence's position as a 'foreigner' in the English canon.
Tom Paulin is editor of The Faber Book of Political Verse (1986) and The Faber Book of Vernacular Poetry (1990). His plays include The Riot Act: A Version of Sophocles' Antigone, which toured Ireland in 1984, and All the Way to the Empire Room which was broadcast by the BBC in 1994. His latest book is The Secret Life of Poems (2007).
Tom Paulin lives in Oxford with his wife and two sons.
He lectured in English at the University of Nottingham from 1972 until 1989, and was Reader in Poetry from 1989 until 1994. He was a director of Field Day Theatre Company in Derry, Northern Ireland. He has also taught at the University of Virginia and was Fellow in Creative Writing at the University of Reading. He is now G. M. Young Lecturer in English at Hertford College, Oxford. He is a well-known broadcaster and a regular member of the panel for the BBC Television arts programme 'Newsnight Review'.
Much of his early poetry reflects the political situation in Northern Ireland and the sectarian violence which has beset the province since the late 1960s. His collections include A State of Justice (1977), winner of a Somerset Maugham Award; The Strange Museum (1980), which won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize; Liberty Tree (1983) and the acclaimed Fivemiletown (1987), which explores Northern Irish Protestant culture and identities. Later collections include Walking a Line (1994) and The Wind Dog (1999), which was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize. The Invasion Handbook (2002) is the first instalment of an epic poem about the Second World War. His latest collection is The Road to Inver: Translations, Versions and Imitations 1975-2003 (2004), which brings together work from four decades.
His non-fiction includes Ireland and the English Crisis (1984), Minotaur: Poetry and the Nation State (1992), The Day-Star of Liberty: William Hazlitt's Radical Style (1998), a critical study of the nineteenth-century essayist and radical, and (with Amit Chaudhuri), D. H. Lawrence and "Difference": The Poetry of the Present (2003), a study exploring Lawrence's position as a 'foreigner' in the English canon.
Tom Paulin is editor of The Faber Book of Political Verse (1986) and The Faber Book of Vernacular Poetry (1990). His plays include The Riot Act: A Version of Sophocles' Antigone, which toured Ireland in 1984, and All the Way to the Empire Room which was broadcast by the BBC in 1994. His latest book is The Secret Life of Poems (2007).
Tom Paulin lives in Oxford with his wife and two sons.
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
April 10, 2022
If you like poetry and reading deeper about the composition of poems, you'll most likely enjoy this book, which I think is tom paulin most popular book, in terms of sales, outselling all his poetry collections.
Like other reviewers have noted there is an issue with the gender balance, even given the nature of canonical literature, a few more women would have made it a better read, it would be great to learn about other perspectives, outside of paulin's comfort zone.
The analysis of the poems is very annoying, with some ridiculous assertions but they are at least always interesting, and the book introduced me to some fine poems I would otherwise never have read. So overall, a good read!
Like other reviewers have noted there is an issue with the gender balance, even given the nature of canonical literature, a few more women would have made it a better read, it would be great to learn about other perspectives, outside of paulin's comfort zone.
The analysis of the poems is very annoying, with some ridiculous assertions but they are at least always interesting, and the book introduced me to some fine poems I would otherwise never have read. So overall, a good read!
December 13, 2013
Paulin proceeds without prelude to his purpose; an illumination of meanings and mechanisms of poems spanning hundreds of years, many sharing his Irish heritage. He reflects on the effects of acoustic patterns and the physicality of reading, as well as on biographical episodes and contextual detail ranging across politics and literature
I learned so much from this book, about poetry, history and the English language. Paulin's insight into the sophistication of works by the likes of DH Lawrence dispelled the initial anxiety that I wouldn't understand the book, and I was hungry for more when I came to the end. Susan Sontag has said that the aesthetic is 'that which needs no justification' (in her essay 'On Style'), but Paulin's book demonstrates to me that we still need guidance to acquire the taste for new pleasures...
I learned so much from this book, about poetry, history and the English language. Paulin's insight into the sophistication of works by the likes of DH Lawrence dispelled the initial anxiety that I wouldn't understand the book, and I was hungry for more when I came to the end. Susan Sontag has said that the aesthetic is 'that which needs no justification' (in her essay 'On Style'), but Paulin's book demonstrates to me that we still need guidance to acquire the taste for new pleasures...
February 18, 2010
The extent to which you’re likely to enjoy Tom Paulin’s The Secret Life of Poems depends entirely on what you’re hoping to get out of it. If you’re looking for a “poetry primer” (as the book is billed), that breaks down every poem into its minute component parts – its trochees, cretics, molossus, feet, and labials – and explains why they are so arranged, the book is likely to be a useful, and possibly enlightening, tool.
If, on the other hand, you’re looking for something that might make reading poetry more enjoyable, you’re likely to be disappointed. Of the forty-seven poems, only two are by women (Emily Dickinson and Christina Rossetti) which suggests Paulin thinks few female poets are worthy of his scholastic study. Snobbery, perhaps, but whatever the reason, their exclusion from the primer means they’ve been spared Paulin’s goings-over that, to my mind, deaden the poets and their work.
If, on the other hand, you’re looking for something that might make reading poetry more enjoyable, you’re likely to be disappointed. Of the forty-seven poems, only two are by women (Emily Dickinson and Christina Rossetti) which suggests Paulin thinks few female poets are worthy of his scholastic study. Snobbery, perhaps, but whatever the reason, their exclusion from the primer means they’ve been spared Paulin’s goings-over that, to my mind, deaden the poets and their work.
March 6, 2022
2.5*
there was a good bunch of poems in this -- just very male, very (very) white, and i wasn't convinced by some of the close reading interpretations.
there was a good bunch of poems in this -- just very male, very (very) white, and i wasn't convinced by some of the close reading interpretations.
January 29, 2015
Sometimes interesting, sometimes painfully pedantic notes about the minute mechanics of poems. Also sometimes really bizarrely tangential.
What strikes me most, though, is the massive Maleness of this book. 37 male poets (about 8 of them called John); 2 female and one anonymous. Of the two female poets, Paulin's chosen poems from Dickinson and Christina Rosetti about their sexual thoughts/feelings about men.
Thus this is the first book I've read that fails the Bechdel test, which it does spectacularly.
My daughter just threw it in the bath. I agree.
What strikes me most, though, is the massive Maleness of this book. 37 male poets (about 8 of them called John); 2 female and one anonymous. Of the two female poets, Paulin's chosen poems from Dickinson and Christina Rosetti about their sexual thoughts/feelings about men.
Thus this is the first book I've read that fails the Bechdel test, which it does spectacularly.
My daughter just threw it in the bath. I agree.
June 30, 2022
Interesting but creative criticism becomes fanciful.
June 14, 2017
Somewhere, I imagine, there are musicologists whose detailed knowledge of their subject is so deep that on hearing Beethoven's late quartets their minds see nothing other than musical notation. The emotive nature of the music has long since passed them by.
Such thoughts came to mind on reading this rather strange, and ultimately very disappointing book by Tom Paulin. It's not the worst poetry companion I've read, but it comes a very close second. Paulin knows his poems with a knowledge of meter, diction and syntax so intense that each poem becomes a succession of sounds playing off one another. This makes for interesting reading for a couple of poems - but for 40? And at times it feels that we've wandered into the realms of a daytime TV word quiz. So bleat also contains the word eat, does this presage an unfortunate end to the sheep? And any word ending with uck... A famous Blackadder sketch comes to mind.
For Paulin, most poems (at least the ones he has selected) are essentially about sex and politics. For some poems these clearly are dominant themes, and you don't have to be a paid up Freudian to see undertones of sex in a great deal of poetry. Even so, when Robert Browning's - admittedly erotic poem - "Meeting at Night" begins with a boat on the sea, are we really supposed to associate the sea with salty semen staining the bed. I hope not. And when the anonymous author of the Unquiet Grave slips in the word "content" towards the end, does he really mean cunt - nudge, nudge, wink, wink? It is hardly "Country matters".
His political stance is more interesting, and inevitable given the authors that he has chosen -Milton and Bunyan most obviously, and later the Irish poets. Is Keats' Ode to Autumn as political as he makes out? I know that opinion is divided on this. He puts his arguments across well, but damages it once the robin becomes a cypher for English redcoats. Likewise, no one can doubt Coleridge's early revolutionary enthusiasm and political interests, but in Frost at Midnight is he really alluding to a (rather obscure) passage in Henry V where frost is mentioned to link an English invasion of France with the fear of a French invasion of England? Or did Coleridge just happen to be sitting up late at night, one winter's evening, with his new born son? Sometimes the prosaic happens to be true.
In his enthusiasm for the hidden and subversive meanings he misses some more obvious connections. Ode to Autumn surely owes much to Grey's Elegy in A country graveyard, and in its turn supplies the language for Wilfred Owen's Anthem for Doomed Youth. There's a line of imagery here that could have been worth pursuing. Likewise, when questioning why Ted Hughes chose "pale" rather than "blonde" in his description of the thistles, he speaks of the need for Hughes to avoid making his soldiers aryan. Rather more obvious (I would have thought) would be reference back to the pale kings, princes and warriors in Keats' La Belle Dame sans Merci, building on the mythical fairy-tale tenor of the poem.
Good points? I enjoyed his essays on Dryden, Pope and Swift. If I had a life expectancy of 500 I would probably get round to reading Dryden's translation of the Aeneid on the strength of his praise. And I actually enjoyed the Pope poem, so there's a good thing.
Overall, though, this comes across as a book by a man who knows the mechanics of poetry inside out but is no longer in love with it. On that point, I hope that I am wrong.
Such thoughts came to mind on reading this rather strange, and ultimately very disappointing book by Tom Paulin. It's not the worst poetry companion I've read, but it comes a very close second. Paulin knows his poems with a knowledge of meter, diction and syntax so intense that each poem becomes a succession of sounds playing off one another. This makes for interesting reading for a couple of poems - but for 40? And at times it feels that we've wandered into the realms of a daytime TV word quiz. So bleat also contains the word eat, does this presage an unfortunate end to the sheep? And any word ending with uck... A famous Blackadder sketch comes to mind.
For Paulin, most poems (at least the ones he has selected) are essentially about sex and politics. For some poems these clearly are dominant themes, and you don't have to be a paid up Freudian to see undertones of sex in a great deal of poetry. Even so, when Robert Browning's - admittedly erotic poem - "Meeting at Night" begins with a boat on the sea, are we really supposed to associate the sea with salty semen staining the bed. I hope not. And when the anonymous author of the Unquiet Grave slips in the word "content" towards the end, does he really mean cunt - nudge, nudge, wink, wink? It is hardly "Country matters".
His political stance is more interesting, and inevitable given the authors that he has chosen -Milton and Bunyan most obviously, and later the Irish poets. Is Keats' Ode to Autumn as political as he makes out? I know that opinion is divided on this. He puts his arguments across well, but damages it once the robin becomes a cypher for English redcoats. Likewise, no one can doubt Coleridge's early revolutionary enthusiasm and political interests, but in Frost at Midnight is he really alluding to a (rather obscure) passage in Henry V where frost is mentioned to link an English invasion of France with the fear of a French invasion of England? Or did Coleridge just happen to be sitting up late at night, one winter's evening, with his new born son? Sometimes the prosaic happens to be true.
In his enthusiasm for the hidden and subversive meanings he misses some more obvious connections. Ode to Autumn surely owes much to Grey's Elegy in A country graveyard, and in its turn supplies the language for Wilfred Owen's Anthem for Doomed Youth. There's a line of imagery here that could have been worth pursuing. Likewise, when questioning why Ted Hughes chose "pale" rather than "blonde" in his description of the thistles, he speaks of the need for Hughes to avoid making his soldiers aryan. Rather more obvious (I would have thought) would be reference back to the pale kings, princes and warriors in Keats' La Belle Dame sans Merci, building on the mythical fairy-tale tenor of the poem.
Good points? I enjoyed his essays on Dryden, Pope and Swift. If I had a life expectancy of 500 I would probably get round to reading Dryden's translation of the Aeneid on the strength of his praise. And I actually enjoyed the Pope poem, so there's a good thing.
Overall, though, this comes across as a book by a man who knows the mechanics of poetry inside out but is no longer in love with it. On that point, I hope that I am wrong.
June 6, 2023
Tom Paulin comes across as pretentious and snobbish in this collection of short essays. He seems far more interested in showcasing his own wide reading than elucidating the poems, and frequently makes unprovable assumptions about the intentions of the poets he studies.
As other reviewers have noted, this book's selection of poems is very white and very male, and also has a leaning towards Irish poetry. If Paulin had outlined a reasoning behind this selection I would have had no issue, but to bill the book as an introduction to poetry more generally is problematic.
Paulin does generate some interesting readings, and I enjoyed his application of metrical analysis. I think the disappointment I feel about this book is perhaps the fault of poor marketing than necessarily the content itself.
As other reviewers have noted, this book's selection of poems is very white and very male, and also has a leaning towards Irish poetry. If Paulin had outlined a reasoning behind this selection I would have had no issue, but to bill the book as an introduction to poetry more generally is problematic.
Paulin does generate some interesting readings, and I enjoyed his application of metrical analysis. I think the disappointment I feel about this book is perhaps the fault of poor marketing than necessarily the content itself.
January 16, 2014
I'd been wanting to read this book for some time under the delusion that "A Poetry Primer" on the cover meant something. I don't know much about Tom Paulin although I have dim recollections of seeing him contribute to the post-pub TV review programme.
I am reluctantly giving up because I have realised the book is not going to give me what I wanted, a better understanding of the techniques poets use... nor anything I need and ploughing on would merely be an act of completism and a good deal of it would be a foreign language.
It is however a Secret Life of Poems - individual poems which Paulin unpacks, going further than the poet's intentions and possibly even further than is credible.
It was not just that I found the discussion impenetrable (there's just a one page list of terms and then we are into sentences containing four, five even six jargon words) but startlingly and needlessly vulgar. I really liked the first poem - a very old one about a bereaved swain mourning at the grave of his young woman. I felt Paulin was pushing it a bit with where he takes the ideas about it but profoundly unimpressed by his use of four letter words in this context. That's a device for poetry not for scholarly writing.
I carried on for a while but did not feel I was learning anything more than how irritating Paulin can be.
I am reluctantly giving up because I have realised the book is not going to give me what I wanted, a better understanding of the techniques poets use... nor anything I need and ploughing on would merely be an act of completism and a good deal of it would be a foreign language.
It is however a Secret Life of Poems - individual poems which Paulin unpacks, going further than the poet's intentions and possibly even further than is credible.
It was not just that I found the discussion impenetrable (there's just a one page list of terms and then we are into sentences containing four, five even six jargon words) but startlingly and needlessly vulgar. I really liked the first poem - a very old one about a bereaved swain mourning at the grave of his young woman. I felt Paulin was pushing it a bit with where he takes the ideas about it but profoundly unimpressed by his use of four letter words in this context. That's a device for poetry not for scholarly writing.
I carried on for a while but did not feel I was learning anything more than how irritating Paulin can be.
November 21, 2016
An excellent selection of poetry, with informative if a little dry commentary from Mr Paulin. The commentary was only marred intermittently by the critic's crime of over-analysis; really I believe they overdo it at times. Mr Paulin seems particularly to see things sexual which I'm sure aren't really there in the poems. But still a useful discussion of how poems work and, as I say, a great selection of works.
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews