Many readers will have already acquired the basis for self-conscious and self-critical reading strategies through their everyday responses to popular culture. This innovative new textbook will help develop these strategies and interpretive skills by recognising and explaining the open and multi-dimensional qualities of the poetic text. At the same time, Reading Poetry is theoretically informed and up-to-date, taking into account the wealth of theoretical speculation about poetry, and literature in general, the twentieth-century has produced. A wide spectrum of examples has been included, ranging from fifteenth-century lyrics and ballads to contemporary poetry from all over the English-speaking world. Features a unique combination of theory and practice unprecedented in an undergraduate textbook, arguments and discussions supported by analytic examples and case studies, chapter-end exercises to help develop critical analysis, and well-known canonical poems placed alongside the poetry of marginalised groups to exemplify the different meaning and uses of poetry.