The Poem Itself by Stanley Burnshaw
Published 1960 · 88,000 words · about 7 hours at an average pace · Essays & Criticism
How hard is The Poem Itself to read?
The Poem Itself scores 53 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 62 out of 100
- Linguistics and prosody vocabulary combined with accessible critical prose.
- Sentence structure: 50 out of 100
- Abstraction: 65 out of 100
- Abstract claims about translation grounded in poem-by-poem demonstration.
- Information density: 75 out of 100
- Each entry packs phonology, semantics, and literary history into brief commentary.
- Narrative indirection: 14 out of 100
- Direct scholarly commentary format.
- Symbolic density: 12 out of 100
- Analytic throughout, though poems discussed are often highly symbolic.
- Ironic distance: 12 out of 100
- Straightforward scholarly tone.
- Resolution withholding: 14 out of 100
- Individual commentaries reach clear conclusions about each poem.
- Structural complexity: 35 out of 100
- Anthology structure with consistent multi-part format for each poem.
How The Poem Itself is regarded
The Poem Itself holds a literary regard score of 68 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.