Stephen Edgar's 'The Secret Life Of Books'
Commentary Samples from Exam 1, May 2001
Higher Level
Stephen Edgar’s “The Secret Life of Books” is about the nature of reading and the power of literature to affect the reader. The poem personifies books, imagining how they silently plot to draw in their readers, and then moves to a discussion of how the readers are changed by their reading. Edgar structures his poem to illustrate the nature of this relationship between literature and its readers. “The Secret Life of Books” is divided into five stanzas, each six lines in length. A lyric poem, it is a brief commentary revealing the speaker’s emotions on its topic. Within such a brief length, Edgar has developed a specific structure to each stanza. Of the six lines in a stanza, …show more content…
In this case, the author seems to be acutely aware that this poem will be analyzed, and some of his lines suggest that he is directly speaking to the analyzer. The question: “What do they have to say and how do they say it?” is a classic prompt when analyzing a poem or other piece of literature. The irony in this poem is that, like the books it describes, it will become part of its readers’ mind; it will write us, so to speak. The inherent irony within the poem makes Edgar’s use of a light tone appropriate; were he to write an extremely serious piece on this topic, it would seem that he had failed to understand that his own work was part of the process he describes, instead, he is fully aware that the quotation marks we are caught between may be his own. Although “The Secret Life of Books” has a light, or whimsical tone, it provides serious insight into the relationship between author and reader. Just as a composer needs musicians for his art to come to life, an author needs readers, or his work has no more worth than lines on a page. At the same time that the author needs the reader, the reader needs literature, needs the ideas it contains for they help him to form opinions and expose him to new ideas. We are what we read, Edgar suggests, but this is not necessarily a bad thing; this transformation must occur for authors to turn the
Higher Level
Stephen Edgar’s “The Secret Life of Books” is about the nature of reading and the power of literature to affect the reader. The poem personifies books, imagining how they silently plot to draw in their readers, and then moves to a discussion of how the readers are changed by their reading. Edgar structures his poem to illustrate the nature of this relationship between literature and its readers. “The Secret Life of Books” is divided into five stanzas, each six lines in length. A lyric poem, it is a brief commentary revealing the speaker’s emotions on its topic. Within such a brief length, Edgar has developed a specific structure to each stanza. Of the six lines in a stanza, …show more content…
In this case, the author seems to be acutely aware that this poem will be analyzed, and some of his lines suggest that he is directly speaking to the analyzer. The question: “What do they have to say and how do they say it?” is a classic prompt when analyzing a poem or other piece of literature. The irony in this poem is that, like the books it describes, it will become part of its readers’ mind; it will write us, so to speak. The inherent irony within the poem makes Edgar’s use of a light tone appropriate; were he to write an extremely serious piece on this topic, it would seem that he had failed to understand that his own work was part of the process he describes, instead, he is fully aware that the quotation marks we are caught between may be his own. Although “The Secret Life of Books” has a light, or whimsical tone, it provides serious insight into the relationship between author and reader. Just as a composer needs musicians for his art to come to life, an author needs readers, or his work has no more worth than lines on a page. At the same time that the author needs the reader, the reader needs literature, needs the ideas it contains for they help him to form opinions and expose him to new ideas. We are what we read, Edgar suggests, but this is not necessarily a bad thing; this transformation must occur for authors to turn the