Poetry's Touch: On Lyric Address

Indeed, he claims in the balance of Chapter 3 and in his short fourth chapter, some poets play to the effective control that readers exercise over the interpretive act, their poems actively "[seeking] a reader's presence" (142) and exploiting the contrast between the poet's here-and-now and the here-and-now of the text's reception. Time and again, Waters uses a wide range of linguistic approaches (syntactic or metrical analyses in some cases, applications of discourse theory in others) to frame or sharpen his readings; at the same time, he never allows technicalities to obscure his overall goal of enriching his readers' experience of the poetry.