Introduction

Abstract

The introduction outlines the subject of the book, namely, the contentious issue of difficulty in poetry—especially modernist and postmodernist poetry. It does so by addressing the general reader and by reporting some anecdotal evidence in a lively manner. It draws attention to the fact that the perception of difficulty is both widespread and fundamental, and so it needs to be tackled holistically. The stylistic and cognitive model developed and applied in the rest of the book does just this. The second part of the introduction offers a helpful chapter-by-chapter summary of the remainder of the book, clearly signalling the progression of the argument.