This paper aims to illuminate new formalism and new aestheticism as alternative theoretical bases to previous literary theories of new criticism and new historicism for teaching English poetry. Both new formalism and new aestheticism concur in the way in which poetry (and its textual meaning) occurs as an event through the readers’ experiences of reading. First, new formalism emphasizes the significance of formal elements in poetry. Unlike the former theories concerned with historico-political implications of the text, new formalism searches for the poetic singularity occurring through the materiality of the formal elements of the text, irreducible to exterior values. The singularity leads readers to the poetic event, a temporal, somatic experience of poetry reading. Second, new aestheticism reevaluates the aesthetic, neglected by contemporary leftist theorists preoccupied with politics. Instead, new aestheticism notices the importance of the readers’ affect in constructing textual meaning, which is always in flux. In applying new formalism and new aestheticism to English poetry classes, poetry teachers can retrieve the poetic event by encouraging their students to transform poetry to other genres. In so doing, the readers are expected to regain the pleasure of reading and the ability to share the aesthetic experiences with others.