Joy Recollected: High School English

Jean-Baptiste Greuz, "Boy with Lesson Book"

Jean-Baptiste Greuz, “Boy with Lesson Book”

I’m currently in Sewanee, Tennessee visiting my parents, and yesterday I happened to bump into my two favorite English teachers from high school. Sparky Edgin taught me both the freshman and junior-level English classes at Sewanee Military Academy, and Phil White taught a vocabulary building class that I still use to this day.

Okay, so I didn’t quite have the experience that D. H. Lawrence describes in “Piano”:

The glamour 

Of childish days is upon me, my manhood is cast 

Down in the flood of remembrance, I weep like a child for the past.

Nevertheless, it was still an emotional experience. It had been years since I had seen either man, and Sparky had taught me—I say this without exaggeration—the most meaningful class of my life. No course has ever excited me as much as his junior-level Survey of British Literature.

I can still recall vividly many of the works we read. We started with the 20th century and I remember “Louise” by Somerset Maugham (I posted on it recently), “The Barrel Organ” by Alfred Noyes, and “October” by Dylan Thomas.” The contemporary beginning was designed to ease the transition us into the old stuff because we then plunged into Beowulf, the Venerable Bede, The Canterbury Tales (we looked at every pilgrim), Hamlet, poetry by Donne and the Cavalier Poets, an excerpt from Gulliver’s Travels, an excerpt from Pope’s Essay on Man, Oliver Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer, Chesterfield’s  “Letter to his Son,” Thomas Grey’s “Elegy in a Country Churchyard,” an excerpt from Boswell’s Life of Johnson, a huge dollop of the Romantics (“Intimations of Immortality,” “Kubla Khan,” “Ode to the West Wind,” “Ode to a Nightingale”), poems by Tennyson (“Break, Break, Break”) and Browning (“My Last Duchess”), and Shaw’s Pygmalion. There were other works as well but I don’t at the moment recollect them.

It wasn’t only the works themselves that I remember. I also recall the passion Sparky had for them. I remember him reading passages from Hamlet and walking us through the Romantic poems just mentioned. He introduced us to songs from My Fair Lady when we were studying Pygmalion, and he managed to convey the sheer fun of She Stoops to Conquer. Sparky confirmed for me what I already knew in my heart of hearts, that nothing in life was as transcendent as literature.

It was well that I had Survey of Brit Lit that year because the military part of my education was not sitting well with me. I hated dressing up in uniforms and marching and undergoing inspections and all the rest of it. If it hadn’t been for academics—oh, and tennis and the debate team—I don’t know what I would have done.

English high school teachers must know first hand what I only distantly remember, that teenagers can get caught up in works with an intensity that college students never quite match. (I would love to hear from readers if this fits their experience.) At any rate, no other English course—no other course—ever hit me with such force. It was probably decreed then and there that I would some day become an English teacher myself.

I was glad that I could express my gratitude by giving Sparky a copy of my book on Beowulf. It was like completing a circle.

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