Saving Poetry from English Teachers

Simon Vouet, Polyhymnia, Muse of Sacred Poetry

Simon Vouet, Polyhymnia, Muse of Sacred Poetry

Poetry used to play a much larger role in our culture than it does today.  That, at any rate, is the opinion of literary scholar Robert Scholes in his wonderfully provocative The Crafty Reader (Yale, 2001).  Scholes’ book is provocative in part because of where he puts the blame:

 “I would like to suggest that a lot of the damage has been done inside our schools and colleges, by well-intentioned teachers.”(5-6)

What have these teachers done?  Well, among other things, they’ve signaled to students that if a poem is too accessible, it’s not great poetry. They’ve dismissed poetry that people have loved (say, a poem like “Gunga Din” by Rudyard Kipling) and elevated poems that stymie people (say, “The Wasteland” by T. S. Eliot).  They’ve signaled that true poetry is meant to be contemplative, not actively engaged in the world.  They’ve taught that what’s most important about poetry is its symbolism and that one must have special between-the-lines reading skills if one is to truly appreciate it.

Does any of this ring a bell with you?  It does with me, and I appreciate Scholes’ search for an explanation as to why we see poetry this way.

 A major culprit, Scholes says, is poet Allen Tate, a man that I’ve actually met since he retired to Sewanee and was a friend of my father.  (He was also once the editor of The Sewanee Review.)  Tate was a key figure in the New Criticism, an approach to interpreting literature that flourished in America in the 1940’s, 50’s, and 60’s. Tate and the New Critics, Scholes points out, “tried to make a case for the supreme importance of poetry, based on a supposed opposition between poetry and other ways of using language.”    The poetry they held up as exemplary was lyric or expressive poetry.  If a poem had a political agenda, if it was out to instruct, if it was too practical, then it wasn’t true poetry.

In other words, poetry had to be pure and rise above the world.  It became tainted if it got too close to life—or too close to the history of the time or the biography of the author.  As Scholes says of Tate, “he wants to reserve for poetry all the power of expressing the truth, and he wants to believe that truth must be the possession of an elite, far removed from any situation in which ‘the common personality exhibits its commonness.’” (11-12)

Armed with this vision of poetry, the New Critics went about attacking a number of well beloved poems like Adelaide Anne Proctor’s “The Pilgrims,” “Fancis Mahony’s “The Bells of Shandon,”  and Joyce Kilmer’s “Trees.”  Scholes writes,

“this wholesale ‘correction’ of popular taste—taken up and magnified in hundreds of classrooms across the country— had the effect of purging the curriculum of the very poems that had once functioned to give students textual pleasure, thus preparing them to take an interest in poetic texts that did not display their hearts so obviously on their verbal sleeves.  Most children love simple songs, jingles, and nursery rhymes.  The path from these to the poems we all admire goes through the kind of poetry the New Critics attacked so ferociously, so that their attack had the result of cutting off the connection between the roots and the blossom.” (16)

And that’s not all that they did.  By separating out special poetic language from the subject matter of the poem, the New Critics helped determine that, in literature classes across the land, major focus would be put on symbolism, irony, tone, and hidden themes.  New Criticism may now be a relic of the past, but its influence persists today.  Scholes describes looking at on-line bulletin boards where students post questions and regularly coming across such cries for assistance as the following: “I need help identifying the symbolism in this story.”  “How is the river a symbolic mother to Huck?” “How do I decide the Tone of Antigone?” “I need help finding Irony in Oedipus.”

My colleague Michael Glaser, currently Maryland’s poet laureate, tells a story that confirms Scholes’ observation.  Michael says that, when he asks his Introduction to Literature classes to differentiate between a simile and a metaphor, most can do it. They’ve been taught that a simile is a comparison that uses “like” or “as” and a metaphor is one that doesn’t.  Yet when Michael asks these same students to name ten poems they love, they have difficulty.  Never mind that the simile/metaphor distinction hasn’t been a big deal to any literary scholars since the 1960’s.  It still gets taught.

Scholes is understandably appalled by the skewed perspective. As he points out, Oedipus is not about irony.  It is about

 “how a scandal in a ruler’s private life is causing public disasters—like a plague, for instance.  You might think that questions about the relation between sex and politics, between private and public life, would have a certain resonance in these times.  Questions about justice, guilt, responsibility, sexual desire, and family life are raised by the play.  But ‘irony’ is a safe topic, a ‘literary’ topic, one of those topics that seems to belong only to the artificial world of ‘English classes,’ where we English teachers feel at home.  My point is that, by playing it ‘safe,’ we are losing the game.  The great works of literature are worthy of our attention only if they speak to our concerns as human beings, and these must take precedence over the artificial concerns of symbol, tone, and irony.  Symbol, tone, and irony, after all, are only devices, or ways of talking about technique.  We need, and shall have to find, better ways of talking about what these works mean and how they connect to our lives.” (24)

Scholes acknowledges that the New Critics were very good at interpreting a certain kind of poetry, the short lyric.  It’s just that they then claimed that their favorite poetry was the essence of all poetry.  Scholes sums up his case against New Criticism this way:

“It opened up too great a space between words and deeds, and between the rhetorical and the poetic.  It took a certain patrician attitude of cool detachment and made it the measure of all good writing.  And it developed a method of reading, an art of reading poetry, that emphasized the technical qualities of form over the human qualities of expression.” (74-75)

I didn’t know anything about New Criticism when I went off to Carleton College.  But as much as I loved literature, I sensed that there was something wrong with how literature was being handled there.  Here I was, someone who had grown up in the midst of the civil rights battles and who was now a young man with a low draft number during the Vietnam War, and teachers were talking about literature as though it had nothing to do with life.  So I majored in history instead.   History, after all, clearly had something to say about war and political struggle and racial injustice and other such things.

But literature was my love and I managed to write most of my history essays about literature, about Beowulf and Chretien de Troye’s Arthurian legends and cultural theorists like Antonio Gramsci and Herbert Marcuse. My senior thesis was about the influence of Rousseau and Diderot on the French Revolution.  I returned to studying literature officially in graduate school.

So I have experienced the gap between literature and life in English curricula.  I have set up this website, and I quote Scholes extensively, because work still needs to be done in tearing down the barriers.

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