Today I walk into my first classes after a year of sabbatical. After having spent all day Friday meeting with new entering students and hearing about their momentous decision (as they see it) to attend St. Mary’s, it makes sense for me to write on decision making. In what is arguably America’s most famous poem is about […]
Monthly Archives: August 2009
One Kiss, My Bonnie Sweetheart
When my wife and I leave the house in the morning, I will sometimes call out to her, “One kiss, my bonnie sweetheart” and we will embrace before going our separate ways. I suspect you recognize the line, which is from one of the English language’s most beloved poems, Alfred Noyes’s “The Highwayman.” I write […]
You Don’t Have to Read between the Lines
Robert Scholes tells us to teach biography and historical context and the poems will become clear.
Posted in Uncategorized Tagged Crafty Reader, Robert Herrick, Robert Scholes, teaching Comments closed
Through Novels We Practice Being Human
My friend Rachel Kranz and I have been talking and e-mailing about the value of novel reading, always a useful topic to revisit. Rachel is as thoughtful as anyone I know on the subject—she is a novelist as well as a novel reader so she has a double perspective. Leaps of Faith (Farrar […]
Posted in Uncategorized Tagged English teachers, Leaps of Faith, novels, Rachel Kranz Comments closed
Why Didn’t Poetry Save Neil from Suicide?
Yesterday I wrote about how Dead Poets Society, despite its support for poetry, still doesn’t give poetry enough credit and that Keating is the coin side of J. Evans Pritchard. Whereas Pritchard wants to graph literary excellence on a Cartesian plane, Keating (at least in the scenes we see, which are all we have to […]
Posted in Uncategorized Tagged adolescence, Antigone, Dead Poets Society, English teachers, Midsummer Night's Dream, Peter Weir, Sophocles, suicide, teaching, William Shakespeare Comments closed
Dead Poets Changing Lives
I seem to be returning to my childhood in recent posts, what with all my references to Sewanee, Tennessee. In my last entry I showed literary scholar Robert Scholes blaming Allen Tate, a poet and critic with close ties to Sewanee, for the abysmal state of American literature instruction. To balance Tate out, my launching […]
Posted in Uncategorized Tagged Dead Poets Society, English teachers, Peter Weir, Sam Pickering, teaching Comments closed
Saving Poetry from English Teachers
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 […]
Posted in Uncategorized Tagged Allen Tate, Crafty Reader, English teachers, New Criticism, poetry, Robert Scholes Comments closed
Poetry vs. the Decline of Civilization
I was listening to Garrison Keillor’s Prairie Home Companion this past weekend and marveling yet again at his ability to pull me into his stories about the Lake Woebegone citizenry. His account of a school field trip may have been a summer repeat—I’m not sure because I came into the program late. In any […]
Posted in Uncategorized Tagged A. E. Houseman, adolescence, Garrison Keillor, Loveliest of Trees, poetry Comments closed
