Why worry about poetry? If the buoyant national interest in writing it and reading it is anything to go by, poetry would seem to be enjoying an unprecedented phase of public enthusiasm and approval. There are poetry festivals, poetry workshops, poetry competitions and even Poetry Proms. Much of this is to be welcomed. The Poetry Proms are not just casual entertainment for the well-heeled on their way across the park to hear Mahler’s Fifth at the Albert Hall. These Hyde Park poetry readings, launched last year as a summer accompaniment to the music Proms, are free to anyone who can be bothered to go (and they can be heard on BBC Radio 3 during concert intervals). The Poetry Proms are showcases for some excellent new work by poets such as Maura Dooley, Paul Farley, Liz Lochhead, Michael Donaghy and Fred D’Aguiar.
Radio continues to stimulate a lively national interest in poetry, with successful poetry programmes and occasional series like Radio 4’s ‘Adventures in Poetry’. A new experience in configuring words and images has been made possible through the Internet, and there are dozens of poetry sites on the World Wide Web, promoting both traditional lyric poetry and new ideas of poetry as performance and electronic event. ‘Poetry, please’ is what listeners and viewers, as well as readers, are saying, and the big publishing companies have responded by giving us shelf loads of anthologies to satisfy a craving for every conceivable kind of poetry: long poems, short poems, love poems, war poems, underground poems, poems for the day and poems for the week. The Nation’s Favourite Poems, the product of a survey conducted by the BBC, has spawned a whole family of favourite poems, including The Nation’s Favourite Animal Poems and The Nation’s Favourite Comic Poems (and no doubt others are on the way).
The worry is that the spectacle of a poetry-loving nation is a superficial and misleading indication of the value and purpose of poetry in contemporary culture. In fundamental ways, in schools and colleges and universities where poetry once occupied a much more substantial part of the English literary syllabus than it currently does, we might be ceasing to care very much at all about its value and function. The perception of poetry as popular versifying, light entertainment and public performance sits uncomfortably alongside another perception of poetry as embattled and marginalised, unpopular as a subject of study and increasingly irrelevant in a new social formation obsessively concerned with measurements and targets, and only narrowly and pragmatically interested in literacy.
The sharp disparity between poetry as a thriving national past-time and poetry as part of an education in English is such that, while the poetry festivals flourish, some undergraduate students are likely to arrive at university with little or no interest in poetry, confessing that they don’t know how to read it and therefore can’t be expected to understand or appreciate it. Part of the problem is that there has been little sustained effort to co-ordinate the teaching of poetry in schools and universities, to think comprehensively about the purpose of teaching poetry in primary, secondary and higher education, or to establish a convincing set of arguments about the far-reaching cultural value and significance of poetry. In the anxious debates over English and the national curriculum, not enough attention was given to poetry as a distinctive literary genre, and in some schools it has since been displaced by a more overt emphasis on fiction and drama or else subsumed within a heavily generalised English literature curriculum.
The consequences for the teaching of poetry in higher education are troubling. While clearly there are students who excel in poetry classes, who can speak persuasively about Emily Dickinson’s punctuation or Wilfred Owen’s use of pararhyme, there are others who painfully lack even the most basic critical skills in the analysis of poetry. Do we then blithely disregard the problem and confine the study of poetry to a few optional modules scattered across the three or four years of a degree course, or do we set about building a strong foundation in poetry that all students might benefit from? Given that students’ knowledge of poetry and their skills in criticism are likely to vary extensively, what kind of introduction to poetry might be appropriate at undergraduate level? Should the priority be formal analysis or historical coverage? How can we encourage technical proficiency in the reading of poetry and a sophisticated aware-ness of its social and political significance?
The pressing nature of these questions informs a number of useful introductory textbooks designed for both teachers and students of poetry. An Introduction to Poetry by Dana Gioia and X.J. Kennedy (Longman, 1998) is impressive in its range, combining a thoughtful selection of over 500 poems (from early English ballads to contemporary world poetry) with extensive exercises and discussion sections. Formal analysis is helpfully complemented by a judicious arrangement of critical and contextual materials. Reading Poetry: An Introduction by Tom Furniss and Michael Bath (Prentice Hall, 1996) candidly addresses those readers ‘who have not read much poetry’. At the same time, the book ambitiously (and effectively) combines a detailed technical criticism of poetry with an exemplary range of historical and theoretical insights, and it carefully pitches its questions and exercises for the benefit of undergraduates.
The Poetry Handbook by John Lennard (Oxford University Press, 1996) has obviously been distilled from many years of classroom experience in practical criticism, but it shows how rigorous formal analysis can be expanded and complemented by other critical interests and endeavours. One of its distinguishing features is that it concentrates on the cumulative reading of a single poem (‘Nearing Forty’ by Derek Walcott). Studying Poetry by Stephen Matterson and Darryl Jones (Arnold, 2000) very deftly introduces students to both formal analysis and critical theory, opening with a chapter on poetic form and working its way through to more challenging propositions on the poem in history and the limits of poetry. Whether writing about Bob Dylan’s ‘Highway 61 Revisited’ or W.B. Yeats’s ‘Easter 1916’, Matterson and Jones are companionable and engaging critics of poetry.
After all this illuminating reading, we still need to design our own poetry courses and we have to do so within the constraints of our own institutional frameworks. Even if we have the opportunity of running an introductory poetry course across an entire academic year, there are constraints to do with chronology and nationality. Where do we begin and where do we end? Should it be ‘English Poetry’ or ‘British Poetry’?, ‘British and Irish Poetry’ or ‘British and American Poetry’? Perhaps we should teach ‘Poetry’ and choose freely from the richly abundant work of poets from Australia, Canada, the Caribbean and elsewhere.
Where constraints of time or constraints of structure restrict the scope of poetry courses, a great deal can be achieved through a sus-tained concentration on poetic forms such as the sonnet or the elegy. Far from limiting attention to formal and stylistic matters, courses with a strong generic emphasis can be powerfully effective in opening up dis-cussion of the poem in history. A carefully structured course on the sonnet can amply demonstrate the close relationship between eloquence and power, between the structural and thematic concerns of the Renaissance sonnet and the social and political interests of the court; and it can also show how the sonnet flexibly accommodates a range of very different voices over several centuries: the radical, republican voices of John Milton and Tony Harrison, the anguished, confessional voices of George Herbert and Gerard Manley Hopkins, the intimate, amatory voices of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Christina Rossetti. A short course on the elegy can be equally effective in both formal and historical terms, juxtaposing ‘Lycidas’ with later works such as Auden’s elegy ‘In Memory of W.B. Yeats’ and Heaney’s ‘The Strand at Lough Beg’.
Beyond all this, does poetry matter? Auden’s famous pronouncement that ‘poetry makes nothing happen’ is too often quoted out of context, as if that great tribute to Yeats renders poetry impotent or merely ascribes to it some self-regarding aestheticism. Of course, the lines that immediately follow suggest something else: something closer to the specialised autonomy that Theodor Adorno approved of in modern art. Poetry retains a capacity to operate at a critical remove from the society of which it is part: ‘it survives / In the valley of its making where executives / Would never want to tamper…it survives, / A way of happening, a mouth’.
Matthew Arnold was edging towards this kind of realisation in his essays on poetry at the end of the nineteenth century, and while we might find Arnold’s pontifications wearying, and some of his moral and political formulations objectionable, we have without doubt lost the force of his central conviction that poetry is a criticism of life. That poetry can have such a function lends credence to some of the most memorable defences of poetry by modern poets themselves, in the essays and letters of Yeats and Frost and Stevens and others. In its intense and vivid imaginings, poetry can take the measure of just how drastically life falls short of what it might have been, and with that realisation some fundamental politics of poetry begins. Yeats and Auden ‘sing of human unsuccess / In a rapture of distress’, neither poet confining unsuccess and distress to some putatively personal realm.
We sell poetry short when we collapse its reach and possibility into a few half-hearted learning outcomes on some hurriedly written course description. We need, at every level of teaching, to remind ourselves of the insights and incitements that poetry can generate. To do that adequately, we have to rethink the way that poetry is currently being taught, and we have to argue persuasively for its relevance all the way across the school and university curriculum, so that we might ‘In the prison of his days / Teach the free man how to praise’.
