I love poetry. Since I was a young man, I have written, read, and thought about poetry with something like a religious fervor. It has always seemed to me to represent the paradigmatic form of learning, in which the compulsion to speak what is true about this or that experience is married at all times with a more deep-seated need to express the latent patterns and harmonies persistent within and behind all experience. I have written elsewhere of the unrivalled importance poetry ought to hold in a civilized order of things; in fact, I could write endlessly on the topic.
If I am being honest, however, I have always found it difficult to convey my enthusiasm for poetry to my students. Undoubtedly, the intricacy of the language, and the arduous mental response it demands of the reader, has constituted a great barrier to most of them. This is so at all times (Wordsworth himself acknowledged that only about one in twenty educated persons could appreciate poetry), but for a generation subject to relentless forms of distraction, the problem has grown even more acute. Then there is the lack of the cultural vocabulary which would allow modern students to feel at home amid the array of classical and theological allusions with which English-language poetry is thickly planted. And of course, the contemporary prejudice against everything old leaves the antiquated language of our greatest poetry sounding foreign and forbidding.
I have noticed, over the years, that many teachers of literature, encountering this indifference (or worse) from their students end up shying away from poetry in their own instruction. No teacher likes to feel like they are pulling teeth in the classroom, and there is no doubt that teaching poetry to contemporary students can often feel that way. I have thought a lot about how all of us can present poetry to our students in ways that will be more engaging to them, and have had some success in my own classroom with these practices. Here are some of the things I have learned:
Start Early: Think of poetry like a dialect: the more you hear it, the longer you are acquainted with its particular rhythms and inflections, the earlier the “strangeness” of poetic language will dissipate. Young folks who catch the hang of meter and rhyme, metaphor and simile in their elementary schooling will have internalized the sort of reading habits that will facilitate their reception of “the greats.” Classical schools that incorporate lower and upper levels together have a great advantage in this regard; a coordinated program of instruction in poetics would go a very long way in preparing high school level students for appreciating all but the most challenging examples of poetry.
Say it Loud: Memorization, recitation, class readings – the best ways students can encounter poetry are by hearing it. It is an artistic medium, and its particular aesthetic effect lies in the way it joins sense to sonority. But that sonority has to be indulged in regularly. Certainly, this kind of habitual recitation can improve our students’ speaking abilities, and this is a great advantage to be derived from our curricula. But these skills should not overshadow the fact that reading poetry aloud simply allows our students to encounter beauty in the classroom, and encountering beauty in the classroom on a regular basis should be one of the foundational experiences of a classical student.
Write Poetry, Not Just About Poetry: One of the standard assignments in the contemporary English classroom is the poetry analysis essay. There is, of course, nothing wrong with such assignments per se, and properly structured, they can cultivate valuable close reading skills. However, when such assignments become the exclusive means through which students respond to their reading of poetry, the effect is to render the art something to be understood from the outside. To appreciate poetry, students need to understand it from the inside, to gain the sense that poetry speaks from the center of their own experiences. Towards this end, it is advisable to have students regularly write poetry in emulation of the works they read, and to write according to the parameters of those works. This allows them to appreciate the artistry involved in crafting fine poetry, while also imbibing some sense of the allure of that artistry when searching for the proper way to articulate one’s inner world. I have found that certain genres, like the ballad or the sonnet, are perfectly within the capacities of most upper level students, and that trying their hand at these forms can be an invigorating experience for them.
Find the Story: Speaking of ballads, this genre makes an excellent gateway into poetry as a whole, because it provides a narrative framework for the students to grasp on to, which facilitates their understanding of the language. From Sir Patrick Spense to La Belle Dame Sans Merci to Rime of the Ancient Mariner, many of the most accessible poems I have taught have been ballads, because the students are able to apply the interpretative skills they use to decipher details of plot and characterization, skills that generally take a deeper root than those applied to interpreting figurative language. But even when teaching poems that do not have an explicitly narrative structure, I find it useful to discover some sort of storytelling framework for the presentation of the lyric. So for instance, when teaching Ode to a Nightingale, I like to share Charles Brown’s anecdote about how Keats composed it one morning sitting under the tree, so that the students can have some sense of what is happening as they read.
The Students are the Context: Many books we teach our students work excellently as exemplars of the historical forces we wish to call to their attention. Augustine’s Confessions provides students with a wonderful model of the way early Christians wrestled with their classical patrimony. Machiavelli’s The Prince provides a perfect demonstration of modernity’s increasing disjuncture with classical thought. But in general, it is not a good idea to use poetry in this manner. Reading this or that poem as an example of “neo-classicism” or “Romanticism” only serves to distance the students from it. Over the years, I have gravitated towards an almost entirely non-historical approach to poetry, so that students can approach each poem asking themselves, “how does this work shed light on my own life?” rather than “how does this work shed light on cultural history?”
These are only a few insights I have gathered over the years, but hopefully something here can be of use to my fellow teachers. Above all, I suppose I just want to encourage a persistence in teaching poetry, no matter the challenges involved. It was once a common expectation, both in the West and elsewhere in the world, for a civilized person to be a poetry dilettante, capable of reciting a handful of lines on appropriate occasions or composing a bit of original verse at momentous points of their own life. If we as classical educators can cultivate that fine amateurishness once again in our students, I think we will have accomplished much.