Today, with few exceptions, students leave high school innocent of poetry: in grammar, logic, and imaginative prose they may be only hazy. For two-thirds of our youth, this is the terminus of formal education. They can scarcely be expected to evolve into Whitman’s “great audiences.” The third who go on to college, and for whom there should be some hope of remedy, are too often given a minimal exposure to the muse’s art; and of course, they have been anything but predisposed to take a real interest in even that little. In freshman English courses, the study of poetry—if it enters into the syllabus at all—typically occupies three or four weeks, or less, out of a semester.
Wow. I believe my entire freshman English course in college was devoted to poetry. Not much attention was paid to it in high school, though.
"The mistake of many contemporary poets is to think that one of the reasons why they go unread is that the public is still attuned only to Scott and Longfellow."
ReplyDeleteI try, and fail, to imagine a poet so naive that he supposes that the public is attuned to Scott and Longfellow. I have probably read more of both than anybody on my block; yet I know more of Lewis Carroll's parodies of them than I do of their real verse. If you can recite more than a snatch of "Lochinvar" or "Paul Revere" or "I Heard the Bells", more power to you.
I managed to avoid freshman English in college, but I do remember a near-unanimous groan when the instructor in a sophomore-level class suggested another week of poetry. It is fair to say that the selection in the anthology could have been better.
I see no reason to choose between Scott and Longfellow on the one hand and, say, Eliot and Stevens on the other. Actually, I think it would be nice if people started reading things like Masefield's Reynard the Fox again. Poetry has become too narrow in its scope, don't you think? There's more to it than lyrics.
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