Thalia Flora-Karavia, “Boy Reading” (1906)
English professor William Logan wrote a quirky column about the decline of poetry in Saturday’s New York Times. It’s not a great article—in fact, it’s unclear either what Logan is protesting or what he is proposing—but the piece serves as a useful launching point for reflections on the current status of poetry.
Logan observes that “[t]he dirty secret of poetry is that it is loved by some, loathed by many, and bought by almost no one” and that poetry “has long been a major art with a minor audience.” He then takes us back to a time when poetry had a larger audience:
Many arts have flourished in one period, then found a smaller niche in which they’ve survived perfectly well. A century ago, poetry did not appear in little magazines devoted to it, but on the pages of newspapers and mass-circulation magazines. The big magazines and even the newspapers began declining about the time they stopped printing poetry. (I know, I know — I’ve put the cause before the horse.)
And further on:
Poetry was long ago shoved aside in schools. In colleges it’s often easier to find courses on race or class or gender than on the Augustans or Romantics. In high schools and grade schools, when poetry is taught at all, too often it’s as a shudder of self-expression, without any attempt to look at the difficulties and majesties of verse and the subtleties of meaning that make poetry poetry. No wonder kids don’t like it — it becomes another way to bully them into feeling “compassion” or “tolerance,” part of a curriculum that makes them good citizens but bad readers of poetry.
I partially agree with Logan but disagree much more. First, where we agree: I can testify, on the basis of a 19th century British poetry course I taught in a senior center, that poetry used to be more public in the past than it is now. My elderly students talked about reading daily poems in The Baltimore Sun (many of them not very good but it was still poetry), and they could still recite “The Charge of the Light Brigade” or “Kubla Khan” or stretches of poetry by Longfellow. So that’s an argument for poetry’s higher profile.
I should caution that these students were not a representative sample of the broader population. After all, they had chosen to sign up for a 19th century British poetry class. Still, it sounds like different cultural institutions paid more lip service to poetry than they do today.
But, except for the fact that they had had more life experience, my senior citizens weren’t more attuned than my English majors to “the difficulties and majesties of verse and the subtleties of meaning that make poetry poetry.” In some ways, people of earlier generations seem to have memorized poetry in the same way that they dressed up to go to church: it was a gesture of respect to high culture, a sign that they were civilized. But just as wearing a hat and gloves doesn’t necessarily enhance the spiritual experience, so reading and reciting The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere doesn’t necessarily deepen one’s understanding of poetry.
To be clear, I’m all for memorizing poetry and treasure the fact that, when I went to a Parisian school at 13, we spent an hour memorizing poetry every day, 30 minutes at the end of the morning session and 30 minutes at the end of the afternoon. I sometimes have my own students memorize the opening lines of Canterbury Tales and appreciate how it gives them a deeper appreciation of rhythm and rhyme. So yes, schools could and should do more along these lines.
But Logan is just riding a private hobby horse or indulging in a caricature of current day professors by talking about today’s students being bullied into “feeling ‘compassion’ or “tolerance.’” I’m not even sure what he’s talking about unless he’s still fighting the early 1990’s culture wars. Students today respond to poetry is a wide variety of ways, just as they always have. Sometimes they are inspired, sometimes intrigued, sometimes aroused. Like Benedick and Beatrice in Much Ado about Nothing, often they turn to poetry for purposes of lovemaking:
Claudio: And I’ll be sworn upon’t that he loves her;
For here’s a paper written in his hand,
A halting sonnet of his own pure brain,
Fashion’d to Beatrice.
Hero: And here’s another
Writ in my cousin’s hand, stolen from her pocket,
Containing her affection unto Benedick.
In other words, poetry has always mixed it up with life.
Standing on shaky ground, Logan then engages in a little self-satire. Perhaps he’s exaggerating to disguise just how curmudgeonly he’s sounding:
My blue-sky proposal: teach America’s kids to read by making them read poetry. Shakespeare and Pope and Milton by the fifth grade; in high school, Dante and Catullus in the original. By graduation, they would know Anne Carson and Derek Walcott by heart. A child taught to parse a sentence by Dickinson would have no trouble understanding Donald H. Rumsfeld’s known knowns and unknown unknowns.
Logan admits, “We don’t live in such a world, and perhaps not even poets alive today wish we did,” and he ratchets down his goals to children memorizing a poem a week.
Then he makes a declaration that irritates me no end:
The cigar-chewing promoter who can find a way to put poetry before readers and make them love it will do more for the art than a century of hand-wringing. He might also turn a buck.
I’m all for doing whatever it takes for spreading the gospel of poetry, with or without a cigar. What I find irritating is that Logan has no clue that English teachers and poetry lovers all over America are already finding imaginative ways of introducing young people to poetry. To cite one instance that I’ll bet Logan knows nothing about, there is “Poetry Out Loud,” a recitation contest that students compete in from all over the country. In some ways, rap has reintroduced students to rhythm and arresting images and, so introduced, students suddenly find “Tiger, Tiger” or “Kubla Khan” to be marvelously modern. I don’t know that people are turning many bucks as they excite young people about poetry but they aren’t hand-wringing. They leave that up to people like Logan.
The columnist is more interested in complaining about political correctness and our decadent times than in discovering what is already going on.