Barry Spurr
There is no question that the study and appreciation of poetry have been under active threat or at best regarded with indifference for too long, even in those very places where one might have imagined that their nurturing would have been safeguarded – in school English curricula and university English Departments. Schoolteachers of English are heard to say that they ‘don’t like’ poetry (and, no doubt, say so to their students) and, because of sufficient syllabus flexibility, they can avoid teaching very much of it, or any of it. Many years ago, I met a prospective high-school English teacher who was finishing her studies and already doing some teaching stints in schools. She proudly declared – to me, of all people - that, not liking poetry, she had been able, by a careful negotiation of her choice of courses, to avoid studying poetry almost entirely during her undergraduate years in which she was (nonetheless) majoring in English Literature.
In some Australian states, it is possible, at matriculation, to have taken the highest level of English study and have sidestepped poetry entirely in that senior year. Queensland school-teacher friends tell me that scarcely any poetry is prescribed for study for years on end in that state’s schools, and where it is studied it is most likely to be by Indigenous writers, such as Oodgeroo Noonuccal, which can be used to illustrate the racist character of white Australia. In one of Sydney’s leading academic schools, the only anthology of poetry prescribed for study for years was the aptly-named collection, Deadly, of Aboriginal protest poetry. It as if the vast corpus of non-Aboriginal poetry in English simply does not exist, a deliberate strategy, of course, of cultural and civilisational cancellation and eradication, which has been in place now for more than a generation and across the Humanities. I had occasion to ask some of the boys, exposed to Deadly, what they made of this poetry – each said they thought it was frightful, but they dare not say so, predictably.
Graduates in English Literature have lacunae in their knowledge of poetry and its history, now, that once – say, fifty years ago - would have been unthinkable (no Chaucer or Milton, for example), and which are indefensible if one holds that, at the very least, an Honours graduate in a discipline should have some acquaintance with its key elements and its historical development. The disappearance of Milton, for example, is the equivalent of Homer and Virgil being deleted from Greek and Latin literary study, Dante from Italian, Goethe from German and so on. Once, Paradise Lost was a core text on English undergraduate study (as I know, as I lectured on it for years to second-year English) and for the very good reason, not only that it is the only epic poem in the language, but because of its extensive influence, for centuries, on writers after Milton. Now, you would be hard put to find an English department in Australia where it is taught at all, even in an optional course or honours or postgraduate seminar. Milton, as you would know, has several very bad marks against him: a white, heterosexual, English, Christian male ticks all the wrong boxes, which even the poet’s left-leaning support of Oliver Cromwell in the Revolution will not mitigate.
This idea (of an evolving canon of books – never cast in iron, in spite of what its critics routinely, tiresomely claim, but with some inevitable, recurring texts such as Milton) was discredited and abandoned years ago, and it is poetry in particular which has suffered. Then, the collapse of what we used to term the English major in colleges and universities – a decline described in detail recently in The New York Times – and of English Departments themselves, both of which are happening here, as well as in America, combine to represent the meltdown of the discipline in toto - with poetry (again) most under threat. A vicious circle (or downward spiral) has very securely established itself: teachers who have graduated from the fragmentary remnants of English in the universities, today, are coming into the schools, as English teachers, with little or no competence to teach poetry at all (like ‘music’ teachers today, who are appointed to these positions without being able to read music or play a musical instrument - which is like a satirical nightmare out of Jonathan Swift). And for the English teachers, unschooled and unskilled in poetry, this gap in their education in the subject would now be stretching back even to their schooldays. And those of their students who go on to university to read English, having studied little or no poetry at school, under them, choose courses which have no poetry in them, as course-choice is now a free-for-all, as nothing must be prescribed, apart from the ‘correct’ responses to the reading of texts, in accordance with race, class and gender orthodoxy, and it has taken very little time, in this process, for poetry simply to disappear from English study entirely.
William Shakespeare is the notable exception to the ideologically-driven vaporisation of once-canonical authors. He has survived in school and university English courses because his works have proved infinitely malleable to race, gender and class orthodoxies, no matter how preposterously contradictory of the facts of his texts or ignorance of his historical-cultural context that process proves to be. So, in a recent student’s assignment, I read that she was required to demonstrate that Shakespeare, as an oppressive enforcer of the patriarchy, ‘silenced women’. I suggested to her that she might query this proposition, by referring to some of the numerous examples of stridently vocal, wondrously-loquacious women in Shakespearean drama (Portia, Cordelia, Lady Macbeth, Miranda, Desdemona, Kate the Shrew and so on), but she replied that that would not be a wise strategy if she wanted a good mark for the assignment. She needed to endorse the ‘correct’ interpretation, in accordance with the principles of Third-Wave Feminism about which she turned out to be much better informed than the works of the greatest of dramatists. English Studies have become Lying Studies, as Les Murray once pointed out.
For the appreciation of poetry to survive, let alone flourish in the society – and I will explain why this is imperative, soon - teachers need to be trained in the teaching of verse, which depends for its success at least as much upon a love of poetry, as on well-developed skills in accounting for (and communicating) the language of poetic diction, poetry’s various techniques and its history. And the mere mention of history raises yet another problem and disturbing phenomenon of modern education – what my one-time colleague, Professor Michael Wilding, calls the contemporary denial of history. Poetry-reading and appreciation must be set in historical and cultural contexts if it is to be intelligently and satisfyingly pursued. If you have no knowledge of what the English revolution was, you cannot read John Milton informatively. If you have no knowledge of the French and Industrial revolutions, you cannot read William Blake or William Wordsworth intelligently. If you have no knowledge of the mid-Victorian crisis of faith, you are wasting your time trying to understand what prompted Lord Tennyson or Matthew Arnold to write their great poems on that subject. And this opens out to that much larger issue of ignorance of the Bible and Christianity without at least some elementary knowledge of which, much of literature in English, in general – and its greatest poems - until about the middle of the twentieth century remains a closed book. When a student recently queried me about a reference he had heard me make to Calvary, in a discussion of T.S. Eliot’s poetry, by asking if this was the place in Canada where there is an annual stampede, I had yet another insight into what confronts us in teaching any texts from the heritage of Western civilisation these days. Hence, the pervasive emphasis on contemporary writing for which the forgetting, even the denial of history is of no account, and the popularity, as one of the Queensland teachers told me, of such trash as teen fiction in today’s English classrooms. A century ago, Julien Benda coined the term, la trahison des clercs (the compromising of integrity by intellectuals who engage in political advocacy). The betrayal of the discipline by people who claim to profess it is simply appalling. As Professor Simon Haines, of the Ramsay Centre, has written:
What has been hardest of all to fathom [in the destruction of the Humanities] is the decades-long war of attrition carried out against the study of poetry and other literary genres, especially the English poetry and literature of the past, by other academics in the humanities – most of all, incredibly, within English departments themselves.[1]
It is amazing, when you think of it, that even the term ‘English’ has been allowed to survive, given the word’s disreputable associations. ‘Speaking English’, we are told, ’is colonial terrorism’.[2]
I was interested to read the account of Melbourne teacher, Conor Ross, reporting, in The Spectator this month on his attendance at a conference in February held by the Victorian Association of Teaching English, at Deakin University – which began, he wryly notes, with an acknowledgement of the stolen land on which the conference was convening, but with no indication that it was to be given back any time soon to its original owners. In the course of his pointing out that while it may seem ridiculous to the outside world that ‘there are indeed teachers who happily celebrate the death of the novel and play as the predominant text forms studied in English’,[3] I noted that poetry is simply not mentioned even in this account of literary cancellation. It would seem that its corpse had been disposed of long ago. Even this writer, critical of the trends that were being exposed at this gathering (and – coming as no surprise to anybody - the most destructive views about the teaching of English came from academics, in this case from the University of Melbourne), makes no mention at all in the article of the abolition of poetry. In the last summer vacation, I saw on Linked In, a teacher from a Sydney high school noting that he would be taking the advantage of the holidays to catch up on his reading and to widen his range, for the benefit of his classroom teaching. Admirable, no doubt. And he received many ‘likes’ in response. He gave an extensive list of books, fictional and non-fictional, in English and in translation that he was embarking on, but there was not one poet amongst them; and the responders to his list (many of whom seemed to be teachers, too: certainly, well-read people) suggested some more works he might consider: but, again, not a single poet. I could not resist adding my comment to the dozens that were there, at this point: ‘What about poetry?’, I wrote. No response, of course, and, if I remember rightly, not a single ‘like’.
So when Mr Ross notes that ‘English is often considered the beating heart of a secondary school’s academic life’, I can only respond that, on the evidence of such as his piece and of his Sydney counterpart, it must have a chronic case of arrhthymia, of significant and possibly terminal missing beats.
Now, you may ask: ‘Why, in this desperate scenario, is poetry so important and its disappearance – its deliberate cancellation - so disturbing, although, given the scenario, not remotely surprising? And what can be done about it?’ The first point that must be made about poetry is that it has been a continuous presence in the history of our civilisation from the earliest times. The novel, in comparison, is a Johnny-come-lately, not emerging significantly, in English literature, until the eighteenth century. In ancient Greece and Rome, Homer and Virgil, respectively – and numerous other poets, besides (and we remember that the drama in ancient Greece was a form of poetry too) - expressed the mind of the people. It was originally an oral art, transmitted through the generations and, indeed, the centuries (Milton knew Homer by heart, and has been termed the English Virgil and Paradise Lost is replete with Homeric and Virgilian references, as, of course with biblical ones). To this day, poetry will only be best appreciated if it is spoken, recited, committed to memory, known by heart and, thereby, taken to heart. America’s National Endowment for the Arts’ annual Poetry Out Loud competition, which was inaugurated in 2005, now involves more than four million high school students from every state, promoting, specifically, the art of recitation of poetry from memory, with the grand final in Washington, DC each year. Amongst the criteria of choice of poems for performance in the competition, one must be a pre-20th-century work. Many related online resources are provided, including an audio ‘poem of the day’ for every day of the year, where there is, regrettably (but, I suppose, inevitably) an over-representation of contemporary verse. Nonetheless, this is undoubtedly an admirable and successful initiative to engage both teachers and students, not only in poetry, but in its historic expression and, most importantly, the skills of alertness to such as rhythm and emphasis for bringing out meaning, which oral recitation – and doing so from memory, in particular – conspicuously nurtures. Poetry Out Loud is remarkable; its ongoing existence and ever-increasing popularity is a great encouragement. In the general environment of the suppression and cancellation of poetry study in schools, however, it would seem to be the exception that proves the rule.
Then there is the issue of the character and function of poetry, as it has been interpreted through the ages. In ‘An Apology for Poetry’ (‘apology’ in the sense of an apologia, a defence of a belief, not an admission of guilt or regret), written around 1580 by that quintessential Renaissance man, Sir Philip Sidney, the poet-critic speaks of poetry’s ‘delightful teaching’. To distinguish it from and prioritise it over both philosophical and historical writing, his emphasis is as much on the delight (which verse, at its best, affords) as the teaching it embodies. It is through the verbal delight that the teaching is communicated. The poet ‘doth not only show the way, but gives so sweet a prospect into the way as will entice any man to enter into it…. he doth not only far pass the historian, but for instructing is well nigh comparable to the philosopher, and for moving leaves him behind him’.
Beyond its general influence throughout subsequent literary criticism, Sidney’s ‘Apology’ is specifically recalled by the Romantic poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley, in his ‘Defence of Poetry’ (written in 1821), who writes that while ‘ethical science arranges the elements which poetry has created’, poetry ‘awakens and enlarges the mind itself by rendering it the receptacle of a thousand unapprehended combinations of thought’.
Shelley’s contemporary, John Keats, nonetheless, issued a salutary warning, with regard to poetry’s teaching function, in a letter a few years before Shelley wrote his ‘Defence’:
We hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us — and if we do not agree, seems to put its hand in its breeches pocket. Poetry should be great and unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one's soul, and does not startle or amaze with itself, but with its subject.
Yet this caution was challenged, later in the century, by another poet-critic and cultural theorist, Matthew Arnold, who, discarding orthodox Christianity in the familiar mid-nineteenth-century way, argued, in ‘The Study of Poetry’ (1880), that, in an age of increasing rejection of Christian faith and practice, poetry would take the place of religion: it would instruct, uplift and comfort us, as religion was no longer capable of doing:
More and more mankind will discover that we have to turn to poetry to interpret life for us, to console us, to sustain us. Without poetry, our science will appear incomplete; and most of what now passes with us for religion and philosophy will be replaced by poetry.
Such high-minded Victorian literary moralism inevitably spawned, in turn, a vigorous reaction and repudiation, and nowhere more so than in the ‘Preface’ to Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde’s famous first novel, published in 1891 and epitomising the ‘decadent’ Art-for-Art’s-sake movement of that period, explicitly rejecting the Arnoldian idea of art for life’s sake. Wilde was being typically and deliberately provocative in his aesthetic credo, nonetheless his emphatic tone is indicative of how deeply embedded the idea must have become, through the long Victorian age, that the teaching function of such as poetry was its principal purpose:
The artist is the creator of beautiful things…. There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all…. No artist desires to prove anything…. No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style. All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. All art is quite useless.
For all the aesthetic differences between the ‘Nineties coterie and the ensuing Modernist movement of the early twentieth century, which got into its full stride after the First World War, we can see a persisting compatible wariness of the explicitly didactic or moralistically utilitarian interpretation of poetry in the literary-critical theorising and poetic practice of such as T.S. Eliot. In his influential essay, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ (1919) – as revolutionary in its own way and time as Wilde’s ‘Preface’ – this poet-critic repudiates Romantic subjectivity and, with it, the expression of personal convictions and feelings:
Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.
While Eliot has William Wordsworth particularly in mind here (and Wordsworth’s theory of poetry as embodying ‘emotion recollected in tranquillity’), elsewhere he makes similar statements about Matthew Arnold, accusing him of ‘putting the emphasis upon the poet’s feelings, instead of upon the poetry’. What we might call the classical ideal in poetry envisages a creative tension between the poet’s didactic purposes (philosophical, sociological, theological, or whatever) and an aesthetic that aspires to a universal expression. Eliot, for example, described himself as ‘a classicist in literature’, a concept that does not annihilate originality, but it places constraints on the ‘turning loose of emotion’ and the ‘expression of personality’. What mattered, ultimately, for the poet was to transcend these limitations so that poetry speaks of and to the human condition at large, in all the variety of its times and places and, in doing so, delights as it teaches.
By withholding this treasure – and it is being wilfully withheld, by our so-called educators – from most youngsters, today, through school and university, we are denying them the vital opening-up of sense, sensibility and sensitivity to this most humane and wide-ranging of accounts of mankind’s life in this world. How can this possibly be defended, except by enslavement to the ideological position that nothing is worthy of study and appreciation that does not conform to and advance a never-to-be realised (in fact) social justice Utopia, which countenances no catholicity of thought, actively supports ignorance of history, and allows only the officially-mandated and jackbooted-enforced compliance with a fundamentalist, socio-political orthodoxy. George Orwell foresaw the cancellation of poetry by such forces of darkness, three quarters of a century ago:
By 2050, earlier, probably - all real knowledge of Oldspeak will have disappeared. The whole literature of the past will have been destroyed. Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Byron…. The whole climate of thought will be different. In fact there will be no thought, as we understand it now. Orthodoxy means not thinking - not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.
We are living the Orwellian nightmare today, in all aspects of our society, but particularly – and most damagingly for the future – in education and at all levels of it.
Thirdly, and finally, in relation to the much-needed recovery of poetry in school and university study, such study needs to be systematically pursued under the guidance of informed teachers, focusing attention on verbal accomplishment, across an inexhaustible range of modes of linguistic expression, marvellous to enjoy in themselves, for the representation of any and every human idea and emotion. It demonstrates to students, engaged in its sustained reading, the boundless riches of their own English language for expressing thoughts and feelings. And when it comes to students discussing and writing about poems, in analysis and the development of argument, concentrating closely on matters of vocabulary-choice and syntax, imagery and form, this study nurtures, in them, invaluable linguistic skills that, once mastered, can extend across numerous disciplines, vocations and professions, not to mention daily life itself, and throughout life. Never has this educational experience been more sorely needed in a culture where one is constantly astonished by people’s inarticulateness, even university graduates’ inability to string a series of lucid and grammatically-correct sentences together when put on the spot. Poetry study educates students in the way language works at its best, and enriches their understanding of human experience immeasurably and incomparably.
In addition to introducing the youngest pupils to poetry and song, with the rhythm and rhyme that they relish, by the time year 7 is reached and throughout the six years of high school, there should be a rigorously-planned curriculum that ensures that an equal amount of classroom time is spent on the four areas of literary study: poetry, novel, the drama and non-fictional prose. And, with regard to poetry, an excellent anthology such as the Norton, currently in its sixth edition, with some 2000 poems, which is organised on historical principles, beginning with Medieval lyrics, can provide a splendid resource for mapping and directing the entire high school experience of poetry, from the simpler works to the more challenging ones, as the years pass. Again, with attention to rigour, at least as much classroom time should be allocated to pre-20th century poetry as to that of the last hundred years or so. This is not rocket science, but it requires what is currently, lamentably, demonstrably lacking: the commitment to such a task by educators and, crucially, a teaching profession, in the discipline of English, the members of which have been immersed in such poetry study themselves for three or four years of their undergraduate courses, so they are professionally equipped to undertake such teaching. And that, as I have already pointed out, is where the major stumbling-block currently exists, and, alas, with next to no prospect of it being removed.
[1] ‘On Professing Poetry in Australia in the 21st Century’, in Catherine Runcie, ed., The Free Mind: Essays and Poems in Honour of Barry Spurr (Edwin H. Lowe, Sydney, 2016), p.101.
[2] Titania McGrath, The Critic, April, 2023, https://thecritic.co.uk/issues/april-2023/speaking-english-is-colonial-terrorism/ (accessed 2/6/20230.
[3] ‘What is the point of teaching English’, The Spectator, 4/6/2023, https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/05/what-is-the-point-of-teaching-english/ (accessed 5/6/2023).
