I was a child when poetry was still “taught badly,” according to some people. In fifth grade we had to memorize a poem, choosing from a collection that our teacher had compiled. Before that I remember reading some poems at home, like “Wynken, Blynken, and Nod,” which I came to love. It was in a children’s literature anthology my grandmother had given us.
From the options my teacher presented I chose “The Children’s Hour” by Longfellow. It seems that we had some weeks to learn our poems, and the practicing and reciting of the poet’s metered verse are a very pleasant memory for me. I did enter vicariously into the scene the poem describes, of a father surrounded by his affectionate and beloved daughters. I can still hear the music and feel the happiness even if I can’t remember many of the words past the first line.
Now, when I read about that particular poem on Wikipedia, I find that it serves as an illustration of one aspect of poetry that educators debate about: “More recently, the poem has been called overly-sentimental, as have many of Longfellow’s works. Scholar Richard Ruland, for example, warns that modern readers might find it ‘not only simple and straightforward, but perhaps saccharine and overly emotional,’ though he concludes it is a successful poem. Scholar Matthew Gartner, however, uses the poem as an example of how Longfellow invited his readers into his private home life in New England to refine them and teach them lessons in virtue.”
I have been lightly musing over these questions since reading a recent article by California’s Poet Laureate Dana Gioia, who has for as long as I’ve known him been intensely interested in education, and how to restore among the populace the love for poetry that used to be commonplace.
In the article “Poetry as Enchantment” the poet discusses the huge changes that have taken place in the world of poetry over the last few generations. I can see how my own experience reflects some of the losses that occurred. After the one poem that I memorized (not counting lyrics of hymns and folk songs) there was to be no more reading aloud in school, or memorization. In high school I know we analyzed some poems, but nothing grabbed me. Despite this, our small rural high school retained vestiges of the past in the form of a literary magazine in which students might publish poems or stories that the student editors selected.
I tried writing some poems, of which I was of course ashamed soon after they were published in the magazine. Maybe the magazine was not actually a leftover from a previous era but a “progressive” thing, packed with material from untaught writers, screened by writers just as unqualified. And likely it was an attempt to hold on to a fuller experience of poetry than we were getting in the classroom. Gioia says that textual criticism and analysis is all well and good and can be very helpful — he does quite a bit of it himself — but that we require an encounter with poetry that engages more than our intellect. We amateurs should not be underestimated as readers of poetry:
Amateurs have not learned to shut off parts of their consciousness to focus on only the appropriate elements of a literary text. They respond to poems in the sloppy fullness of their humanity. Their emotions and memories emerge entangled with half-formed thoughts and physical sensations. As any thinking person can see, such subjectivity is an intellectual mess of the highest order. But aren’t average readers simply approaching poetry more or less the way human beings experience the world itself?
Life is experienced holistically with sensations pouring in through every physical and mental organ of perception. Art exists embodied in physical elements—especially meticulously calibrated aspects of sight and sound—which scholarly explication can illuminate but never fully replace. However conceptually incoherent and subjectively emotional, the amateur response to poetry comes closer to the larger human purposes of the art—which is to awaken, amplify, and refine the sense of being alive—than does critical commentary. The scholarly response may be accurate and insightful. The culture is enriched by specialized discourse about literary texts and traditions. But critical analysis remains deliberately outside the full experience of the poem, which is physical, emotional, subjective, and intuitive as well as intellectual.
Less than ten years out of high school, I was teaching poetry to my children. That was when I fully fell in love with many a good poem. Maybe all the analytical skills my high school and college teachers had tried to teach me came back and helped me appreciate the art, but I think much of the good effect came from starting from the ground up: teaching toddlers the fun of a sing-song nursery rhyme; reading A Child’s Garden of Verses to older children so many times that we couldn’t help but learn several by heart (skipping a few that didn’t seem to be teaching “a lesson in virtue,” to use the words of Matthew Gartner above); working the copying and memorization and reciting of poems into our homeschool curriculum; reciting/memorizing Frost’s “The Figure in the Doorway” as a family in the car while on a camping trip. We didn’t try to analyze or figure out hidden meanings, but I think we often intuited deep things. Probably many times we missed the primary intent of the poem, but we still were enriched in our humanity and our connection to the poet, and the world.
“Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.”
-T.S. Eliot, as quoted by Dana Gioia
More from the article: Poetry offers a way of understanding and expressing existence that is fundamentally different from conceptual thought. As Jacques Maritain observed, ‘poetry is not philosophy for the feeble-minded.’ It is a different mode of knowing and communicating the world. There are many truths about existence that we can only express authentically as a song or a story. Conceptual language, which is the necessary medium of the critic and scholar, primarily addresses the intellect. It is analytical, which is to say, it takes things apart, as the Greek root of the word ana-lyein, to unloosen, suggests. Conceptual discourse abstracts language from the particular to the general. Poetic language, however, is holistic and experiential. Poetry simultaneously addresses our intellect and our physical senses, our emotions, imagination, intuition, and memory without asking us to divide them. The text may be frozen on the page for easy visual inspection and analysis, but the poetic experience itself is temporal, individual, and mostly invisible. As Wallace Stevens wrote, ‘Poetry is a pheasant disappearing in the brush.’
In the passion of 20-yr-old pride I tossed out my copies of the high school magazine, but I can remember the first line of one verse I wrote: “Must we tear apart the thing, and analyze and criticize?” Even then I had no leanings toward being a literary scholar. But I am still in the process of getting a literary education.
“The purpose of literary education is not to produce more professors;
its goal is to develop capable and complete human beings.”
-Dana Gioia
Against much resistance, when he was chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, Gioia managed to implement a program he designed to restore some of the practices that encouraged a love of poetry in bygone years. Many of you are probably familiar with Poetry Out Loud, but I only learned about it in this article. High school students are having fun learning poems and reciting them in competitions, and this has been going on for ten years now! I’m hoping to attend the recitations in my area this coming January. It will do my heart good.
Get the fuller story of Gioia’s thesis and suggestions, and of the Poetry Out Loud events, by reading the entire article here.
Gladsome Lights 
More than one of these ideas expressed by the various authors you have quoted, including this one… “a way of understanding and expressing existence that is fundamentally different from conceptual thought,” are very reminiscent of things I am reading about qualitative differences in an “orthodox” approach to worship.
I had a seventh grade literature arts teacher who read to us and had us memorize poems both as groups where we recited in unison or in smaller groups to the class and also unique individual memorization. Some poems she chose, others she asked us to find. We also acted out much Shakespeare together. I wrote a little vignette of her. I will have to find it for you. I may have posted it on one of my blogs.
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I always feel that my education is so lacking in the appreciation of poetry. It really wasn’t until I started teaching my children at home that I discovered this whole other life of literature. So dictation and memorization became very important to us. I would start out with Robert Lewis Stevenson with the babies and progress from there.
One of the hardest I think they learned was all of the verses in “The Highwayman.” Ron made it easy for us when he put “The Cremation of Sam Magee” to music. With the boys, Robert W. Service was a favorite. I loved reading about you and I loved the samples of handwriting. How sweet. I am still a beginner when it comes to poetry.
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I had a similar experience to yours at the private school I attended through the 4th grade, and I memorized “The Children’s Hour.” It has always brought me comfort and happiness when I think back on that poem. Longfellow became unpopular quite a time ago; I recall that when I was a freshman in college (1974), I wrote an essay about one of his poems and, though my professor gave me a good grade, she wrote quite a bit on my paper about how he wasn’t really a good poet– trite, etc. (She seemed to be justifying giving me a good grade!) I HAVE heard recently that he is “coming back”; we shall see–that would be lovely. His work expresses an ordered world; perhaps we are to the point now where we can appreciate such an “alternate reality.”
I think poetry goes straight to the soul, and when a teacher “unpacks” it, she has to be careful not to take that mystery away. It can be powerful and joyful to analyze the elements of any literary work, as this can bring such enrichment, but it’s most important to just– be able to love that work.
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I was thrilled to hear Dana Gioia on Mars Hill Audio a few years ago talking about Longfellow and what a gifted poet he was – Gioia is so knowledgeable about him and his place in history and literature.
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Oh I would be thrilled to have Longfellow become accepted again by the education elites, his being a Maine poet and all. My grandfather had learned “The Children’s Hour” in school over a hundred years ago. He once grabbed me by the wrist as I walked by and recited the final stanzas to me. It took me a long time, pre-computer, to find what he was quoting me. How excited I was to find it.
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My grandmother- Grandma Ruby Hart- a New England gal- is the one who gave me my love for poetry! She had reams of it memorized. I still have many of the books she passed on to me. She started the poetry society in Oakland (I cannot remember the name of it) back in the earlier 20th c. Those Victorian era folks had something there!
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In an entirely round-about way, Longfellow is responsible for the existence of my blog: particularly, the opening lines of “Evangeline,” which I memorized in grade school, and which came to me one day on the banks of a cypress stream.
Have you read Billy Collins’s wonderful “Introduction to Poetry”? It says all I would have to say about modern poetry critics, and the academic approach to verse.
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Yes, I have, and I love it! Thank you for including the link.
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I took a music appreciation class when I was in college and it dawned on me that learning the structural details of how music, art, literature work enhanced experiencing them. I couldn’t get by the snobbish attitude of literature teachers that seemed to make understanding exclusive. When I taught poetry I tried to shake away the fear of right and wrong ways to craft with words.
I thought that Longfellow’s poem spoke about the short time each day (toward tea time) when children were allowed to interact with their parents (like on Downton Abbey when the children appeared for a short time and then were swept off with the nanny).
I love the way you appreciate poetry. You have fine taste in poetry, too. (Now I sound like one of those elitist English teachers!)
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Oh how I love the quote from Elliot. I have always thought that the best compliment that a poem can receive is, “I like that.”
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I like that first line, “Must we tear apart the thing, and analyze and criticize?” I hope you didn’t throw away the rest.
On the other hand, I’ve thought often about how the experience of writing may be more satisfying than staring at one’s finished poem–unless of course it isn’t finished, in which case the satisfaction could be extended (but if the extending involves endless obsessive revisions, that’s not good; it’s not art either, I think).
Anyway, looking at one’s own poem, or reading someone else’s, is not the same–and not nearly as pleasing–as hearing it (what, “said”? “read aloud”? “performed”? ) I’m not sure what the best descriptor is, but you know what I mean. Much of your post gets at that.
And your reflections helped me think back on my own early attraction to poetry. I think it was in 10th grade, hearing the teacher read aloud from Tennyson’s “Enoch Arden,” http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/enoch-arden and then his asking us to do the same with that or another narrative poem, possibly by Robert Frost. It wasn’t cool for us to like lyric poems, but the ones that told stories–they were interesting, and fun to dramatize, or at least to imagine the person telling the story to you. You could hear the voice and get the pictures and feelings through the voice.
And the following year there was “The Odyssey,” then “Macbeth” . . .
But why am I going on like this? Oh well, you did. And others too, in the comments. There must he something really basic about poetry. Or about memories from youth. Well, thanks for bringing all this back to my attention!
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I’m so glad you went on like that. Poetry, and memories from youth, are both fundamental and compelling, and when you put them together, they are truly worth going on about!
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I was of the generation that still was blessed by having to memorize many poems in school. The Children’s Hour was not one of them, but it is a poem I love along with much of Longfellow….
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Kristi, I memorized a lot of Beatrix Potter and Robert Louis Stevenson without really trying, in my “second childhood” of teaching my children. I’m so grateful! It’s hard not to love all these poems when they have become part of your mind’s fabric.
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I’m rather passionate about poetry myself 🙂 I think if you teach it to children, you learn to truly love it and long to impart it to others. I always studied poetry extensively with my students and consistently had them memorize and recite (before the class) beloved, high-quality poetry. I mourn the death of the love of poetry we used to have culturally. And because I have this limited, well-rehearsed repertoire of poems (but limited) I appreciate reading your favorites here! Thank you. Loved the kids’ poems.
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