Historical Poetry For Humanistic Education

Abstract

Where historical texts present records and interpretations of history, literature offers imaginative, subtle and oblique ways of familiarizing the reader with the untold stories of history. Historical poetry goes a step beyond historical fiction to evoke multiple discourses and build possibly subliminal connections between historical information and its subjective processing thus gaining an advantage in its capacity to subsume psychological and social responses to history. This paper proposes that the dissemination of history through commissioned historical narratives customized for young adults and adult students need to be integrated with historical poetry to affect Transformative Learning. The underlying hypothesis is that young adults and adult learners need to synthesize prescribed historical information with subjective representations of history to form a humanistic understanding of the interaction between the public and private spheres of experience. The paper analyses historical poetry suitable to supplement the teaching of history in the spirit of Humanistic Education. Selected samples from the poetic works of the Caribbean Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott and the Welsh born, Portuguese author and critic, Landeg White are examined as supplements to the teaching of history syllabi. Employing stylistic and discourse analysis poetic schemes and tropes are explored to see how poetic texts can structure multiple ways of connecting historical events with individual experience stimulating Transformative learning.