On Not Talking: An Experience in Teaching Poetry

Abstract

WE WERE TWO WEEKS into my fall semester Development of English Verse course, and we were dying. I was experiencing what is called negative feedback that would have shrivelled the bark off a sequoia. Finally, to my queries, one brave lady spoke: I don't know [the invariable preamble to an honest remark] but how can I learn about the development of poetry if I'm not sure what poetry is? I had assumed that a prerequisite course in the department had taken care of this minor matter, but it appeared from the nods and serious looks that the brave lady spoke for most of them. Here we were, a group of intelligent human beings, poised to study an interesting subject, and we were boring each other to the point of anoxia. In the most relaxed discussion that followed, we got to discussing their personal responses to poetry, and I was reminded of I. A. Richards' experiment in which many years ago he had his students write protocols on poems given to them without authors' names. Many of these people had been exposed to social ignominy for liking the poets or liking the right ones for the wrong reasons, so we determined to use a form of the Richards experiment as a beginning. I would choose what I thought were good, poor, and indifferent poems, put them on sheets without poets' names attached and we would like and dislike whom we pleased and talk about why we did. To the demurrers from some dedicated scholars about relativism, I promised to try leading them by empirical test toward good taste in poetry. That is, we would talk about poems as purely verbal structures as they had effect on the present audience. I would listen and attempt to categorize effective and ineffective structures as they saw and experienced them. We further decided that in order to learn about what is variously called form, structure, denotation, archetypes, extension and so on in poems, we should write some poems ourselves. I recalled W. H. Auden's instructions (from The Dyer's Hand) about his dream university, in which students' writing would not be of a critical sort but would be parodies to teach poetic form. After a lapse of time I emerged with the following format, idealized somewhat, which I have used with a few variations and some success over the past five years. Spoken to the entering class: