South of Pompeii the Helmsman Balked

Abstract

TEACHING THE WRITING of poetry requires from the instructor a combination of looseness, severity, enthusiasm, honesty, and warmth. Theodore Roethke, in an essay entitled Poet, enlarges upon the difficulty of the task. bring diverse people, he says, including the neurotic, the pig-headed, the badly trained, into harmony is a task that must be assumed, at first, by the teacher and carried on without the appearance of a struggle. The burden is clearly on the instructor. The problem, apparently, is the touchiness that poets-especially beginning and serious poets-suffer in response to criticism. Basically it is a question of Ego, the Anti-Muse. Instructors want their students to write better. Writing better, sooner or later, means finding one's voice by enlarging one's skills. The path is learning how to revise. Valery said that a poem is never finished, only abandoned. Students hate such talk. Revision is just the thing that beginning poets need to learn most and that which they like least. Poems are sincere and passionate creations. To step back and fiddle with them seems fake, cold-blooded, and hypocritical. Roethke's solution to this problem involved, in part, using a number of exercises in form, exercises so monstrously arbitrary and not of the student's choosing that the arguments against false emotion or the dreads of vanity can hardly appear. Richard Hugo describes one such exercise in Stray Thoughts on Roethke and Teaching (American Poetry Review, 3, No. 1, 1974):