The Boy Stood on the Burning Deck: Knowing the Mediocre and Teaching the Good

Abstract

That mediocre poetry is poetry's worst friend becomes plainer to me each time I teach a class in verse literature. Friend because mediocrity remains for many the first door into art. For each reader attracted by Donne or Dickinson, the ears of fifty are turned by Tell me not in mournful numbers or boy stood on the burning deck. Worst for two reasons: readers may let their growth in poetry stop at boy stood on the burning deck; readers may, if not lured beyond, confuse the qualities of mediocre poetry for the qualities of great poetry and let a just but unarticulated dissatisfaction color further relationship with the art. Practically all the common objections to poetry-that it is sentimental, that it is wafty or effeminate, that it is irrelevant to the concerns of the contemporary world-are really objections to half poetry, to bad poetry, to poetry poorly taught or ignorantly read, to the mediocre. The only objection registered rightfully against the genuine as much as the mediocre is that it is difficult.