Why We Stop Reading Poetry

Abstract

I am a poet who questions how literature is taught in English classes, and my query is a hand-medown from Northrop Frye, the critic who once was asked by an inspector of schools, grade four nearly all the children are enthusiastic about poetry: in the adult world hardly anyone bothers to read it. What happens? (16) Frye tells the story in The Well-Tempered Critic (1963), noting that the critic should have been doing the asking, not the inspector. Although he lacked an immediate response, Frye sensed that here again an educational problem is bound up with a critical (17). In the five years I have asked this question, mainly to poets and critics, I have received tidy answers about too much television, lamentable lack of rhyme, increasing emphasis on material goods, declining educational values, dying art forms--a litany of literary cliches, including one that Frye mentions: Schoolteachers kill the child's interest