When I was a Child I Spake Like a Greek William Sylvester (bio) A private memory has, I believe, public implications. During the weekly assembly, or meeting, at a Friend's school—the students called it a Quaker school—we were obliged to sit silently, and to wait. We were supposed to listen for the promptings of the inner light, and even then most of us sensed, however vaguely, that the notion of hearing was curiously mixed up with seeing. The confusion, if there were one, belonged to the inexplicable world of adults. Strictly speaking, any one of us should have been permitted to stand up and to speak. The inner light, however, was never to shine within us, but within a speaker chosen in advance. He was seated on a platform with other dignitaries and visitors, and the inner light almost invariable moved him to speak at exactly twenty minutes past the hour. Usually the speaker was on stage right, but we could never be sure which of the visitors had been designated. No matter who stood up and moved to center stage, the opening quotation was likely to be the same: "When I was a child, I spake like a child, but when I became a man, I put away childish things." We sat bolt upright, partly from obedience and partly from resentment. We wanted to be out of there, away from concepts and confronted with things. We wanted noise and activity. We knew what we wanted, and that knowledge was paradoxically part of the experience. The adult world was there, and we had our privacy. As we sat waiting for the speaker to arise, we were alone and we knew it. Authority was literally above us, but out there, different from us. Nobody threatened us in the sense of claiming to understand us, and nobody made demands that we understand older people. I take this experience to be emblematic of the time from the thirties through the early fifties. Ours was not the only school where the purpose of education, at heart, was to confront children with an adult otherness, an alien way of life to which we were supposed to become accustomed. The full implications are undoubtedly complex and far reaching but from the point of view of literature, [End Page 93] one assumption, I believe, was clear: literature, real literature, belonged to an adult world. Latin, English and French were all "adult": Julius Caesar, Cicero, and Le Voyage de Monsieur Perrichon were equally difficult and equally good for us. The other literature, the books we read privately and for fun, were not "real." And in a sense they weren't: the adventures of Tom Swift, or of David Bimney Putnam were fantasies, or had the effect of fantasies, wish fulfillments, or undifferentiated sentimentality. The fundamental assumption that reading for fun and reading for school were two separate activities had one immediate consequence; no creative activity was supposed to take place in an academic environment. Poetry was never written in school—except as an exercise—and poets never belonged to Universities. The voices in protest were infrequent but occasionally strident, as in Ezra Pound's correspondence with Professor Felix Schelling of the University of Pennsylvania. The model for poetry, real poetry, poetry to be studied was the "well wrought," and the norm was the iambic pentameter, although one glanced briefly at the popularizers, such as Walt Whitman, Vachel Lindsay, or Carl Sandburg. These were the sanctified exceptions. The notion that poetry could be enjoyed, and also be studied in school—that, to me, was an astonishing proposition, particularly as it was offered by an eminently responsible person. In the late 1940's, Henry Rago, before he became editor of Poetry, A Magazine of Verse, said in private conversation that he looked forward to the day when Marianne Moore's poetry would be read in high school. It was a startling prediction, and in the light of subsequent experience, a rather tame one. When he was editor, the magazine was for all practical purposes the trade journal of poets, and all of the poetic revolutions were welcomed by him: Frank O'Hara's personalism, Robert Creeley, Black...