Where are English Studies Going

There is real danger that English studies are going to pieces – not in the production of learned treatises (which goes forward like a wound healing itself in the body of a condemned man), but as a central discipline in the universities and the schools.  In the last four or five years the universities in general, and English studies in particular, have suffered some shrewd blows, administered inexpertly and out of ignorant goodwill, as is the way of experts and of our elected representatives.  The schools have suffered even more lamentably than the universities.  Lack of money is a condition always to be counted on; in a materialist society it provides an incontrovertible argument for brief discussion, ab­rupt decision, and rough handling.  I wonder how long it will take the universities to recover – because recover they certainly will – from the combined afflictions of elephantiasis, inept bureaucratic intrusion, and clumsy tinkering with delicate struc­tures.  But I say nothing of these things because I am sure they are not the source of our troubles in English studies.  The enemy is within.

Overgrowth has no doubt introduced into our ranks some per­sons that we could well do without; and we could never have seriously expected that outsiders would ever understand anything quite as odd as a healthy university or the value of studying language and literature.  But we could have been expected to have understood ourselves – if we hold with Jung that the unexamined life is not worth living.  We have failed to recognize the doubleness of our work as professionals and the doubleness of our task as instructors, the two not being coincident.  We have also al­lowed ourselves to accept – and even to endorse – certain plaus­ible sophisms that disguise our true purpose and progressively undermine it.

Some years ago, the people who conduct the study of English Language and Literature in Canadian universities and colleges formed a professional association in order to provide occasions of fruitful meeting and to foster the good health of our art.  The title chosen for this loosely articulated group was the “Association of University Teachers of English” (ACUTE).  Like many things Canadian, the title was not indigenous: in modelling the title on one already established in another country we were prepared to identify ourselves officially as “teachers” – “university teachers”.  One of the oddities of my upbringing was that it instilled in me a half-mystical veneration for what happened in universities and for the sort of people who devote their lives to a university.  I am still surprised and flattered to be included in (what I take to be) the company of Erasmus and other learned doctors; and I had always supposed that, in a university, “teach­ing” was what we – as humanists – never admitted we ever did.  Our business was more recondite, oblique, and fertile than that.  To my ear the word “teach” is not much less aggressive than a pair of dentist’s forceps or a stomach-pump.  At school, perhaps, there is teaching.  There you teach children – or used to – to add and subtract and multiply, to fog out words from printed charac­ters and to shape characters into the semblance of spoken sounds; you teach spelling and the rudiments of grammar and the dates of kings and the size of the annual crop of copra in Malaya and of coffee in Venezuela, the names of early explorers and rebels and of a few prime ministers; you teach children to colour maps correctly, and to draw diagrams of the steam-actuated, self-propelled, rail-guarded traction engine, because that is a little easier than the Industrial Revolution or the Diet of Worms (and for children probably more suitable).  But at a university, I had innocently supposed, professors don’t teach people, unless it be as a desperate expedient marginal to our true calling.

In the “professions” – medicine, law, engineering – a student must be taught a good deal by rote, otherwise his case will be dismissed, his patient will die, his bridge will fall down, his still might blow up.  Occasionally, it is true, we may agree (very reluctantly) to teach “remedial English”; I’m sure “teach” is the right word for our attempts to effect a transformation that we had hoped would have happened a little closer to the cradle.  There is, I must admit, something a little importunate about some of the things we try to insist upon our students getting right – spelling, grammar, dates, conventions for citing references, the correct ascription of authors to works, generally doing things in what looks like an orderly manner: that is, it isn’t all improvised games and free uninformed discussion.  Importunity and a hunger for the correct answer are the earmarks of “teaching”.

‘Yet the most eloquent lecturer I have ever listened to was a naval commander who instructed us in astronomical navigation.  He unfolded the mysteries of the celestial sphere and of spherical trigonometry with the rapt lyricism of a star-gazer and with the shameless delight of a cellist playing a sequence of harmonics in the fifth position.  What he told us certainly helped us to keep ships off rocks and out of mine-fields, and to that extent he “taught” us; but his performance was also what is called “an education”.  Even after more than thirty years the sight of a sextant or a set of navigational tables will recall the expression of his face as he spoke and the movement of his arm (with the three gold rings on the sleeve of his superb Gieves monkey-jacket) as, with fluent incisiveness, he would draw a diagram and sketch in a succession of modifications that kept pace with his discourse.

When we think of the memorable things we have seen our instructors doing over a literary text, or reflectively over some subtle point of articulation, or across some great sweep of time and space, it has been as though we were privileged to overhear an interior monologue; we might intervene occasionally to touch upon the reverberant strings of it; it did not seem to be spoken to us; certainly it was not spoken at us.  I don’t know what is the right word for that exalted humming, that transfigured chewing of the mental cud; but “teaching” doesn’t seem the right word at all.  Not being the right word, it may be a bad word for us to get used to using unthoughtfully when we think or talk about our work.  If we are not careful, that is precisely what – through the subversive efficacy of sheer reiteration – we shall find ourselves doing: teaching.  And that, unhappily, is what, as university in­structors, we spend far too much time doing.

One of the commonplaces of our academic system of credit-rating is that we are expected to “perform well” as “teachers” and as “scholars”.  It is also a commonplace in arguments presented to fund-granting committees that the two functions are so closely related as to be virtually indistinguishable, and that there­fore there should always be more funds for “research”.  I am not against “research funds”, but the argument seems to me a spe­cious one, especially when it goes on (as it usually does) to assert that “research” is indiscriminately a good thing and that other academic responsibilities that might interfere with it should to some extent give way.

To have persuaded somebody somewhere to put one’s scho­larly lucubrations into print is no doubt a sign of life of some sort; the failure to do so, however, or the failure to want to do so, is not necessarily a sign of death.  A university being a place of learning, surely there must be learned people about; and to be learned is presumably not a terminal state.  In the humane studies it is an advantage if an instructor ferrets away at some reading or studying in his spare time – not that that gives him “more know­ledge” but that he is then able to move with greater ease.  Good university instruction, like careful writing, is always icebergish; only journalists are so hard-pressed that they have to put all their wares in the shop window at once.  Perhaps a university instructor should normally be talking over his students’ heads – otherwise no effort is involved, and they might get the impression that there were no heads more exalted than their own, which could have negative educational results.  What matters is not to “know more” (which isn’t difficult if a person sets his mind to it) but to achieve in discourse the disciplined fluency of a dancer.  What is being declared is not simply the subject of the discourse but also the fact that a certain movement of mind is possible.  To be a little learned secures the possibility of such a movement.  Since good university instruction in English is an imaginative activity, we should not assume that we can always tell the dancer from the dance.

We need to fulfil both roles, as instructor and as scholar (though not necessarily to the extreme of cold print), but securing as far as possible a seamless relation between the two.  Too often the split between them occurs not through neglect but through misplaced zeal: the unassimilated detail of the work-in-progress comes to the forefront to disrupt the reflection proper to the work in hand.  It is so easy to become “expert beyond experience” that perhaps most of us do our best work as instructors when we are not working in our “special field”.

To “teach a course”, I take it, is to assume that the subject matter defined by the title of the course is what must somehow be impressed upon the minds of those students who “take the course”; to treat the time available as a vacuum to be filled with discussion and interpretation of that subject-matter to the general exclusion of everything else so that students will be able to answer pointed questions about the subject; to establish for the subject-matter an orthodox method of inquiry and a received interpretation; to urge students to use their own judgment and to seek their own conclusions, but at the same time insisting that they know “the right answers”; to exhibit a strong proprietary interest in the subject, being if need be a little pugnacious in defence of it; and if the subject falls within the compass of one’s “research specialization” to give a notable performance on the hobbyhorse.

If we try to construct, from the biographical notes on con­tributors to the learned journals “in our field” and from the articles themselves, a portrait of a University Teacher of English, we get the impression that his prime function is to “make a contribution to knowledge”.  He seems to emerge, not as a com­manding Abelard or a boisterous Giordano Bruno, but rather as a small, almost anonymous, creature who adds to the coral-reef of scholarship.  Turning to my one-volume encyclopaedia (which sits on the shelf next to a copy of Old Moore’s Almanac) I found the following:

Coral – a small invertebrate characterized by its outer skeleton and by its sedentary habit of life.  Most corals live in colonies although there are some solitary forms.  Each polyp is mainly a hollow digestive tract with a single opening at the free or unattached end of the body.  Reproduction results in the production of an indi­vidual which moves about freely in the water before attaching itself and secreting its skeleton.  As the colonial forms produce more polyps, the lower members die, and new layers are built up on the old skeletons.

It would be a pity if our “teaching” became no more than secretions from so sedulous a process. 

The attitude towards “English” has changed a good deal in the thirty years since I first had the temerity to stand at a lectern (we wore academic gowns in those days) and tried to engage students in what was called “English Language and Literature”.  By that time, “English” had already taken up from the Classics the role of the central civilizing discipline.  We were the transplanted heart of the humanities, and nobody had yet studied the im­munology of such a case.  We were a little startled so to assume that responsibility.  We accepted it as the Damocles sword of a noble enterprise rather than the sceptre of divine authority.  We had (as I said at the first formal meeting of acute gathered in Edmonton in 1958) the air of elderly gentlemen who unexpec­tedly find themselves running in an egg-and-spoon race.  But we had no doubt what the race was for, and were in no doubt that – despite the enormous hazard and despite certain physical disabilities – we could carry the egg triumphantly.  That confi­dence has now largely evaporated.  If we could find a wall we would have our backs to it.

On the whole, the universities – like the schools – have abro­gated their prime responsibility to give coherent purpose to the grand subversive work of education; not only of passing on our literate heritage, but also of liberating the minds of the young and helping them to find a disciplined order for their inner lives.  This has come about through a sequence of academic propositions, all of them allegedly egalitarian, none of them apparently of much importance at the time, yet all of them anti-educational.

First the equivocation, established long before the first student activist sloped towards a Senate chamber, whereby it was estab­lished that the word “required” as applied to a course meant “compulsory” and therefore socially “unacceptable”: at one stroke this removes the responsibility of giving educational direc­tion according to experience, tradition, and judgment.  Again, Snow’s journalistic fantasy of “the two cultures” has been effec­tively used – as no doubt it was intended to be used ­– as a ploy in the silly game of one-upmanship; even in faculty boards of some judgment and stability it has provided the means of denying that the humanities have a central civilizing function and of as­serting that English is “just another subject-area”.  This glosses over the fact that a university, even a small one, has to fulfil a number of different functions, many of which involve straightforward, high-pressure, technical training.  The sophism in this case consists of maintaining that all instruction that goes on in a university is accurately described as “education”: there­fore there is no educative difference between one kind of study and another – the only difference is in the “subject-area”.  Yet the engineer’s training, or the chemist’s, or the medical doctor’s is not an “education” in the sense that an honours programme in philosophy or literature is expected to be an “education”.  That is not to say that no engineer or chemist or doctor can ever become an “educated person”, but that his special university training will not be able to do much to make him so.  Nobody has any hesita­tion in rating programmes according to their alleged “social rele­vance”, but our sensibilities seem to be too exquisite to allow us to say that one faculty or programme or department is educationally more influential than another.  And what are we to say to faculties of education in which the word “education” seems often to assume a meaning bizarre and inscrutable?

In the name of “freedom” the view has prevailed that every “subject” is equal in educational virtue to every other “sub­ject”; that every “subject” is a “discipline” (jealously guarded by the home-made mystique of its practitioners); and that every “discipline” (that is, “subject”) must be given equal time, space, and lighting in the academic midway so that students can pick out from a bewildering profusion of wares “the subject of their choice”.  According to this curious figure of the free market, business opportunities must be equally spread; the consumer’s choice must be guided entirely by his own digestive tract; we must never seem to discriminate against Linear B or the mi­crobiology of the lesser lepidoptera.  It is tacitly agreed – as bib­liophiles tacitly agree not to embarrass each other by asking questions about what is written in the books they collect – that no question should ever be raised about the educational quality of a programme or the paedagogic virtue of a course.  The same com­plicity applies within English departments: nobody dare hint that Sean O’Casey is inferior to Ben Jonson or that there may be more value in studying Milton than Edgar Allan Poe: that might imply that “our O’Casey man” or “our Poe man” is of less stature than “our Ben Jonson man” or “our Milton man”.

So “English” now sets up its stall submissively in the fly-blown academic midway, doing a pathetic shuffle-dance to at­tract attention to the Bearded Lady because good manners pre­vent us from hiring a barker.  Surely in these circumstances every university should now have a Fair Practices Committee and an array of anti-combine regulations.  I have heard the preposter­ous suggestion, uttered with no sense of the barbarous implica­tions of it, that English should now be considered a branch of “communications” or a wing of that fashionable high-flyer, Sociology.  But that is hardly surprising when we remark that no university seems to have any educational philosophy beyond some soothing principles of socio-economic accommodation and the divine right of students.  And after the midway where the recruits are unwittingly beguiled into their chosen corrals, there is the academic self-service supermarket of courses, where packag­ing and promotion are paramount, and the prices – in intellectual and emotional terms – are cunningly concealed.  In such a setting it would be impertinent to ask: “What educative result is my course (programme, department, faculty) supposed to have?  And what subject-matter and what processes of mind would be most powerful to induce it?”

Beyond this cluster of damaging assumptions, two others need to be noticed, possibly more insidious than the others.  One is the uncritical acceptance of the behavioural figure of a man as a not-very-efficient, problem-solving animal, whose actions and choices are represented as mechanical responses to a complex of forces from within and without, all of which are definable and to a large extent programmable.  According to this scheme, instruc­tors produce the “stimuli” (the loaded questions?); students pro­vide the “responses” (the expected answers?); the “results” can be “quantified”.  The other damaging assumption is the canoni­zation of “research” in the humanities, claiming for it a status and function similar to research in the sciences, the case being supported, and the issue confused, by applying the scientist’s word “research” to all kinds of independent and methodical inquiry in the humanities.  I have said elsewhere that the word “research” can be made to refer – and should be made to refer – to a definable concept, and that that concept, scrupulously applied, refers properly to some activities that are essential to English studies, but as ancillary rather than central.  We need reliable texts and glosses; we need to set down, at various levels of minuteness, veridical facts as far as they are available and relevant.  Our work of inquiry demands the utmost discrimination and precision within lattices of fact; but the “facts” that are central to us are judgments upon events, and most of the crucial events are interior to ourselves, accessible only to direct qualita­tive apprehension.

The marks of a good literary scholar are a highly developed sense of fact and of relevance, and an acute feeling for distinc­tions and differences and the precise scope of them.  I am not sure that we foster those qualities much by trying to make students of literature into “researchers”; yet if we place a skew value on “research” our self-justification may produce monsters in our own image.  As instructors we are transmitters.  Much of our care is to help people tune their circuits, partly to what we are saying, but mostly to the literature we invite them to study.  Some of the equipment looks pretty ramshackle at first – not much beyond the cat’s-whisker stage; but we have to make a start somewhere, and the choice of a starting point requires tact, and sometimes char­ity.

The practice of marketeering has put some strange goods on the shelves – symptoms of feeble educational purpose or infirm confidence, echoes of the entertainment industry, evidence of the easy slide into comfortable zones on the fringes of literature: histories and backgrounds; themes, trends, and genres; “history of ideas”, “critical approaches”, “research techniques” – all of them interesting enough but having in themselves surprisingly little to do with the substance of literature.  For certain other delicacies and sweetmeats there is less to be said ­– children’s literature, the folklore of the Alleghenies, witchcraft and utopianism, orientalism in the nineteenth-century essay, aliena­tion as a major theme in emigrant novels, etc., etc., etc.: these are clearly digressions from the strenuous business of coming to terms with great works of literature.

Only great works of literature and great writers make heavy enough demands to induce the activities of intellect, and the exact emotional definitions, that can make the study of literature an educational instrument of unique power.  When time is short and distractions manifold it is idiotic to squander time and attention on peripheral activities and third-rate materials – third-rate, that is, in paedagogic efficacy, which usually also means third-rate in literary quality.  Survey courses, for example, commonly have no purpose beyond presenting a microtome slice of a large number of “representative works” interlarded with brief dogmatic judg­ments easy to remember and handy to repeat.  What is worse, first-year courses are often tarted up with fashionable and sensa­tional trifles that students can be expected to applaud for their salacious topicality but which can do little enough to induce worth-while reflection.

Our business is to do with seafaring, not basking in the warm shallows.  If, as instructors, we succeed, we shall have added another ancient mariner to our company – a wary and skilful navigator capable of making accurate landfalls in deceitful weather.  The fact that some will jump ship and that others will suffer cruelly from sea-sickness is not reason enough to stay tied up at the marina within comfortable reach of the gin-shops and the bikinied sunbathers.  The marina-courses usually justify themselves on the grounds that we have to make ourselves accessible to “modern taste”.  The accessibility of literature, however, is to be found elsewhere – in our inheritance of language and in our need to clarify our selves and to escape from the disease of self-indulgence.  We all tend to dislike danger, to prefer a safe berth.  Only the frontal assault of fully realized literature is likely to startle us into one of those acts of recognition and commitment that mark the end of foolery and the beginning of serious inquiry. 

It is so difficult to sustain our attention upon a complex poem that our attention naturally drifts outward and the heart of the matter slips away from us.  Since there is probably no such thing as an elementary poem, it is difficult to persuade students that it is possible to sustain critical attention; difficult to show that we are not inevitably forced to talk about something we hadn’t set out to talk about.  Nevertheless, out of misguided compassion, we are tempted to offer panaceas, short cuts, formulary devices, interpretative charms, so that the burden of critical initiative will not have to be taken up; and all these have a sickening way of dissolving the realities of literature and breeding dreary tauto­logies. 

If we are not using literature with some educative purpose we are unlikely to make much educational headway.  Teaching some­thing about literature – by glossing, digesting, explaining – is not the same as using literature for an educative purpose; for there is as much difference between knowing something and knowing about something as there is between observing and seeing, be­tween hearing and listening, between dream and vision, opinion and judgment.  Certainly we want to study literature for its own sake; but we also want to study it for our sake.  Since our work is, like the working of art itself, an art of indirection, it is quite possible to combine a clear sense of purpose with a disinterested means of fulfilling it.

We can usefully think of our work as falling into two phases – “acquaintance” and “inquiry” – the phases being con­ceptually distinguishable but concentric and proceeding together by interaction.  Both phases begin, as Plato said philosophy be­gins, in a sense of wonder, and both lead to an extension of awareness; and both need to be overarched by a quality of atten­tion that Owen Barfield ascribes to Coleridge: reverence and its twin sister reticence.

Whether or not a student comes to university fairly widely read, it is unlikely that he will have more than a smattering, even of some acknowledged giants of English literature.  As instructors we may not have much more than a deeper smattering, with some special areas where we have done some quiet browsing or earnest excavation; and all of us will have to live with the fact that few will ever get much beyond that, and that those who do may, in extending their scope, have to rely for much of it upon their own generalizations from fragmentary impressions.  Our first task with students is to initiate the process of acquaintance, or if it has already begun, to accelerate it.

Nothing much can happen in English studies until a person has established, with some works of literature, an active personal relationship that goes beyond general interest or technical curios­ity: the guiding impulse is delight.  Poets are magpies; students should be encouraged to be magpies – becoming in this at least a little poetical.  What we want to encourage students to recognize is that they have a capacity for complex response much wider and more sensitive than they had supposed, and that that capacity can be extended, refined, and disciplined; that their response can be more or less appropriate, advancing beyond the mere triggering of an emotional “mood” towards a supple state of mind that is shaped in detail by the poem itself; that as we become increas­ingly deft at attuning our awareness to poems there will come a growing sense of the otherness of a poem, its substance, au­tonomy, and strangeness – that the poem can become genuinely “knowable” and not simply “knowable-about”.

To begin with we should not be too busy in correcting choices, though we might at some time hint that there may be more intel­lectual and emotional reward in John Donne than in Thomas Hood or Robert Burns, or that the Grosse Fuge may prove more durable than the Nutcracker Suite.  (All of us who lay claim to an informed taste would cringe to see paraded in public the history of the development of that taste – through what shallows, by what paths of blind ignorance, through what shameless in­dulgence.)  We need to be careful not to insist too urgently upon what they should enjoy or admire; they will find soon enough what things are pure gold and which are as thin as gold-leaf without being gold at all, and that there are a great many poems this side of “greatness” that charm and delight us and can be a possession for all time.  And we must be especially careful – this is where the reticence comes in – not to remove or impair that most precious possibility, of their discovering something really first-rate for themselves.  (I am grateful to have discovered for my­self, along the path of ignorance, John Donne, W. B. Yeats, and David Jones, and I treasure all three of them the more for that.)

At the beginning we can advance emphatically the injunc­tion: “Connect – enjoy – listen – don’t fuss.”  What looks like the line of easiest access, through the topical and the familiar, engaging the echoes of our (so dreary) social milieu and our (so pathetic) personal preoccupations, will almost certainly prove a nauseating dead-end.  Somehow a personal and not very sceptical relation must be discovered.  Here the instructor’s business is not selling goods but disclosing and unfolding marvels; establishing for literature the simultaneity of everything that lives and de­serves to live, cultivating a sense of wonder for the physical substance and intricate specificity of works of imagination.  I am sure that sensibility develops little, if at all, by disliking and rejecting; it develops most rapidly towards accurate apprehension when confronted with work increasingly powerful and strange.  In art, as in life, there are no classes for beginners.

The progress will not be either uniform or linear – a pattern of rabbit tracks over a rough landscape, with a little bloodshed at the places where we detached ourselves from straw gods and the mirror of Narcissus.  In this phase there is no place much for argument or exposition; rather the lightest of frameworks is re­quired so that an occasional fix can be taken, and every temptation to catholicity placed in the path of the unwary.  Above all, a deepening sense of language and of the sounds and rhythms of it; the sense of the inventiveness and autonomy of language heigh­tened by asking, not simply “What does this mean?”, but “What is this doing?” and “What exactly is this doing now?”

If this seems too haphazard a way of staking out a country of affection, a centre of reference can be found in a unitary view of poetry, on the assumption that “poetry” is a very comprehensive term, and that although poems are many and various, poetry is one and has its specific frisson.  This is done, not by generalizing from the whole body of literature, but by shaping a figure from the best evidence we individually have available – that is, the things we know best and care most about.  A fashionable counsel of despair says that there are too many kinds of literature, too many single works of literature, for anybody to attempt such a view.  That is really a consolatory evasion: there has always been too much to learn and know; the capacity of the mind is prodigi­ous but not infinite.  Yet we are ill-advised not to make the at­tempt.

One of the beautiful features of the mind is its power to select, and the tendency to select and stow away what we care most about – even though the caring may sometimes be from fear or revulsion.  The mind remains agile by forgetting as well as re­membering, by emptying as well as filling.  The healthy mind is ringed round by unknowing as a poem is ringed about with silence; unknowing is the matrix of knowing.  Perhaps the best beginning for a unitary view of poetry is to find out what poets themselves say makes them do what they do, how they work, and what axioms guide their work.  That may not provide a definition of poetry, but it will certainly remove some absurdities.  For those who have never seriously engaged the poetic way of mind this may be strange country; but we can at least learn the axioms, if necessary by rote, so that we do not entertain inappropriate as­sumptions or disseminate corrupt analogies.

If we are constructing an illustrative analogy for the way poems get made and how they “work” – a figure that will be used not to classify poems but to bring to our attention distinctive peculiarities of individual poems – we should be ill-advised to go to a psychologist, a sociologist, a historian, a linguist, or a com­puter expert – least of all an expert in “communications”.  None of these will have made any careful study of the facts and axioms of poetic making, or if they have they will have selected their evidence according to their own working assumptions and will have phrased their findings in an analogical vocabulary (almost certainly causal-mechanistic) constructed for a purpose so differ­ent from the purpose of poetry as to exclude most of the distinc­tive characteristics of poetic making.  Each “outsider” will in his own way – looking at poetry through his own methodological spectacles – describe poetry as a projection of his own guiding analogies.

I turn aside for a moment to examine an analogy that has come from “outside” to gain some currency among our people: the analogy of “communication” as promulgated by those experts in auditory and visual presentation who are convinced that coherent speech and the printed word are obsolete.  Departments of “Communications” have already been set up in some univer­sities.  It is fair enough that somebody should study the various technical means of “getting things across”, but it is difficult to see any connection between that and the assumption that “Com­munications” possesses, or can provide, the central theory by which all modes of intelligible interaction among human beings are to be interpreted.

Whether or not, as an economic or administrative conveni­ence, English is threatened with being swallowed up by “Com­munications”, we could hardly deny that the jargon of the subject has already invaded our classrooms with the terms “informa­tion”, “medium”, “message”, and “audience-appeal”, and has called to its support certain relics of a pre-parascientific age – “meaning”, “intention”, and “the poet’s philosophy”.  “Communications theory”, properly so-called, is to do with mathematics, cybernetics (computer theory), and the design of certain kinds of electronic equipment, and has a history that can be traced back more than a hundred years.  The theoretical under-pinning of academic departments of Communications however has a different origin and a much shorter history; since much of it is arcane, assertive, and incoherent, it might be consi­dered speculative rather than theoretical; and since these specula­tions grew up largely as a self-justifying offshoot of the advertis­ing and propaganda industries, the purity of its theoretical posi­tion may be thought to be in some way a little contaminated.  But there are other objections both logical and linguistic, and it would be salutary to notice some of the ambiguities and distortions that the unexamined analogy of “communication” can bring to the study of literary matters.

The radical sense of the word “communicate” lies in the area “to bring together into one, to hold communion with, to share closely with, to hold intercourse with”.  The sense of an intimate coming together into a condition of union is intrinsic to the word – a meaning that could well carry with it some hint of the reason why language is more refined than grunts, squeaks, and whistles, and how, in that development, language has been able to secure and delineate the most subtle relations between one person and another.  These implications survive in the semi-technical jargon of “communications”, but only as an escape hatch in argument or as an emotive aura.

The ancillary terms “information”, “medium”, and “mes­sage”, however, show that “communication” is being used in the military or telegraphic sense: a line of connection (a wire or a suitably directed radio wave) is established in order to pass mes­sages from one person to another.  If there can be shown to be a “communicating” link, it follows that it could be there only to “communicate” – i.e., to pass messages.  If messages are to be passed there must be somebody who initiates the message, and there will be somebody to receive it and read it intelligibly (be­cause there’s not much point in sending a message that the reci­pient cannot understand).  The line by which the message gets from one person to another is the “medium of communication”.  This is all quite elementary and perfectly clear.

The trouble begins when the analogy is applied to persons standing close enough to each other that no wire or equipment is needed, or to the circumstance of writing something (as is the case with most works of literature) that is addressed to nobody in particular.  By a process that for convenience we could call “nominalism”, each item in the elementary figure is given the status of a “thing”, something that exists, and each item must then be accounted for in any situation that is alleged to be analo­gous to the illustrative figure.[i]  The sender of the message is iden­tified as the poet; the recipient is the “audience” (conceived of as an indolent or resentful TV audience that has to be persuaded to pay attention); the “medium” is “language”.  (Here the terms of the figure have slipped a little: by rights the “medium” corres­ponding to the wire that carries the electrical impulses would have to be the air carrying sound waves or a piece of paper carrying written characters on it.)[ii]  By definition, a “message” is anything that can be sent; it does not follow, however, that any­thing that can be sent is a “message”.  When we apply this to poetry we are in trouble: there is usually no evidence that for the poet there was in fact any sending or intent to send, and although a poem can have a “message” we usually suspect a poem of having an impure intention if it does have a “message”.  By trying to make “message” mean too much it means almost nothing.  Correspondingly the apparently forthright term “information” dissolves when on the one hand advertisers plead that everything they publish is “information”, and on the other hand computing people define “information” as anything that their technical system can accept for processing.

Once the analogy of “communication” is accepted for poetry we must look for a “message”; but what we find is either nothing, or else something grotesquely at odds with the poem itself.  Yet because the figure insists that something has to be sent, the “message” gets desperately transformed into “meaning” or “in­tention”: the “message”, even if in soldierly terms it is obscure or indecipherable, is still what the poet “meant” or what he “intended to say”.  If the poet’s “meaning” or “intention” eludes the grasp, we then regress to “the poet’s philosophy” in search of a key to interpretation – forgetting that “philosophy” is a shifty term, and that to work from the general to the particular is at best a hazardous procedure.

It is obvious that a “medium” is a vehicle for transmitting.  A telephone circuit with a narrow range of audio-frequencies is an unfaithful medium for the human voice; a radio circuit of unsta­ble frequency response is an unfaithful medium for any kind of sound.  A medium (in this sense) has definable characteristics and limitations, but no character; it initiates nothing, and it does not partake of the nature of what it transmits.  By asserting that lan­guage is a “medium”, the “communication” analogy insists that language is either a neutral conveyor of messages (meanings, intentions?), or else a conventional code in which messages can be conveyed.

It is true that we can indeed utter and write messages; but that is far from all we know we can do in language and far from what we commonly use language for.  We know, for example, that we manage intelligible speech with primitive simplicity and direct­ness: it is a gesture, an act, and typically an inventive act; we do not first conceive a “meaning”, then translate it into language as a “message”, then “send” it by speaking or writing it.  We know that, because it is a person, not language, that means, the saying of anything is typically a delineation of what the speaker guessed he might find himself saying.  To put it another way, what is said in speech – if it is of more than the most rudimentary indicativeness or abstraction – cannot be separated from how it is said.  We know, for example, that language is often used as a way of preventing disclosure of feeling, thought, intention, meaning.  We know that it is possible – and not very exceptional between people who are “close to each other” – to speak in such a way that what is actually said becomes a carrier-wave for matters quite different from what the words seem to be about, and that this is so because what is put on the carrier-wave could not be said in any other way.  It is true that language can (in the loosest sense) “communicate” and it is true that poetry can “communicate” – that is, can transfer something more or less intelligible from one person to another.  But it is a very slack kind of logic that would find those two statements equivalent to the statement that “Language is communication” or that “Poetry is communication”.  For a beginning we should have to do some­thing about that slippery verb “is”.

The “communication” analogy as applied to literature seems to commend itself for its cheerful plausibility, perhaps most of all to those who may have hoped that there would be some easy and straightforward way of dealing with poetry.  But in spite of its lively vogue it isn’t very useful in literary studies.  Its assump­tions about language and the functions of language preclude much more than they illuminate, and what they illuminate is of little importance in the field of literature.  The most serious objec­tion to the analogy is that it misrepresents the prototypal nature and functions of language as we know them.  Another serious objection is that virtually every term in its battery of special words is either ambiguous or circular: the analogy readily pro­duces a sequential equivocation that may be useful in case-making, or even in a court of law, but it does not help us in our inquiry into poetry, inasmuch as poetry is a continuous affirma­tion of our nature as articulate, discriminating, and inventive.

While we are thinking of analogies and their appropriateness it is perhaps just worth pointing out to students that – contrary to the working premises of anthropology and psychology ­– some people sometimes do things simply for the fun of it; that perhaps not all symptomatic indications are “deeply significant”; that perhaps not all human actions are adequately explained in terms of “drives” and “motives”, any more than a theory of ballistics will tell us what it feels like to shoot at somebody with a pistol with deadly intent; that when we “see”, it doesn’t feel as though we were experiencing a “neuro-visual reaction”; and that when we speak, it doesn’t feel as though we were “constructing a verbal-semantic string of indeterminate length”.

Coming back to “acquaintance”, there is no need for separate “courses” in it.  Indeed much heavy-handed damage can be done to a student’s grasp of literature by spending too much time over works that do not reward the effort, writings not strong enough to arouse delight and not profound or intricate enough to shape response into sustained scrutiny.  The trouble with marina-courses is that they provide themselves with a vacuum so spacious that it has to be filled out with factitious entertainment and special pleading.  Also they tend to isolate themselves from other staple courses because direct comparison would show them to be peripheral.

This is my objection to “a full range of courses” in (say) Canadian Literature.  There are many reasons why we should be acquainted with our own best writing; but you don’t have to “take a course in the subject” to do that.  Our primary purpose is educative; the accident that certain works were written by our fellow countrymen is no guarantee that they are strong enough or intricate enough to induce – in the very limited time at our disposal – the activities of mind that alone make the study of English Literature a powerful educative discipline.  To use up time and energy on “acquaintance” with works that will not sustain worth-while inquiry is time ill-spent; our main educative task is subtle and slow-burning, and needs all the time-for-gestation we can possibly find for it.  If we are really working sub specie aeternitatis – as I think we should be – declarations of national pride and ambition, though pardonable, are beside the point.  If we are not playing for keeps, English is indeed “just another subject”.  As educators we should be much more concerned than we are with the function of what we study, and much less with the subject-matter of it.  It is even arguable that, unless we do our work with serious intent, we shall be making less contribution than we could to the climate that brings great works of literature into being.

The process of acquaintance need not be isolated, and is prob­ably better if it isn’t: it goes forward at every stage in the de­velopment of taste, advancing – and retreating too – by quantum steps, responding to inquiry and nourished by reflection.  A per­son can read Pope or Milton or Dante or Aristotle one day; two weeks earlier it would have been impossible; a year later (for a variety of reasons) it may be wormwood and gall; yet later again it may return as a new thing.  Because the process of acquaintance is continuous and proceeds (not without effort) by unpredictable stages, the ordonnance of possibilities in any single mind is as mysterious as the way a poem comes into being – yet familiar enough (one would have thought) because it is the way our minds order themselves, preparing a spider’s web for a fly that we do not yet know exists, and which we may not like when we come to eat it.  If “criticism” is understood to be a process of getting-to-know, it can be seen to be as firmly rooted in “acquaintance” as it is nourished by “inquiry”.

In the study of literature we rightly place strong emphasis upon the poem as the centre of attention.  That precept cannot be al­lowed to cut the poem off from its context; yet part of the diffi­culty is how to prevent the context from swamping the poem.  Very little can be systematically excluded from the field of litera­ture: students need to acquaint themselves with the non-literary matters that works of literature are often embedded in and that often give them both energy and direction.  It is not well that students be totally unaware that something has happened to physics since Newton, or to labour relations since the Peasants’ Revolt, or to psychiatry since Freud; nor should they be ignorant that some things had happened to English poetry before Pound.

If “background material” is merely accumulated as “informa­tion” it will tend to deposit itself in the mind at a level of uniform emphasis, either refusing to combine with literary elements or reducing the poem to the same uniform level of evidence.  The selective and heuristic activities associated with “acquaintance” can provide a contour of relevance, a sense of a centre and a periphery, a sense of what in any instance is to the point and what isn’t, and with what degree of emphasis.  As recognitions of quality become reliable we are better able to judge whether we are studying a work of literature as an imaginative construction in its own right, or whether we are using it as evidential material for a quite different purpose – psychology, philosophy, history, sociology.  It is in the continuous process of acquaintance that agility of mind and subtlety of perception are fostered.  We need to be careful that what should be a continuing process is not arrested by activities dominantly analytical or merely cumulative.

The other phase ­– “inquiry” or “reflective inquiry” – is what we do with the knowing we have gathered up in acquaintance.  Inquiry does not wait for acquaintance to be completed, but is rather the means by which acquaintance advances beyond mere accumulation to a progressive exploration of new modes of im­aginative activity.

Reflective inquiry is the crowning intellectual and emotional achievement of our art; but I want to consider it here only in its paedagogic aspects, for it is in this that the Aristotelian principle especially applies: we become what we do.  As instructors, our first and crucial consideration is the choice of works that students are to inquire into and reflect upon.  Ideally we should like them in the end to be able to inquire into any literature whatsoever; but at first – and probably throughout an undergraduate programme, because time is very short – a careful selection needs to be made according to the paedagogic function each work is to serve.  The selection has to begin “at the top”, with works of unquestionable toughness and achievement, works that force us to recognize the poetic way of mind that they declare, because that is actually the way of mind we, as individuals, are trying to discover – with the whole person, intellect, emotion, and imagination, in due con­sort.  Some works need to be intricate and difficult in order to force students out of prosaic assumptions into the specific verbal world of poetry; but not too many of these, otherwise students (like many of their instructors) might think that there’s nothing to the study of literature but ingenious puzzle-solving.  We also need to choose works that combine great power with unmannered sim­plicity and translucence, poems that at one stroke bring into coincidence the qualities of the extremely simple and the ex­tremely complex – the indelible mark of all imaginative work.  Works need to be chosen also that will demonstrate beyond reasonable doubt that the poetic mode is not a modification of the conceptual mode, but distinct from it, even though it uses “the same language” and embraces many of the same logical and syntactical principles.

Here the imperative to “respond to”, which is paramount in the phase of acquaintance, turns into a family of questions: How can I respond less accidentally, in a more sustained, more in­formed, less private way?  How can I get to know the poem rather than merely my response to the poem?  How can I sustain inquiry and reflection without getting stuck in some analytical back­water, the poem disembowelled and no way onward?

As instructors we want not only to show how to inquire, or that it is possible to inquire and to sustain inquiry; we also want to show what to inquire from, what to respond from.  In the gradual development of critical maturity, the centre of attention shifts from the responding self to the poem as an entity in its own right, to the poem as reshaping our response in detail and guiding our reflection, to the poem as something that we can genuinely know.  The foundation for this change is the secretion of critical experi­ence that transforms “response” from a more or less accidental personal reaction, neural and emotional, to a distinct cognitive act: from “I feel’’ to “I feel this; I value this; I know this poem.’’

The gathering together in memory of our experience of poems becomes a foundation for both our responsive activity and our reflective activity; it becomes the personal counterpart to the poem, the experiential complex that each of us, being what he is, can hospitably present to a poem.  The accretion of critical ex­perience, when fully assimilated at each stage and taken up into ourselves, becomes a subliminal part of our selves, being the selected impressions, known-and-forgotten-but-never-lost, that we now bring to our recognitions and judgments.  We are then no longer merely a responsive mechanism triggered by what we read, nor a brain that can do nothing but think about what we read.  We have acquired, and continue to nourish, an imaginative darkness from which we go out toward poems, recognizing them not as projections of ourselves, nor as gratifying emotions that we may wish to have aroused, but as having their own life and integrity, and as having in a real sense a nature resonant with our own.  What we respond from is not simply our cumulative ac­quaintance with substantial works of literature, but also our sense of the nature of poetry itself, how it lives and functions; and also our sense of our selves.  Gradually, through recognition and dis­covery, we gain confidence in our responsive selves, and in those crazy bird-cages we call our “minds”.

When a concept of poetry and a concept of mind come into conjunction, a crucial assault occurs, because the two concepts are mutually constructive.  Except for a few conceptual purposes the terms “subject/object”, “subjective/objective” dissolve.  We are suddenly denied what we thought was a common-sense foun­dation for our analyses.  The realities of imaginative works defy the “realist’s” assumption that all events must be analysed – can only be analysed – into subject/object, cause/effect, conscious-purpose/intended-result.  For we find that our inquiry – like the making of poetry itself – cannot proceed except through a se­quence of recognitions and judgments of value; that our knowing, thinking, perceiving is incorrigibly subjective in the sense that it is always anchored in the experiencing self, I-knowing, I-thinking, I-perceiving; that the relation between reader and poem, and between poet and poem, is not a subject/object relation but an intersubjective relation – two I’s going out to meet each other.  For the poet’s chief preoccupation is, not to write something that will have a certain effect, but simply to make a poem.

In matters of this sort I think that our training (as instructors) does us some disservice: we pay far too little attention to the pervasive presence and activity of mind, and we think too little about the metaphysical status of a poem – how it can be said to exist, how it can be said to be knowable.  Yet literature itself, with poetry as its prototypal function, provides all the evidence we could possibly ask for if we are to inquire into the mind and its functions and relations – not least in what it can tell us of the way poems come into being and of the ways they can become the embodiment of mental events.  We are remarkably insensitive to speculative possibilities if we do not see that the order of lan­guage we call “poetic” or “symbolic” forces us to inquire into judging, perceiving, knowing, recognizing, discriminating; and that any serious attempt so to inquire into the poetic way of mind (the peculiar inheritance of man) forces us to define activities, relations, and orders of mental certitude that lie outside the com­pass of experimental psychology as we now have it, and of positivist philosophy, and of the behavioural-mechanistic ac­count of man.

It is our responsibility to make the range of mental activity as comprehensive as possible.  Yet the trend of literary studies since the Second War has narrowed rather than extended the field of our work, by tacitly excluding much that is fertile – and even essential – in an attempt to “define the discipline”.  That circum­scription has been further endorsed by the specialization that has accumulated quantities of microscopic and unrelated detail – that seems to argue that the field of literature is too multitudi­nous to be embraced, and that therefore either the boundaries should be drawn in or else that the country should be subdivided in order to keep control of it.

A “discipline” is characterized, not by its subject-matter, but by the ways of mind it typically and necessarily evokes.  Yet in desperation, and afflicted by a “technical” climate of opinion over which we have little control, we have turned too much, and too uncritically, to semi-technical manipulations, analytic procedures, patchwork rather than synthesis.  Our tendency to rely on formulary procedures in the classroom is as much a symptom of this as it is a symptom of laziness and timidity.  We forget that the mind is both a perceptive and a selective instrument.  To match the imaginative source of literature, the dominant process of in­quiry needs to be synthesis – or more properly, a synthesizing rhythmic movement from synthesis to analysis and back to syn­thesis, forgetting as well as remembering, so that we can discover the true patterns of literature and not impose upon it preconceived patterns that we insist (for other reasons) that literature must exhibit.

Literary studies now seem to have fallen into three strains: the principle of “close reading”, the “history of ideas”, and the grand conspective scheme.  All these, when they become ends in themselves rather than instruments of inquiry, become deflective rather than constructive: “close reading” often fails to show us what we can do with the elucidatory detail it brings to the surface; the history of ideas has difficulty staying in the field of imagina­tion at all because of the working assumptions it has to make about the nature and identity of “ideas”; the grand scheme – except perhaps in the hands of a master – collapses into plaus­ible classification or proliferates into allegorical ingenuity.  Even the dictum “Consider the poem and nothing else” can become a preclusive principle, a fixative procedure that prevents the poem from growing in the mind because it shuts out much of the nourishment we could conceivably bring to it.

All procedural devices have a limited function; they are at best instruments of inquiry, not metaphysical principles.  A good part of our discrimination needs to go into discerning – in any particu­lar critical activity – the precise limits of any procedure or anal­ogy we decide to use.  Our schools and universities are dominated by the assumption that “to know” can only mean to acquire and possess something(s) called “knowledge” or “information”.  We have to make an effort to remember that there is another kind of knowing that we recognize whenever we say “I know that person” – a kind of knowing that is paramount in our study of poems.  The way we “get to know” a poem, and find it growing in stages of fullness and vivacity in a process that has no end, is through a sequence of risky losings of it in analysis and restorations of it in synthesis; then, in fact, we are moving back and forth between two kinds of knowing, each distinct, each with its own peculiar function.  Analysis is characterized by a regressive movement toward increasing multiplicity and a uniform emphasis among the things-known.  Synthesis – an elegant selective process – is characterized by clarity, wholeness, simplicity, shapeliness; it liberates us from the confusion of multiplicity and allows us to see what is the “right thing” to do with our know­ledge.  In our studies we must evoke and clarify both these pro­cesses.

Because the things we study are at once physical and elusive, we need to be tactful as well as skilful; we need to recognize that no analogy can be better than a suggestive analogy.  Many analy­tical procedures can be directed upon the body of literature for various purposes, and many different ones are needed.  The trou­ble with analytical procedures is that they are very easy to teach: hence the besetting temptation to teach formulary procedures.  But no analytical procedure can of itself engender the synthesiz­ing grasp that is our only direct way of sensing the substance and life of a poem.  To come upon a poem as a living thing takes a simplicity of mind that few of us, out of sophistication, can muster at will.  To hold a poem as a living thing in the centre of attention takes – as calligraphers say ­– a light hand and a light heart.  The more earnest we become – the more importunate, analytic, and “teachy” – the more heavy-handed we become, the more violence we do to literature, to our students, and to our­selves.

The deflective drift away from the reality of literature and the fertility it offers us occurs through excessive cerebration and misplaced conceptuality.  The way of dealing with what may seem an inevitable digression would probably occur to us more often if we were less uncertain of our own capacities.  We need to concentrate firmly on the centre – the poems, the works of literature – resolutely following the threads of inquiry wherever they may lead; but – and it is a very large but – continuously cycling the inquiry back through the poem so that the poems can select and shape the inquiry.  Literature being what it is, the distinctive method of literary inquiry is truly a method, not a technique; it is established and commanded by the peculiar identity of what in any instance is under inquiry; it discovers the minute specificity of the particulars when most of the particulars are impalpable.  It requires some conscious effort because it runs counter to the habitual movement of our minds: instead of mov­ing from the less to the greater, from the particular to the general, we must move from the greater to the less, from the general to the particular, because poetry deals with universals.  Universals are discerned, not embodied in generalizations: they are only found symbolized in particulars.

As for the larger question of how we may regain confidence in the wider ambience that the classics moved in, I should say that it is not to be found in what is fashionably called “interdisciplinary studies”, unless we recognize that there are in fact very few disciplines, and that they do not coincide with the traditional boundaries by which scholarly activity has been delimited.  A definition of “discipline” is very much needed.  For a start we should notice how far the habit of thinking in terms of “prob­lems” and “solutions” produces method-oriented problems rather than problem-oriented method; that the problem is adjusted to fit the expected solution or made to conform to the investiga­tive technique.  There is a further objection.  The “solution” of anomalies is, in any kind of inquiry, the most fruitful thing we can attempt.  But explaining is almost invariably explaining-away; a “solution” is a destruction; the ultimate solution is the ultimate destruction.  The last thing we want to do is to dismiss or destroy the very things we want to get to know.

If we ever lose sight of the poem as a thing-made, out there, with its own identity and existence, infuriatingly impervious to anything we may say or do about it, we shall probably find ourselves “teaching literature” – that is, providing students with our learned acquaintance with some literature and our conclu­sions upon it, showing students how to give the impression that they too have a learned acquaintance with literature when, in fact, they may as yet have no vivid sense of the work they are writing their “research papers” on.  We are even in danger of trying to manufacture intellectuals out of people who are not particularly intelligent.  By absent-mindedly propagating our pro­fessional kind, we may find ourselves testing our students for “results” – that is, seeing whether they know the drill, whether they can handle the “tools” and “techniques” well enough to produce the expected “answers”.

It is one thing to be acquainted with literature; it is another thing to be able to talk intelligibly about the subject-matter con­tained in literature.  But our central concern is neither of these if we are to fulfil our task as a seminal humane discipline.  I suggest that our purpose is to encourage our students to discover, exer­cise, refine, and extend their own mental and emotional capacities, and to do that in the study of literature because it is there that such a purpose can be most concentratedly brought into focus; and in doing so, to leave the wonder and integrity of literature intact so that, either drawing upon that or the memory of it, they will thereafter bring those qualities to everything they see and touch in their lives.

In a task so delicate, and even intrusive, we should never find ourselves pleading that we didn’t know that our task was at once momentous and almost impossible.  If we hum, we hum for keeps; if we doodle, it is a form of wisdom; if we sigh, it is because our lives are short.  We must be eager to abandon pre­pared positions and stand in the open; as professors, bold to profess; as masters, not magisterial; our commerce not with commodities or options but with discoveries and marvels; not with opinions and varieties of opinion but with judgments of value; not with explanations but with knowings and resurrec­tions.  We need to try to know something about knowing; we need to be quizzical about confident statements about how we know and what we can know.  We need to know a good deal about our “inner goings-on” – how we respond, hear, see, listen, attend, discern, recognize, choose, judge, not begging the question with preformulated theoretical answers.  We need to see how we “think” – in starbursts and constellations, forgetting and losing as much as remembering and finding, in no linear mode, groping towards what we know we are looking for though we cannot possibly know yet what we shall find.  We need to be aware how our minds are not computers; how feeling is psychic energy, the formative initiative of knowing, recognizing, remembering, dreaming; how language is not simply a medium in which we record our feeling and thinking, but an articulative process in which feeling and thinking can unite, with great subtlety and precision, to discover and realize themselves; how language is our most inventive characteristic and our specific endowment; how imagination is our capacity for transfiguration, inalienable. 

Paul Valéry, in his early twenties, wrote a brilliant essay on “The Method of Leonardo da Vinci”.  As a poet and as a trained scientific observer he was fascinated with the way of mind that brought poems into existence.  In a later imaginary dialogue enti­tled Idée Fixe he coined the word “Implex” to refer to “our capacity for feeling, reacting, doing, and understanding – individual, inconstant, more or less known to us – but always imperfectly and indirectly – and very often misconstrued by us – and also our capacity for resistance.”  From that dialogue I have pieced together his account of how, through this capa­city to implicate, a “thought” or an “idea” – or a “poem”, it may be – comes into being: it is very much to the point in this discussion.

The sense of fitness – rightness – is the intelligence of the Implex.  Which amounts to saying that, in a given circumstance, what is most needed is summoned up, attracted by the circumstance itself.  There is a state of mental effort completely removed from the mind’s ordinary kind of freedom and haphazardness, a state equally opposed to distraction or fixation, and which can only satisfy itself (unless forced to a standstill by fatigue) with the possession of a sort of mental object, which the mind can recog­nize as the thing it was searching for.  And yet it did not know what the object was which it now recognizes – but there is no mistaking it. ...

A certain pattern takes form – a pattern which no longer has anything to do with your volition.  What is required is submission to a certain constraint: the ability to keep this up, endure it fixedly, so as to give those elements of thought which are present, or in operation, the liberty to find their affinities, the time to combine together constructively and to assert themselves in the conscious mind – to impose some indefinable conviction upon it.

If, as instructors, our idea of poetry is based on recognitions much less subtle than Valéry has set down here, or on patterns of much less exact introspective depth, we shall probably sooner or later go astray; the work will go coarse in our hands and cease to be seminal.

In face of the difficulties and subtleties intrinsic to our work, what matters is that students be instructed – that they discover in themselves a clear structure; it may not matter that the theory of that instruction be disclosed to them.  A surgeon treating a patient does not begin by teaching his patient surgery: he operates.  An instructor inspired by a clear understanding of the materials and of the purpose to be served will tend to work with the radical simplicity of a gesture.  But we should not let our students sup­pose that the central issues in literary studies are less complex and subtle than they are, or that they are less accessible or important than we take them to be.  Whatever can be taught can be tested; whatever is teachable can be taught rigorously and with delight.  And as for ourselves, in handling whatever cannot be taught but can be transmitted, evoked, induced, each of us can have a fine sense of his own peculiar capabilities and the operative limits of them.  The rest is a matter of clear purpose, a light touch, a sense of wonder.