Teaching Poetry
I hope nobody supposed from this title that I would begin by handing round copies of poems, and would then proceed to demonstrate in detail how best to ‘teach’ those poems; or that I would survey all known approaches, techniques of analysis, forms of explication, tricks of haruspication, systems of classification, and proposals for achieving scientific objectivity in the examination of poems, and then say which I recommend. My purpose is more modest than that. I simply wish to ask what could conceivably be meant by the shorthand phrase ‘teaching poetry’, and why such an undertaking could be considered to be of more than common importance in education. I shall say a little about knowing and thinking. I may be a little theoretical at times. I ask you to be patient.
‘To teach’ has a disagreeably aggressive sound to it, but I let that pass. Do we teach poetry, or do we teach students? It seems safe to suggest that ‘to teach’ is either ‘to cause somebody to know something’ or ‘to cause somebody to know how to do something’. I conclude from the prevalence of such phrases as ‘to acquire knowledge’, ‘to contribute to the fund of knowledge’, ‘to work at the fringes of knowledge’, etc., that we are inclined to think of ‘knowing’ as the gathering of reliable pieces of ‘information’ – largely perhaps because we tend to think of ‘knowing’ on the analogy of seeing. If we are provided with suitable visual equipment (the supposition seems to go), we can see what is visible. There is a seeing subject and a visible object; the relation between the two is (so to speak) instrumental. Good results depend upon good visual equipment and clear conditions for observation; results improve as the instrumental errors are adjusted and the lighting approaches the optimum. Both these conditions, it follows from the analogy, can to some extent be prepared ahead of time. Again, we commonly think (analogically) of seeing-with-the-mind’s-eye; sometimes we call it ‘intuition’ (in which we perceive clearly at a glance), sometimes we call it ‘understanding’ (in which we see through something complex and grasp the scheme of its inner relations and workings). The usual preface to a statement arising from, or affirming, either kind of knowing is ‘I know that ...’, even though sometimes the statement may prove to be incorrect. Some philosophers have even stated that, if we cannot say distinctly what is known, there is no knowing. But I’m not so sure.
When the object known begins to lose clear definition as an entity, the verb ‘to know’ loses its affirmative clarity and changes its meaning. When I say, ‘I know that person’, I am most likely to mean, ‘I’ve seen that person before’ or ‘I know that person’s name’. If I say, ‘I know that poem’, I probably mean, ‘I can tell you its title and who wrote it.’ In both cases I am then dealing in items of verifiable information, in themselves more or less trivial. If the intent is more profound, the inflection changes: ‘I know that person’ (meaning ‘I know him through and through; he has no secrets from me’), or ‘I know that poem’ (meaning ‘I am thoroughly acquainted with the poem – or with that piece of music or the work of the writer’). I have then moved into an area in which the object cannot be fully accounted for by any number of statements in the form ‘I know that ...’; not only does verification of points of detail become difficult, but the unity of conception tends to dissolve in a multiplicity of descriptive detail. Yet, as the word ‘intuition’ implies, I can mean something genuine – and something different in quality and extent from an accumulation of verifiable detail – when I say, ‘I know that person’ or ‘I know that poem.’
This is a very crude way of saying that there are different orders of knowing; and that what is knowable or to be known is the exponent of the quality of knowing required to encompass it – that is, that the nature and status of the knowable not only invokes the process of mind required to know it, but also that it leaves in the product of the knowing the marks of that nature and status. At the level of veridical information this involves no difficulty. But when the object-to-be-known passes out of the range of sensory or logical verification, we find that our minds can easily short-circuit the difficulty by assigning to what-is-to-be-known a nature and status that makes it readily knowable: that is, we work from the answer to the question instead of from the question to the answer.
I suggest that because poetry lies at a profound meeting-point of two extremely complex variables – life and the mind – poetry may well tax our cognitive ingenuity rather severely.
The distinctive marks of poetry are – in part, at least: precision, economy, multivalency, the condition of music. Poetry is a necessary and inevitable mode of utterance. Like all works of imagination, poems are entities of direct appeal. Given our natural capacity for the integrative and energetic state called ‘imagination’, and granted our gift of language – our most specifically human endowment – it would be surprising if reading and listening to poetry would not be the most natural thing in the world. I suggest, therefore, that, if we are using literature as an educational instrument, we should always begin with poetry; for poetry is not a sub-species of literature (as prose fiction is, or drama) but the prototype of whatever in language we call ‘imaginative’ or ‘symbolic’.
‘In art as in life there are no classes for beginners’ – and with poetry there don’t have to be any classes for beginners. Nor can there be, because there is no such thing as elementary or rudimentary poetry – there is only poetry more or less clearly defined. In order to establish the peculiar ‘feel’ of poetry, we must always begin with highly developed and complex examples of art. That at least will accustom the ear to the tune and shapeliness of the thing. There are other advantages. We can also establish confidence that even ‘difficult’ poetry is directly accessible (even though not immediately intelligible) to an untrained reader – as music is accessible to listeners untrained in the art of music. We can also establish the fact that we can experience poetry without fully understanding the poem. Until a poem is in some sense experienced, it does not exist in the mind; nothing relevant to the poem can be done with it. An elaborate expository or analytical reconstruction of the ‘meaning’ of the poem cannot substitute for direct perceptual experience at the outset; and it is unlikely to serve well as an introduction for a responsive activity that best arises from innocence of intent and is free from anxiety about ‘meaning’.
Poetry seems to have a double nature: as a substantial thing to be grasped primarily by the senses; and as a complex mental event. Whether or not a poem records a mental event that ‘actually’ occurred in the poet who made it, it certainly is itself a complex mental event standing on its own feet, and capable of regenerating in a reader (or listener) a mental event corresponding in some way to itself in quality, power and configuration. As an ‘event’ a poem presents itself to us directly, and invites us to enter into it and partake of its activity; there’s nothing else we can do with it. The substance of a poem, on the other hand, the fact that it can present itself to us as a solid presence (like Coleridge’s nightmares, ‘a foot-thick reality’) arises not so much from the physical circumstance that it is printed on a page or uttered on the air; it arises rather from the fact that is made in language, that it presents itself as having certain formal and temporal limits and patterns accessible only to the ear and (by synaesthetic transfer) to the sense of touch; through these perceptual relations it induces refined and subtle patterns of ‘feeling’ (or psychic energy). By ‘experiencing’ a poem I mean paying attention to it as though it were not primarily a mental abstraction, but as though it were designed to be grasped directly by the senses, inviting us to ‘function in the perceptual mode’. Poetry can and does make its primary engagement through the senses as much when a poem demands strenuous conceptual activity as when it is as purely musical as the specific music of language will allow.
Poems have substance – that is, they have the qualities that make them not presences only, but physical presences – in virtue of being made of words, of language organised dominantly according to metaphorical or symbolic relations. Our bond with language is primarily through the sense of hearing, a radical sense that – like touch, but unlike sight – does not readily evoke the conceptual processes of abstraction and generalisation. For educational purposes it is essential that poems be actually heard and listened to, whether as actually spoken aloud or as literally heard when reading in silence. The proper and discreet speaking of poetry provides a double physical bond: we not only hear, but also feel – in the musculature of tongue, lips, throat and face – the physical articulation of the words, the shape, mass, movement, impulse of the thing. In my own experience, most students looking at poetry need deliberately to subdue their cerebral anxiety. The first lesson is to engage the senses; not as an agreeable adjunct to other more intellectual delights, but as the necessary means to hold the mind in the perceptual mode, to keep the habits of abstraction and generalisation in their place. Once the senses are engaged all sorts of reflective activities are possible. If that has not happened we cannot expect much beyond a feeble pastiche of what is thought to be scholarly behaviour.
That such an elementary point should be worth making draws attention to some curious (but tacit) assumptions we seem commonly to make about the stuff we are working with. We seem to assume that, if we can postulate an external cause for an event, we can understand and interpret that event. But sometimes we assign ridiculous ‘causes’ – self-expression, the desire to communicate, a hunger to declare the position of man in a hostile world, and so on. In fact, the central preoccupation of a poet is to make poems, to construct stable and patterned word-things. These things-made arise from life, certainly, and reflect back upon life, but they are not ‘about life’. They are incorrigibly made in words, the words becoming unaccountably solid and tactual under the fingers of the mind. Paul Valéry has some very penetrating things to say about how and why poems get made. A poet, he says, is distinguished by the ease with which he enters the poetic state – ‘a mysterious apparatus of life that has as its function to compose all differences, to make what no longer exists act on what does exist, to make what is absent present to us, to produce great effects by insignificant means’. A poet is ‘an individual in whom the agility, subtlety, ubiquity, and fecundity of this all-powerful economy are found in the highest degree’. And a poem: ‘a kind of machine for producing the poetic state of mind by means of words’. Again, the universe of poetry is a harmonic universe: in it ‘resonance triumphs over causality’. The cause is intrinsic to the poem and can be discerned only within the poem. And ‘If I am asked what I “wanted to say” in a certain poem, I reply I did not want to say but wanted to make, and that it was the intention of making which wanted what I said.’ (In support of this last, I think of Hopkins’s ‘Wreck of the Deutschland’, or Valéry’s ‘Le Cimitière Marin’, or of those four lines of a Wyatt sonnet that were important in shaping Auden’s rhythms.)
If the end of our endeavour is to know poems – not simply to know about them – then the beginning and end of our work, the essence of it, will be to induce that quality of knowing appropriate to the psychic events that we call ‘poems’. But it is clear to me that if we actually attempt to ‘teach poetry’ we shall end up in one or several of the plausible evasions that are the hazard of our profession: either teaching how to ‘interpret’ poems, by extracting the ‘meaning’ as though it could be separated out from the physical body of the poem, as though ‘interpretation’, like many other analytic procedures, were an end rather than a means; treating the poem as a puzzle to be solved; teaching how to classify a poem so that the awkward uniqueness of the individual poem can be dissolved into generalised discourse upon the category to which the poem is alleged to belong; teaching analytical ‘approaches’ and ‘techniques’, providing check-lists of symptoms to watch for (vowel-sounds, irony, ambiguity, metaphor, paradox, etc., etc., etc.); and so on. Admittedly all these – and many more – will at some time be essential to the student of literature, but not at the beginning, and not indiscriminately. All of them are pretty blunt-edged tools, and can easily encourage presumptions and habits of mind not altogether appropriate to a delicate and heuristic enterprise.
Now I must speak for myself – not expecting that my views are either exclusively my own, or of any great originality. I can only hope that those who share them will take pleasure in hearing them repeated. What we must teach from the outset is the discipline (disciplina) of ‘heuristic reading’; the end is the cultivation of heightened and informed awareness. Everybody has to do his own knowing; the best we can do is to train our students in how to get to know. Beyond that we shall want to show them (as best we can) how to sustain reflection upon a poem, how to develop confidence in their own perceptions, and what to do if reflection becomes blocked in tautology or in some gross disproportion between the tone and mass of the poem and the tone and depth of our cognitive response to it.
For some years children have been taught in school to read rapidly by eye. The first thing, then, is to make sure that a student can actually hear what he is reading; for if he cannot hear, he will not be aware of the rhythmic declaration of the energy and intricacy of the poem – the life, that is: nor will he be able to enter into the harmonic universe of the poem and be able to sense the dynamics or discern the drama, the trajectory of pure action traced out by the whole poem. Then – and always – anything that helps to cultivate a rich and subtle sense of language is of value; not only the multiple meanings of words, but their sounds and histories, and the way – in that activity in which the senses reverberate with each other – words can assume a physical and tactual quality, having configuration, mass, texture, translucence, intrinsic energy, active function; and how in a poem words typically assume manifold, even conflicting, simultaneous meanings. The sense of language, and the cultivation of sensibility, the ability to hold cognitive activity in the perceptual mode as the root of the operation, with looped excursions into the conceptual (abstractive and generalising) processes always returning to the physical actuality and presence of the poem itself – these can all develop together, and are probably best drawn from a serious and minute study of poems of high quality, rather than from theoretical or generalised descriptions examined in the absence of actual poems. (In the study of poetry the integrity of the particular is paramount. The illuminating function of trying to categorise a poem is to be able to see in what precise respect the poem does not match the assumed category).
Once a student stops looking only for ‘meaning’, and engages the ear in the activity of the poem, the poem will begin to present a contoured shape rather than a plane surface of uniform emphasis; it will present itself as a patterned activity, shapely and self-consistent, with nodes of force that initiate and guide complex mental activity. (These patterns of force are often at variance with the surface ‘meaning’ and logical progress of the matter.) Altogether this encourages confidence in ‘the gift of seeing more than one knows’. This phase of the work is largely carried out in the state called ‘contemplative’, the mind gazing. This ‘synthesis’ is the way of finding out what is what in a poem.
I can see three advantages in separating this phase out, deliberately and markedly, by strong imperatives against ‘interpretation’ and against ‘thinking about’ the poem. (Indeed it may be useful to advise students to sublimate their habit of thinking-about by telling them not to expect a poem to mean anything more specific than we expect of a piece of music; this throws the emphasis upon listening.) The three advantages are as follows. (1) The student becomes increasingly aware of a changing quality of relation between himself and the poem; his presumption that he is a knowing subject and the poem a knowable object has changed into a cognitive relation, dominantly perceptual, in which the initiative begins to shift from himself as knower to the poem as capable of directing the process of getting to know – a process (as I suggested) that is very much like getting to know a person. (2) Instead of the reader dominating and commanding the poem, the poem begins to command the reader’s attention and to establish a hierarchy of relevance – the sense of a centre and a periphery. Instead of telling the poem to ‘get known’, he finds that the poem is somehow vicariously making him over into its own shape and dynamics. (3) As the obsession with ‘meaning’ dwindles, the reader becomes aware of the poem as a harmonic system in which many kinds of resonance begin to be discernible, that these resonances are by no means all auditory, that to a great extent they actually constitute the substance of the poem.
All this can come about without any prior knowledge about poetry or about forms of verse, metrics, philology, or theories of analytical procedure. The poetry comes in through the porches of the ear. Inasmuch as most of this, as far as possible, is conducted in the perceptual mode, the experience of the poem is largely in terms of ‘feeling’ (psychic energy as distinct from ‘emotion’). Clearly this is not what the kids used unprettily to call a ‘gut response’; for the feeling is not only generated by the poem, but it is also controlled – with increasing fineness – by the poem itself (the substance of the poem being defined largely in terms of feeling). So the ‘sense of fact’ and the ‘sense of relevance’ begin to develop. The facts of a poem are the substantial centres of attention as presented to us – things that certainly happen, and that happen at a perceived level of quality and energy. The sense of relevance is simply a matter of being able to discern what goes with what, what is more important than what; it is associated with a sense of proportion, relation, fittingness – the same sense of ‘rightness’ that ‘unaccountably) guides the poet in his making.
The first engagement is by Tom Piper’s whistle: the poem calls out to us, arrests and holds our attention. This is also the way an object in the outside world – something seen or heard – will command a poet’s attention and, usually by being named or found a physical body in words, will become the germ around which a symbolic event grows. At first, by quietness and submission, a reader will seem to merge with the poem, and so can treat the poem as a ‘self-unravelling clue’ (which is what Coleridge says ‘method’ is); but the sign of a maturing cognitive process is the way the poem separates itself from the reader, becomes a ‘thing out there’, unchanged by inquiry, distinct and separate, with a life of its own – certainly not a projection of ourselves. As the poem moves away from us, we are aware that we are no longer merely ‘experiencing’ the poem; we are getting to know it as it becomes less and less like ourselves. What seemed at first little more than an intriguing encounter with a dark stranger becomes cause for a careful and faithful tracing out of the nature of the poem’s existence, the universe it represents – or simply what it is and how it lives. The perceived contouring of the poem, its pattern of forces, allows us to separate out our own ‘errors and ignorances’ from the real issues and questions raised by the poem itself. We can then venture a little analysis.
This is the crucial phase in reflective inquiry. In order to remove the element of accident or the merely personal, to confirm and consolidate the cognitive experience, we shall seek to analyse complex impressions, loosen them into their elements so that we can see them more clearly. But, unless our analysis is guided by a firm perceptual grasp of the whole complex, the poem itself somehow accepting and adjusting whatever we offer to it, we shall probably find ourselves constructing a surrogate poem as a plausible substitute for the true poem. Unfortunately it is towards the construction of such fantasy poems that much of our formal school and university training prepares us. The result can be, for the thinker, very satisfactory: it is a way of dispensing with the unmanageable uniqueness and strangeness of the poem by converting it into something differently constituted, and because we have made it ourselves (a littly slyly) it will be utterly familiar.
Coming back to the beginning again – we are very much inclined not to recognise how profoundly the quality of our thinking is affected by the state of mind we bring to the thinking. If we imagine that we are not changed by what we know, if we imagine that we are knowing-machines that are not modified by their own knowing, our attempts to get to know can become aggressive and can destroy what we thought we wanted to know. The adjustment of the mind to a complex and delicate task is not primarily the selection of certain procedures or techniques, but rather the assumption of discipline – the quiet and submissive preparation of the mind for its task. Not only the temper of the mind needs to be adjusted, but also the ‘colour’. Hence the immense importance of delight, wonder, affection, respect – opening the mind, making it alert, sensitive, receptive, hesitant to impose itself. The more intimate one’s sense of what language is doing and can do in a poem, the more exact our appreciation of the complex and fugitive activities of mind involved in the making of a poem, the more inclined we are to feel delight, wonder, respect. This is an instance of the way that what we know can extend our ability to know further; the first knowing is not directed as a technical weapon towards the poem – it has imparted the tone and clarity that allows the mind to function appropriately in a task that cannot be forecast and for which therefore we cannot make specific and deliberate preparation. Yet the attitudes of mind that I suggest are fruitful (and a matter of virtue to attain to) are the very qualities that ‘technical analysis’ tends to dismiss as interfering with ‘objectivity’ and ‘rigour’.
The only name I can think of for the process I have been describing – a phrase introduced by Alex Corry some years ago – is ‘reflective inquiry’; and the theory of such an activity could be called ‘heuristics’ – the business of searching out something that is at once familiar and unknown, according to rules of search that are determined largely by the quarry, not by the hunter; and, as the quarry is uncatchable (though knowable), the process will establish an intimate bond between the hunter and the hunted until it is not certain which is the quarry and which the hunter. This reversal of apparent causal sequence is not uncommon in human affairs; even psychologists have noticed it. If all goes well, you get something like a reverse Pavlov effect: the dog eats its dinner and the doctor rings the bell.
Suppose we have (by ‘teaching’) trained a person to be a ‘good reader’. He would have a fine ear, a rich and subtle sense of language, a copious store of learning gathered so affectionately and so promiscuously that it had all become like housemates, cherished but half-forgotten, reverberant to the lightest touch of association. He would be capable of clearing the line of vision by getting his own ignorances, preferences and fantasies out of the light so that (by grace or luck) it is the poem and not himself he’s looking at, and so would be capable of sustained reflection over the poem, not seriously troubled by the fact that there can be no end to his reflection (unless he has chosen a poem so trifling that it will not support much reflection). Then what? What can he do with these marvellous capacities?
It may be that it is precisely at this point we fail to see that we have – as far as direct commerce with poems is concerned – fulfilled our task. What comes next is either not our business as teachers, or else it is almost entirely beyond our influence; for the next phase – if separable – is what we do with our knowing. We are all very inclined (as teachers) to try to make over our students into our image; as most of us are primarily scholars (rather than poets), we try to make our students over into scholars. No reflection over poems can proceed far without sound and comprehensive scholarship; but scholarship by itself will never produce the qualities of a fine reader – even though scholarship cannot get very far unless it is informed by an alert sense of what is going on in the body of its chosen material. The crux, from a paedagogic point of view, is in the body of literature itself, the stuff it is made in – language, words. At some point thinking must achieve body and articulation by being worded – another clue must be paid out for unravelling – not simply in order to ‘record’ what has happened in the thinking, but as a means of defining, of sustaining and illuminating our own inquiry, the sustaining of our thinking. As the making of a poem is always a process of discovery, so the wording-out of reflection becomes itself a process of discovery; and this goes well or ill according to the precision and fertility of the wording itself. Hence the immense importance of teaching precision in choosing and applying special terms – not merely for purposes of accurate definition, but in order to keep the line of vision clear, to keep the mind in sharp focus so that the glimpse of a fruitful possibility can be traced analytically to its most remote consequences. Hence the need to be wary of inflated, honorific and vogue terms, of catch-phrases that make the head nod slowly in impassive approval like certain Chinese figures without ruffling the surface of the brain-pan. Where better can one learn the functional virtues of a fine precision in words than in poetry itself? Or where better study the crucial implications of that precision as the condition under which alone symbolic activity can occur – not least in the ‘other harmony’ of prose? If, like myself, you can see the end of good reading (?criticism) to be heightened and informed awareness, the question for written or spoken ‘reflective inquiry’ is not simply whether a record of that awareness will be a ‘contribution to knowledge’, but whether it will make somebody else more aware, with a refreshed capacity for knowing, the perceptions purified, the object of inquiry placed intact in the mind of the reader as matter for further inquiry and further delight. In this way, literature itself becomes an instrument of inquiry, showing us how far a question can be pursued, to what self-revealing end a glimpse of a possibility can lead.
To expect all our students to engage in such an activity is probably an unreal – and unreasonable – hope. For a great many students the best that can be hoped for is that they will have become better – that is, more perceptive – readers, that through their contact with us they will (as Frost says of a good poem) have suffered an immortal wound and will never get over it. That would be no trivial accomplishment. A few certainly will take up the clue, the scent, the pursuit; and of those a smaller few will succeed beyond any reasonable expectation. But we need to be clear, in setting exercises and encouraging certain ways of speaking and writing, what the exercise is meant to achieve. If we are inviting students to venture into an area of discourse unfamiliar to them, we need to be sure that there are excellent examples of the art available for study (that is, for listening to); otherwise we get imitations of allegedly learned articles that are themselves too often, alas, no better than lifeless parodies of both genuine scholarship and genuine reflective inquiry. The limits of behaviourism are obvious and sombre.
One of the great advantages of working at literature is that it engenders something of the devil-may-care, jackdaw mentality that makes poets objects of our scholarly envy and indignation. We learn from literature to develop a sense of humour, to feel an instinctive disrespect for grave formulations that purport to provide a fulcrum to move the whole universe of literature. We find that some of the more fruitful (though limited) methods of analytical inquiry need little or no theoretical or philosophical underpinning; they are clever paedagogic devices that sometimes and in some cases put us on a right track, and work well if we don’t press them beyond their limits. (And yet where would the calculus be without the clever deceit of dx/dy?) We find that certain theories, catch-phrases, axioms, thoughtless epigrams thrown out by artists themselves – the tune of this man’s way of thinking, or the translucence of that man’s prose – are of value (is it disreputable to admit this?) not as dogmas or as technical directions, but as talismans which quieten and dispose our minds; objects the contemplation of which clear our vision, relax our nerves, tempt us to dangerous enterprises. If we take any of these devices too earnestly we endanger the delicate heuristic poise of our minds.
For the mind is (in one sense) a symmetrical integrative energy-system, complete in itself and constantly completing itself. Like any energy-system, the mind seeks equilibrium and repose by the swiftest means available. Take the example of what Gabriel Marcel calls ‘reflection’. To be looking for something you care about induces a specific state of mind, characterised by certain dynamics that cannot be induced otherwise. The essential functional element is ‘concern’. If I am looking for some thing that I care about and already know – something lost (say) that I care about – I am not looking for the thing but for the whereness of the thing. The urgency of my search, the induced activity of mind, is a direct function not of the intrinsic value of the thing but of my concern for it. When I have discovered the whereness, the activity of the mind relapses into composure. Correspondingly, if I seek to know a poem (or to know it better), and approach it through a formula for finding it or a formula for recognising it, my mind is oriented by the formula, and achieves penetrating power by being concentrated in that way. But, if it is the fulfilment or matching of the formula I am looking for, that is certainly where the search will end – in the tautology of what I started with, not in a fresh discovery of what, not-knowing, I set out to get to know. If, however, our intent is set upon knowing the poem, and we are prepared to use for what it is worth any promising device, means, formula or incantation, then we stand some reasonable chance of finding what we are looking for. Beforehand we can never be certain that any preconceived method will ‘work’: the poem has to decide that.
We have to be a little quizzical and light-hearted about ourselves too; because we are well aware that the fact that we knew something once does not mean that we know it for good and all – not because we can forget and do forget, but because we may not be lucky enough to pick up the clue again. The authentic value lies not in the product of the knowing, but in the act and process of knowing, and in how we handle that knowing. Usually, I think, we cannot remember the act of knowing itself; what we remember is that that act occurred and what it felt like; and we may be more or less confident that we can recover the act, or that we can regenerate an even more valuable act of knowing in the presence of the same objects of our reflection. By grace, through patience, and through a curious combination of passive attention and alert response, we are certain that we can enter into the universes of poems, and that these are new worlds that for all their strangeness are recognisably our worlds; that, if we can read perceptively and are learned enough and innocent enough to respond deeply and richly to something conceived in a mind more copious, daring and agile than our own, then our relation with poems will surely sustain and nourish reflection, and may now and then bring us, through the necessary articulation that alone sustains thinking, to see something worth seeing and to say something that may be worth remembering – if only as a talisman. Most valuable, if the integrity of the poem is of primary concern, is the way this kind of reflection reverses (as it were) that habitual reconciliatory movement of the mind from the particular to the general, from the less to the more, which is a spontaneous resolution to equilibrium (so that there’s no more work to be done). Reflective inquiry shows us how to think from the more to the less, from the generalised to the particular; and this, when luminous, evokes the otherwise unattainable recognition of the universal. In this too we re-enter the universe of the poet – our birthright if we have a clue to it. It would be disingenuous, however, not to repeat a remark of Valéry’s on the ‘marvellous economy needed for the beginnings of Poetry’.
If one knew a little more about it, one could hope in consequence to form a fairly clear idea of the poetic essence. ... A little metaphysics, a little mysticism, and much mythology will for a long time yet be all we have to take the place of positive knowledge in this kind of question.
The same goes for reflective inquiry, for sustained thinking.
I have been speaking of a propaedeutic, not a system nor a whole programme. I would do or say nothing to diminish the importance of profound learning, of skill in analysis guided to remote consequences, of the capacity for sustained – even ruthless – logical sequence, for that elegance in exposition that is the crown both of mathematics and of music. I would however encourage a little self-mockery in supposing ourselves capable of undertaking work of such alarming educational possibilities and of such subtle privacy. Because poetry is the heart and prototype of all literature, we must be prepared at all stages to lose the thread.
As far as the teaching of poetry is concerned, probably the best we can do – each in his own way – is to find out how to bring our students into the presence of poems. We must also find ways of preventing them from aborting their acquaintance by short-circuiting their mental activity into thinking about something else, and so bringing their minds to rest. The most valuable thing we can do, I think, is to allow students to witness the heuristic processes I have been speaking about and the quality of sustained reflection; to encourage them to gain confidence in the accuracy of their own perceptions and their own judgements; to encourage them to engage all their faculties, especially at the level of perception, and so to advance towards a disciplined – that is, submissive – adjustment of themselves to the inexhaustible business of getting to know; to encourage in them, by example, confidence that their own perceptions and judgements can be tested against the consistency of the poem; to demonstrate that the quality of an idea depends upon the quality of the mind that holds it, that the quality of an inquiry depends not so much upon technical skill as upon fineness of discrimination and quality of intelligence. We need also to make clear the hazard that our desire to understand and to unify brings us into; how the phase of analysis is always in danger of losing us by attaching us to a plausible will-o’-the-wisp; and how, if we are to move out of the area of mere accident, we must take that risk over and over again – with the confidence of a person walking a tightrope with no net under him.
Above all, in an age bemused by the specious beguilements and expectations of parascientism, by attempts to represent all human action – no matter how lyrical or inventive – as the products of Newtonian machines of no great sophistication, it is the business of poetry – and our professional business – to affirm and enjoin a way of mind that is specifically human, inventive and daring, a way of mind that can include everything the mind can encompass and every way the mind has of working; and to spread that infection with all the subversive and light-hearted zest that poetry makes us heir to.