Literature: An Instrument of Inquiry

“I know only what I know how to handle.”

As early as the eighteenth century - and probably much earlier than that - the custom was established that on taking up his chair, the professor would declare in an inaugural lecture what his policies would be and what he intended to do. In those days professorships were for life; a man could afford to be leisurely. Thomas Gray, on being appointed to the chair of History and Modern Languages at Cambridge began to prepare his inaugural address - in an elegant style of Latin - but lost the thread and never got round to delivering it. The important thing was that he had the chair; he had desired it for a long time, and when it was providentially offered to him (through the good offices of a friend) he accepted the offer with as much alacrity as he had declined the poet laureateship a little earlier. He died three years later, leaving no inaugural, and no record that he had ever given a lecture on history, or tutored a single undergraduate. Yet he is still a man of renown, well remembered for his elegy on the death by drowning of Horace Walpole’s cat.

The choice of illustration is not entirely casual. I have three years to go before I walk the academic plank; and since I was, I believe, the first James A. Cappon Professor almost fifteen years ago (and therefore feel a little like one who follows a silent doppelgänger towards a hypothetical destination) I regard this launching with considerable interest. Dr Samuel Johnson tells us that to inaugurate is “to begin with good omen.” Better to do it with divination from the flight of birds than by the gruesome examination of entrails. And if a launching, perhaps a ship, even though we know from the evidence of King Canute that a chair is not a very good device for stemming tides. Yet spice islands and continents and whole new worlds have been discovered in vessels not much more rationally designed for seafaring nor much more secure. So I am happy to set forth by saying, not what I shall do, but what I see.

The programme that I should like to see confirmed is conceived from the inside outward: working from a central educational purpose to the detailed realising of that purpose in the hands of instructors variously gifted, accomplished, experienced. It would be a study in the ways of languages and the ways of the mind, to harmonize with the principal purpose of the whole Faculty and of the university at large: to develop the capacities of each individual student to a level of mastery in his chosen field, and to clarify the process of self-discovery and self-realization - which I take to be the ultimate end of higher education.

I should like to see our work disposed in appropriate patterns and phases in order to fulfil such an educational function in recognizable stages of progress for the various kinds of students who work with us to satisfy the various purposes they may individually have in mind. By tradition, the centre of our attention has been directed to train as best we can those who wish to become teachers and instructors of language and literature in schools and universities, and those who aspire to become literary scholars (we have always been a little wary of literary critics). The desire to produce “professionals” is proper - as long as we refrain from insisting that “professionals” must be in our own image; but to produce “professional academics” has never been our exclusive aim. The study of English we have always supposed was for all comers; and although we have never persuaded anybody that it would sink many ships or thicken many pockets, we have had, over the years, some success (I think) in leaving an unexpected and lasting impression on some who have worked with us.

I suggest, therefore, that we do well to set course according to the value of our “unprofessional” work, all of which has to be a matter of playing for keeps. I believe that it is of paramount importance that every student who works with us - especially those who, for whatever reason, take only one course with us - should never fully recover from that association. I should want them to have discovered indelibly something about their ability to read and to listen, and if not to write in a masterly way at least to learn respect for language as an instrument to inquire with; to enjoy things that they know have no ulterior use, to respect what they cannot hope to understand, to value those things that are strangely unlike themselves or remote from their (often unexamined) view of life. For it is salutary to find in works that we could not conceivably have made ourselves the substance of our own nature, and to find in such commanding presences an exhilarating liberation - if only momentary - from the oppressive circularity of our own personal limitations, the squalor of our desires, the stifling self-preoccupation that we are often told is the necessary condition of modern man. Literature has this effect because by its very nature it is the opposite of an escape: imagination is a realizing process, making the world real, making us real; in this way, poetry is - as Collingwood has said - not an enchantment but a disenchantment.

So I should wish our students, when they leave us, to go on developing each in his own way, in his own time, according to his own initiative, and vision, having caught at least a glimpse here - in this accelerated process of self-discovery - of what they most care about; and that they will have some confidence that they can sustain that vision through the habits of patient discrimination and refined perception that they will have tested and made subtle in coming to terms with works of literature.

Just about everybody who can get hold of a microphone these days, or a typewriter or a soap-box, tells us that we must all become political and economic animals. I believe that it is much more important that we be human animals. Animals of a sort we certainly are, though marked by a development of the roof-brain that some consider excessive, and by a capacity for greed and cynicism that is not to be discerned even in (what Valéry calls) “the shrewd implacable physiognomy of cats.” But one attainment we have that is peculiar to man - the gift of language; and although language suffers monstrous distortion and sad erosion in careless hands, it is at its best the vehicle of an inexhaustible and fruitful inventiveness. It may be that it is through language as much as anything else that we discover integrity of purpose and integrity of action, recognizing that by taking irreversible acts of judgment and decision we change and make ourselves from inside (for better, for worse), being by nature something other than the simple products of those causes of which we have little knowledge and over which we have no control. For to refrain from acting is itself a positive act, and to listen is the positive counterpart to speech - as space is a positive element of design whether in a printed page or a musical score. And from language we find - not so much from what it says as from the way it works - that if we are gifted to think, perceive, speak, we are also responsible - to ourselves if to nobody else - for the quality of our thinking, perceiving, and speaking. For we leave in our speech and writing, as in our actions, not simply the ghost of a meaning, but rather the physical and permanent imprint of what we are, and what we care for, disclosing beyond question, and by means neither conventional nor cryptographic, what we have in mind.

For which reasons a university department of language and literature - especially a department that is dedicated to the language and literature of our own tongue - is empowered to discharge a momentous and delicate responsibility. Some might, with qualification, call it a “civilizing” function; I prefer to call it a “realizing” function. This responsibility gives access to radical sources of influence that we know - especially from recent history - can be turned to furtive and cynical ends. (We shall be careful not to abuse our privilege by offering instruction in sophistry and deliberate misrepresentation.) Certainly the study of literature has implications and possibilities not usually accorded to a “subject.” The study of literature is, I suppose, one of the very few formal studies that can properly be called a discipline; for, if successful, it shows us how to dispose our minds to matters impalpable and of profound personal importance; it also shows us how to come to terms with the world and with ourselves through a reconciliatory quietness, through modes of heuristic reflection that are perhaps as far as we can get from tautology. Our “discipline” is indeed a disciplina - a way of tempering the mind to a task made almost impossible by its simplicity.

I do not say that the study of English language and literature is the only line along which these ends can be realized. I merely say that this study provides an exceptional opportunity and privilege - in being able to concentrate attention on the language we speak and use, upon the literature made in our language, and upon the educational resources that these disclose to us. To encounter literature for what it is and on its own terms is an art not easily mastered, once one has crossed the watershed of self-consciousness; but that attempt can most readily be made through our own language, provided we allow for the way familiarity can blunt the senses. I am confident that English is a tough enough language to hold our attention, being eloquent and infinitely subtle; and given the “monuments of its own magnificence” drawn from a span of some ten centuries, we need never feel that we are provided with inadequate equipment or that the country we seek to explore is poverty-stricken or of parochial extent.

These propositions probably sound “unrealistic,” “out of touch with the modern temper,” useless in an “age of computer technology.” Nevertheless, I believe that it is our duty to see our responsibilities as clearly as we can and to carry them out. It is not, I think, the business of a university to mirror modern circumstances, but rather to secure the habit of looking at those circumstances narrowly and critically - if need be with mockery, even self-mockery. The simple law of economy would in any case keep us out of a field already overcrowded with the purveyors of “an easy blend of news, reviews, and interviews.”

To keep steadily in view the large responsibility we are given, and the exceptional resources at our disposal, takes constant vigilance and a devotion to principles that are virtually impossible to formulate. What matters in the end is not so much the design of courses and programmes - essential though that is - as the living presentation by instructors of the principles and qualities that we espouse. Each finds this in his own way, according to temperament, way of mind, passion, and not least by the intense concentration of his imaginative and intellectual powers in his own scholarship. If this is a time for stock-taking, so is every year and every day of the week. And if this might seem a time for stock-taking because we have suffered rejection, diminution of resources, and the reversal of golden expectations, that would be much too limited a view of the matter. The issue goes farther back, and the symptoms of malaise in the “civilization industry” that were a nagging worry ten or fifteen years ago have now become a crucial issue - the survival of a literate civilization. This is very much our concern, and a little history may help to clarify our present context and the directions in which we should be well-advised to be looking.

In the first quarter of this century the central educational functions that had been traditionally served by the study of the classics shifted - or slithered, for it seemed almost by accident - to the study of English language and literature. This got away to a rather shaky start, even though the shakiness was for a time concealed by the pure ebullience of the warriors who came home to the universities after 1945. The staple of classical studies had been the study of language and literature, of philosophy, of history, and of social institutions. Much of its force turned upon the comparatively limited and enclosed scope of the primary materials; it could be managed - conceivably, though not easily - with an air of finality, with a sense almost of artistic unity. The shift to English suddenly opened a field of inquiry that in some respects was much wider and more various; but it also involved an abrupt narrowing of attention: from three languages (Greek, Latin and English) to one (English), from literature, philosophy, history, and social institutions to literature alone, in a sense that has become increasingly limited and specialized. Furthermore the literature of the English language is still living and growing; and the language itself, not caught like a bee in amber, is also living and growing; and both our literature and our language are always prone to degenerate and lose vitality. To lose the perspective of distant time, to lose the picture of closed societies and a completed history, and to lose the strangeness of languages that embodied two radically different ways of mind, two temperaments different from our own, two languages that have influenced our own language in profound and contradictory ways - to lose these was to lose the cutting-edge of stylization indispensable in education (as in art) as a means of penetrating the bland surfaces of the familiar, the commonplace, the naturalistic, the banal.

The position of English literature has been further weakened, not only by trying to narrow the “field of knowledge,” not only by submitting in very recent years to much “ignorant good-will” and sentimental egalitarianism, but by an attitude among those who profess it which is at once complacent and defensive. We have too readily endorsed the remarkable proposition that literature is easily accessible because we can all read and we all know the language; we declare that literature is noble stuff, and that it is good for you; we assert that English is as respectable as any other “subject,” that it is as difficult to “learn” as any other subject, and if those claims seem a little old-fashioned we muster a considerable armoury of “scientific methodology.” From time to time we think wistfully about these things, because like everybody else we are authorities on education. But we have not been of one mind; and we have not considered carefully enough how the study of our literature is to serve its primary civilizing and educational function. Fortunately, in this university, by scholarly habit, we have insisted upon the need for a thorough and omnivorous study of literature; we have insisted on high standards of scholarship; we have been able to maintain (on the whole) the principle that it is more profitable to study the works of giants than of dwarfs. Few universities have been able so to insist, but we have; and as the old instinct brings back the old names any departures from so conservative and rigorous a position have been greeted within our own walls with comfortable irony. The effect has on the whole been salutary under the sheer momentum of our habitual assumptions about this discipline: you have to read Milton even if it means swallowing some intractable theology, for without the theology you can’t read him. That high-minded and uncritical momentum, I think, is beginning to be retarded by a formidable deterioration in the potential for literary studies of high quality.

A clear sign of faltering momentum is when people think of themselves as “teaching literature.” There was a time in this university when no self-respecting professor of literature would allow it to be thought that he taught anything. He would say that it was his agreeable duty to transmit from the past the treasures of intellect and imagination, and to draw attention to anything of the sort that seemed to be coming into existence in the present. He would also say that without an intimate acquaintance with those treasures the serious study of literature could scarcely begin. But he would regard all that as axiomatic and leave it unsaid. He would probably also leave unsaid his conviction - he would expect you to know this too - that he was engaged in an enterprise less aggressive and more artful than teaching, simply because what he was seeking to achieve can - sometimes, by grace and good fortune - be educed but cannot be taught.

The failure to articulate the educational virtues of a classical education - that it seeks not simply to give us more knowledge but to make us more knowing - was probably one of the reasons the classics ceased to be the central humanist discipline. Another reason was the rapid spread of a universal literacy that has proved to be a universal illiteracy - a monolithic burden that is already threatening the good health of English studies. Because we find it difficult to engage the subtle processes to which literature gives superior access, we try to force the issue (usually represented as the intransigence or ignorance of our students) by teaching literature, by placing the emphasis on content, interpretation, social and historical context, and by using the works of literature as occasions for digression into history, politics, sociology, amateur philosophy, and uncontrolled self-indulgence. We do this, in desperation, I suppose, guilessly presenting effects and expecting that causes will naturally flow from them; maintaining that our students have little or no acquaintance with the literary tradition, that they do not know their own language or any other, and that therefore we must teach them these things before we can get down to serious work. I maintain, to the contrary, that all our students have powers of perception, of responsive sensibility, and an understanding of language-in-action that allows them to engage at once the peculiar educational resources of the study of language and literature; and that although it is certainly an immeasurable advantage to have some previous and vital acquaintance with literature, it is neither necessary - nor even advisable - to expect a student to be learned in literature before the virtues of literary study can be engaged. The first requirement for a student of literature is to be a good reader. It is salutary to remind ourselves that not all good readers are scholars, and that not all scholars are good readers.

The social and political upheavals of the 60s and early 70s nudged us into accepting, under the name of “flexibility” and “freedom of choice,” and for reasons that had little to do with education, some indiscipline, a little superficiality and mediocrity, and we have submitted a little to the claim that the contemporary matters most. It is no longer enough to say that Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth (and the rest) are “great” poets and should therefore be studied; we have to be able to say why they should be studied. And when we can say that, we also have to be able to say with some conviction which writers do not merit formal study, even though almost anything may - some time, to somebody - be worth reading.

These are matters that need to be examined, not simply in terms of social and political trends, but primarily on educational grounds. Once we shift our attention in that way our line is very clear. The potency of our work is best released by insisting that students be confronted with the realities of great literature - not so much so that they can learn the literature, but so that it will begin to initiate the processes of self-education and the widening and clarifying of their awareness. This is clearly not what most students expect; it is not what their previous experience leads them to expect; it is not what “society” shows any signs of wanting them to expect. And many will run for cover when it becomes clear that the undertaking is neither self-indulgent nor reducible to formula, and that the placid absorptive qualities of a sponge will not quite serve the purpose.

It seems to me unlikely that any instructor in this department does not in some way work to these axioms; and I am sure that if asked what the purpose of their instruction was they would reply bluntly “To teach people to read and write.” Furthermore I am sure that each instructor has his own particular way of introducing what after all must be the passion of our lives - whether through the minutiae of an author in whose work he is “expert beyond experience,” or by turning every text into a pretext to explore and expose the primary purpose that lies at the roots of our work.

Yet we are faced by the increasing inertia of those students who (before coming to university) have attempted little or no writing, of students who have read very little and have little taste for reading, who know no other language, and who expect to be “taught” in such a way that those deficiencies will not prove fatal. What in conscience can we do, beginning so late? Below a certain level of literary sensibility, nothing happens; and there are no elementary short-cuts or easy alternatives. At some time we have to be able to assume that our students can and do read and to insist that it is a waste of our educational privilege to use any course in literature simply to acquaint students with the contents of certain texts. Time is short and precious, and needs to be directed as far as possible to the delicate and prolonged business of showing how to read better and better, how to come to terms with a writer of substance; how to “qualify” to enter into another mind - if only momentarily - and to find one’s quality of perception altered thereby for good and all; how to develop confidence in the accuracy of the perceptual powers we are all endowed with; how to be guided by the flickering sense of value, exact and precisely located, that is typical of the experience of a good reader. Yet all this is within the reach of those who can find out how to subdue a blinding sophistication and an aggressive “rationality.”

The word “literature” is clumsy - and unlovely when pronounced without a neat articulation of the -ts; so I shall now use the word “poetry” instead of “literature,” and shall refer to a work of literature as a “poem”: that is, any shapely and self-contained piece of writing noticeably above the level of discursive competence. I cannot in short compass say what I take poetry to be. For a start we should be on firm ground if we believe - as I do, and as Coleridge said - that “all men are poets,” even though “unfortunately most of them are damned bad ones.” Poetry is a human business, not divine; and I hold with St Augustine and others that “creation” and “creativity” are not properly within human compass. What poets do is to select and arrange, and by various means intensify and find significance in what they find or what is given to them, and what at a certain level of energy haunts the dark places of the mind - and so to make poems out of words. That is no trifling achievement, and the achievement is supremely human: for “The idea of making is the first and most human of ideas.”

Theoretically poetry can encompass anything whatsoever, with the single proviso that it be encompassed by a poet; and the ruthless limitation on his activity is that he can work only from what he knows and loves (as David Jones has memorably said); and he cannot escape from the fact that the quality of his knowing and loving will be indelibly imprinted in what he has written - not as a thumb-print of personal expression (a device that no serious artist is interested in) but establishing the status and stature of the thing-written. For “making a work is not thinking thoughts but accomplishing an actual journey”; when the journey has crystallised into a substantial and stable form the poem moves away from the maker of it, assumes its own life, begins its own history; to the poet it will become increasingly strange, inscrutable, an existence to which - even though he brought it into being - he has no special privilege of entry or explanation. There are multitudes of poems, and they can be seen to fall into different kinds more or less distinct, some in verse, some in prose; yet each one is in a just sense unique, and its uniqueness dominates consideration of likeness to other poems - even other poems made by the same poet. So how do we get to know them? And if we could, what good would that be?

I come to my paradoxical title - “Literature: An Instrument of Inquiry.” These days I find it assumed that there is only one way of knowing and that we all have easy access to it as an act of will. If you want to know anything you “study” it, you bring your mind to bear on it, you force its meaning out of it, you analyse it, master it, control it. It is assumed that there is only one way of getting “knowledge” and that we all know how this is done. But in what sense can it be said that we “Know” a poem? My proposal is that, if we hold sensitive and forthright commerce with poems, the poems themselves become instruments of inquiry, they tell us how to get to know, and we can direct the instrument both towards the poem and towards ourselves. This is what Bacon and Coleridge both meant by “method” - not technique, or working to preformulated scheme, but a “way through,” a way of doing what is to be done (in this case getting-to-know the poem). If we approach in the technical manner we always find exactly what the technique was designed to find and usually not much more, and the heuristic impulse, the sheer desire and longing to “know,” the “intellecturition,” is frustrated by a nauseating tautology. It is like looking in a mirror and never seeing anything but your own face. If we do not find our instruments of inquiry in the poem, somehow self-fashioned and placed by the grace of quietness in our own hands, our efforts at literary inquiry will have a curious progeny - logically consistent, even plausible, but parodies nonetheless; speculations that look impressive and intelligent but have become fantasies from losing touch with what they are about - grave discourses on the obvious, the solemn unfolding of straightforward matters for which we need neither the stimulus nor the authority of poetry; demonstrations that prove almost anything except that we are on a right course or that our thinking has taken a fertile turn.

As philosophy begins in wonder, so poetry begins in delight. The primary end of poetry is pleasure - the ultimate end is truth. If we could hold poetry in the field of delight, as children do, we could be knowing in a very profound and fruitful way. But our minds nag at us: we worry about “meaning”; we want to “understand,” to “know more.” And here everything can go wrong, because the means of inquiry can determine the nature of the poem by altering the subject to suit the technique. Our concern is first of all, and properly, to make sure that we do not misunderstand. A search for meaning and understanding, if not conducted sensitively and with respect for the integrity of the original, converts the poem into a piece of more or less logical discourse, treated as a “phenomenon,” shorn of those elements of sound, rhythm, and patterned dynamics that are both its body and much of its reason for having come into existence. For a poem is not an alternative or approximate record; it is the only way that what is to be said could have been said. And since its integrity grows from the fact that every part is indispensable and every part is an intimation of the whole, it cannot even be “taken apart” without becoming something else.

If it is the poem we want to know, we must know it for what it is and for what it does (for what it acts out). It is in the inquiry into poetry that we discover just how difficult - how almost impossible - it is to keep the eyes (and ears) firmly on the object, to be sure that we are paying close attention to what is actually being said, what is actually going on, what sounds and rhythms are actually audible and to be heard. For a poem, stable and plain enough on the page, is not a thing, but a complex mental event articulated in the uttering of it. As a verbal statement it will say something very clearly, and that is the very least we need to get from it accurately; but it will not disclose its whole presence to verbal analysis - partly because you never know where to begin the analysis or what emphasis to give to the various elements isolated in analysis, and the central matters may completely elude the analytical procedure we happen to be using. Although the substance of a poem eludes all the usual tests of “fact,” it has elements of reliable certainty that one can grasp as moments of cognitive affirmation, and these are usually of an order of certainty and worth superior to what is commonly called “fact.” We come to see that the reliability of what in a poem is perceived as important depends not upon the common tests of fact, but upon the quality of the reader’s perception. In the same way that the quality of an idea depends upon the quality of the mind that generates or transmits it, so a reader “qualifies” - not by mastering certain theories and procedures but by achieving the quality of mind required by the work he wishes to read, and by discovering “analysis” as the patient and respectful unravelling of the complex presence the poem confronts us with. It is precisely that “quality of mind,” subtle and infinitely responsive, that we wish to secure - in ourselves, and in others. The “problems” do not reside in the poems, but in ourselves.

“In art, as in life, there are no classes for beginners.” As readers we should have no difficulty in grasping works of an imaginative order, simply because they are “entities of direct appeal” and because they are in resonance with our own radical ways of knowing, recalling, making, remaking. But right at the beginning we are landed with the whole baffling complex, and there is no way of dealing with it bit by bit, or of formulating an adequate preparation. We can find, nevertheless, that the poem itself becomes an instrument of inquiry by directing our attention to whatever depth of thought or refinement of perception it demands; most of all the poem holds us firmly in the universe of language. It is one thing to regard language as our most specifically human gift, our stake of pure inventiveness and lyrical improvisation in the face of all attempts to treat us as little machines constructed out of “motives” and “causes”; it is quite another to have a highly cultivated sense of language, and without that a reader cannot seriously expect to keep pace with poets, their universe being a verbal universe, their preoccupation making, their substantial material language and all the ways of language. And with all this, we need to approach with a quiet mind, subduing our prejudices, presuppositions, and formulated responses, even our approximate expectations.

The beauty of this process is that we can always tell whether it is working or not. If there is not emotional and cognitive engagement with the poem - if the poem does not begin to assume a self-declarative life of its own - the poem has slipped away and nothing is there; as a poem, the poem does not exist; there is nothing to be known, except in a trivial and adventitious sense. If we are honest with ourselves we can always tell whether this initial requirement is being met; if it isn’t, the position cannot be forced by an act of analytical will. And you can always test the appropriateness and reliability of your thinking about the poem by referring it back to the poem - as part now of your own mental furniture - and see whether the poem will have it or not. In this way our sense of the poem crystallizes, not along a single line of inquiry or according to any single theory of interpretation, but by alternations between analysis and synthesis, synthesis being a mental process entirely different from analysis. Analysis divides into conceptual parts, and in doing so loses the bond between the parts as integral to the whole; synthesis encompasses the poem as an integral whole of which each part is an intimation. These are not procedures but ways of mind - dynamic dispositions of the self which we evoke according to the direction and quality of our intention. Neither the one nor the other can effect everything; only in just consort do we get-to-know - and it matters very much how we approach.

So a respectable critic needs to be more than a little learned; and a respectable scholar needs to be a bit of a poet - to which the earliest great Alexandrian textual scholars give splendid witness for their sensibility rather than merely for their industry. Reflection over literary texts refracts into a great number of different special activities and procedures: some are more or less descriptive and empirical, others technical and even scientific, some are largely speculative and imaginative. In any comprehensive treatment of literary tests they tend to interlock and interact; but the closer we get to the imaginative reconstruction of a poem - the good-reading of it, the realizing of it - the less we find we can rely on these special procedures alone. So the hope of something like an overarching “scientific” procedure vanishes. The reason is obvious: the premisses which make sustained historical or scientific thinking possible are very different from the premisses that assist the making of a poem or the remaking of a poem in the reader’s mind. These sets of premisses - even though we need both of them, even within the field of literary inquiry - are mutually exclusive: in particular, one is a system of value, the other is not. For which reason we cannot remake a poem if we regard it as a phenomenon; it has to be regarded as something like a living entity, a dynamic event that unfolds according to its own internal principles - a little like a person who has to be approached with respect, almost courted.

For the making of a poem, even when the poem is (as is often the case) carefully thought out, intelligently disposed, and of fine craftsmanship, is itself a process of discovery guided primarily by an exquisite sense of what is “right” for the poem coming into existence. The test is neither logical coherence (though that may well be required), nor a plausible similarity to a world generally known, nor the poet’s deliberate intention or expectation (if known or knowable), but simply and pitilessly what belongs - and will be found to belong - to the unique universe that is coming into existence. A good reader develops a corresponding sense of “rightness” to guide his analysis, to discern the pattern and disposition of forces, to realize the drama that declares itself. Much literary criticism has, in this last half-century, put on airs, presuming to be superior to the literature it studies, seeking to control literature by formulating ingenious categories and schemata and by invoking ghostly primary elements so accommodating and indistinct that we can, with little difficulty, find them wherever we look for them. I claim for criticism a humble and ancillary duty: to seek fidelity, to heighten awareness, to disclose the literature intact and well-lighted.

But how do we provide the appropriate kinds of learning, the disciplined habits that are at once exacting enough and delicate enough? How do we develop the sense that language is really something other than a conventional discursive notation: that for language to assume the state that we call “poetic” is not a matter of vocabulary or even of theme, but of a musical capacity for swift unprepared change, for timbre, resonance, manifold implication, simultaneous meanings disposed above each other - even contraries - yet not in conflict? For without that sense of language only a limited amount can be achieved.

So the question of “literacy” rises, returning to us quite predictably like a very familiar ghost from the past but with sharper teeth. For this I have no panacea. It’s fashionable these days to regard anything that can be called a “rule” as oppressive and anti-democratic. A cooler intelligence might point out that as far as grammar and syntax are concerned the “rules” can be seen as formulations of the commonest symptoms of incoherence and of defiance of the nature of language itself. Wilfully to ignore the “rules” of grammar or to be ignorant of them and to make no effort to discover what they describe is like insisting upon re-inventing the wheel when you don’t even want to build a wagon. Yet it is not well, I think, to suppose that the problem of “illiteracy” (to use an inflammatory term) can be solved by “teaching writing skills.” There is no skill that can be separated out from the act and process of writing or speaking; for skilful writing and speaking grow out of a very complex integrative state of mind. But we can teach principles of logical coherence; we can teach a descriptive vocabulary for the elements of language and we can teach a way of using those definitions and categories to analyse the coherence and structure of actual pieces of wording; we can teach the primitive system of punctuation by which, conventionally, we score written language to show where the breath pauses come and how long they are to be, and in complicated sentences to mark out the elements - logical or rhetorical - of the structure. All this is essential, but none of it is within shouting distance of finding out how to reach the deceptively elementary aim of “clear, simple statement.”

When it comes to verse, some rudiments of versification and metrics can be taught by counting lines, examining rhyme-schemes, and the finger-counting of feet or accents in a line. But as we know well, few have a fine enough ear to carry this beyond crude mechanics into that area of exact discrimination in which the values of the actual sounds, patterns, emphases, and dynamics of the internal energy - that is, the whole drama of energy interacting upon deftly chosen formative limits - declare themselves as significant; a setting in which (incidentally) onomatopoeia is often the least interesting or remarkable feature in an infinite range of auditory possibilities. The ear can be trained - both the ear of the student and the ear of the teacher - and it has to be trained to the music of language - which is not the same as the music of music; but that can no more be taught than a violinist can be taught flawless intonation or a comedian the sense of timing; and none of these things can be learned unless a person has a passionate and scrupulous desire to learn them. Like recognizing and naming type-faces at a glance, or identifying the work of a composer by the inflection of his melodic phrasing or the timbre of his orchestration, this level of discrimination is probably not within everybody’s capacity; and unless a teacher cares passionately about these things, he is unlikely to be able to generate a love for them. Listen to the opening lines of Paradise Lost or “Kubla Khan” or “The Wreck of the Deutschland.” You cannot be a musician without a refined capacity for listening; the same for a poet; the same for an informed reader of literature.

The depth and scope of the “problem of illiteracy” is to be seen in the pervasiveness of it. Not to be able to spell, or punctuate, or job together a coherent sentence is not a hopeless state of affairs; and most young people speak well enough to be able to find some sort of foundation for the much more artificial business of writing. The frightening question is what to do about poverty or mental landscape. Where do we begin with a student who mistakes “wandering bark” for the bark of a dog when in the context it obviously refers to a ship; or for another who supposes that “jesting Pilate” refers, not to a Roman governor involved in some questionable decisions at a turning-point in history, but to a navigator?

I would ask that for a start students be taught simply to listen; that they should read verse rather than prose, and that the verse be strong, tough, and demanding, so there will be some encounter with language in a poetic mode. I would ask too that students be made to hear what they are reading, otherwise they will not be able to engage the rhythms that are the physical traces of vitality. I would ask further that popular, topical, and allegedly sensational books be avoided for teaching purposes: you can easily get a “response” from these, but you also get a great deal of deflection and very little effective educational mileage. For the point of studying literature is first to enjoy it, then to find in it the figures of a life and intelligence and imagination that is clearly not our own. The only way to populate the mind with reverberant materials (which is not quite the same as “knowledge”) is by caring for, or being fascinated by, what we know or are learning. No doubt every mind is provided with its own reverberant materials, but they may be very limited in extent and inappropriate for literary purposes. Whether a young person has a well-stocked mind is no doubt an accident of circumstances and temperament; but it’s never too late to begin. Many have to begin in the university; and it is encouraging to find what spectacular advances some make in this in only three or four years. Given a little diligence and a capacity for delight the accumulative process once started will go on, without effort, the better for not being systematic.

I make these points almost in desperation because I don’t know how the situation is to be effectively reversed. What I do know is that unless it is attempted soon, our literate culture is in serious danger of disappearing, leaving only a few idiosyncratic bookworms to tend the guttering candles in the next Dark Age. Yet a dead tradition, like a dead metaphor, is never absolutely dead; it is dead only in the mind of the person who finds it dead. The life is there to revive at the first breath of considerate attention, at the first attempt at humble access.

I have chosen to speak about poems, about the highest manifestations in the range of literature, because I wanted to make clear that the poetic way of mind is part of our heritage and essential to our health and wholeness as individuals and as a society. I think we recognize the poetic habit of mind well enough when we come across it; it is penetrating, disrespectful, subversive; affirming a profound law of our own nature, accusing the rules of logic of emptiness and tautology, questioning the underpinnings of abstraction; stern guardian and courageous ring-master of words. Yet it is all done for a song, and as a song, gratuitously, innocently, for the sheer delight of it; that is, very seriously, but not earnestly. If we wish to come to that universe of value, intensely human and beautifully organized, we follow the process sketched out by Coleridge as an apparent definition of Dramatic Illusion - we achieve “that willing suspension of disbelief-for-the-moment that constitutes poetic faith.” We decide not to say no; we reject indulgent fantasy; we cross the threshold into a country that is at once strange and familiar; we behave, not like marauding hooligans or philistine tourists, but like guests, according to ancient custom, because this is our own country. By coming here we come to ourselves. Coleridge has caught this perfectly in his prose gloss to the account of the journeying moon in “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.”

In his loneliness and fixedness he yearneth towards the journeying Moon, and the stars that still sojourn, yet still move onward; and every where the blue sky belongs to them, and is their appointed rest, and their native country and their own natural homes, which they enter unannounced, as lords that are certainly expected and yet there is a silent joy at their arrival.