THE PROFESSORS AND LITERATURE: CLINICAL EVIDENCE Wright Thomas See years ago a graduate student in my course, Studies in Poetry, wrote an assigned criticism of a mimeographed poem whose author and date were unknown to him, During his undergraduate days, nearly all his grades had been A, in every subject; he had achieved our most distin- guished award, High Honors in English; by special arrangement he had taken his first degree at the end of the seventh semester and his Master’s at the end of the eighth; he had topped this with a year in the graduate school. His promise was extraordinary. A month of this course, requiring written criticism and full oral discussion of a dozen good and bad poems, had shown him the pitfalls of hasty judgments. After studying this par- ticular poem for a week, he wrote this considered critique: This sonnet, using the Shakespearean form, certainly echoes Shakespeare, if it is not actually from his own ene The subject matter too would fit very easily into the sequence of his sonnets, the author’s steadfastness in his affection. Whoever the author, he has Shakespeare’s technique of breaking his sonnet form into three quatrains and a couplet. Each quatrain handles aes its ie thought and imagery, and each one ES and builds upon o1 adds to the thought of the preceding quatrain. With a final ber the epigrammatic couplet sums up succinctly the central theme o} the poem as a whole. 255THE SOUTHERN REVIEW SS ‘The imagery is very vivid, and sound is the specific intention of making more vivid th sibilants in the first line is the best example of that, ‘The result achieved by the whole poem is excellent are polished; the language is vivid and vigorous; the style forthright and devoid of the over-subtle word-juggling that mars some of Shakes. Peare’s poems. Only two phrases in the poem bother me, “standing by” and “forever more.” The latter I find rather hackneyed: the former suggests inevitably a ship standing by another that is in distress. Now here, the other is obviously not distressed, but ‘in ecstasy.” This may be only irrelevant association on my part, ised occasionally with fe sense. The string of it; the mechanics ‘The poem is as follows: When shrill winds shriek their scream upon thine ear, And batter the bright stars from heavenly view, Thy heart doth shut, and clap its doors in fear, The while mine own doth open unto you. When April songs are flung on gentle winds, And green of field melts into blue of sky, Thy soul in ecstasy doth soar, and finds ‘Mine own in steadfast love still standing by. And when thy flight to realms so far from here I envy, longing for thy light-winged ease, I comfort me that even rocks are dear, Amid the beating of the steely seas. In love and me thou hast the ancient core, ‘The changeless rock that stands forever more. The author of this poem is I. It was written some eight years ago, between the hours of one and two at night, after I had despaired of find- ing in print a bad poem suitable for an hour’s examination. Tt was de- signed to be so obviously bad in every respect that a class in a required course in sophomore literature could detect its bastardy. Several months after writing the above criticism, the promising grad- uate student abandoned his literary studies and went into advertising, where one is paid to use words without reference to the qualities of the 256THE SOUTHER 2 “RN REVIEW —— thing they describe. But he teft behind him dozene eS fellow-students to become the oe As a poet flattered to tears ther. Another graduate student, ‘, .. ‘ linary be edge of technical poetics, expressed his £4. et The theme of this poem has ply; so much so that I line of Goethe’s Faust: « For here is the « beautiful manifestation: man she loves, thought of the concludi liche eht uns hinan, sternal feminine” in its most @ woman’s unseverable attachment to the Sex was unmistakable. I had also thou Jove poem, but another graduate student saw it otherwise, But “you” may be a growing child and “me” a loving parent. Then everything changes though it’s still a love poem. Then T see that the Poet has used a tone, language, images, that express very well a parent's absolute and yet slightly undefinable feelings. The parent Knows where he is, knows what’s to come to the childnote “steely seas”—and yet can only stand by as the one reliable element in a child’s new world. Something new can be found at each reading when the poem is interpreted in this sense, it seems to me, and I think it a good piece of poetry. : : pag ae of apie courses, afterall, had improved ae ee : ability to guess, although they had slightly dulled his creel at fancy was shown by a sophomore, with only a year e a Efe ae survey course behind him; he had been judged among ti e s z pe of his class in literary ability and had been smn i Bea English after an examination which included a test of his ability stand a difficult poem. ae One can see the winter birds huddled on leafless ee ie is falling and a cold wind blowing. But ae ee a ree birds happily sing and fly about, building their m ee of warm effulgence and blending colors is os Si such a setting birds and man are happy. But man, 257SOUTH N REVIEW See as to be content to remain on the ground while the bird can 4p into the sky and fly wherever fancy takes him. Then even jake rocks along the sea shore are pleasing, if not comforting to oe "pon, which they were not in winter with thelr gloomy and chit Appearance. By “ancient core” does he mean that the bird in love and him will always have a friend, one who is steadfast as a rock? T don’t quite see the meaning behind that phrase. h These quotations are among the more amusing from my files, bt they represent fairly well the kind of misreading and misjudgment com. mon among students. The poem has been given on a number of exami. nations to several hundred sophomores, who were asked to make a critical choice between it and a good poem by a great English poet, Over the best that English literature has produced, the shrill winds have consist. ently shrieked their way to victory, year after year, by three to one, This is about the ratio by which, in the advanced course, graduate students have preferred it to both Tennyson’s “Now sleeps the crimson petal, now the white” and Milton’s celebrated passage from Book IV of Paradise Lost, Eve's speech to Adam, “With thee conversing I forget all time.” Juniors and seniors were somewhat less enthusiastic, But in the course since its start two students out of every three have acclaimed the sonnet as good or excellent. These results will surprise no one who has studied the criticisms by Cambridge students in Mr. I. A. Richards? Practical Criticism. From such a study came the suggestion for this course, Studies in Poetry. It has been a kind of clinic, concerned both with understanding and eval- uating some two dozen poems, and with studying the problems of reading poetry as they are revealed in the students’ criticisms. The method is simple: after studying a poem for a week or more, the students hand in written criticisms, each of which I summarize, or quote in part or in full, and issue to the students on mimeographed sheets for careful study; then we argue it out in class. For some weeks the poems, good and bad, are “anonymous” until the discussions are concluded (very few are recog: nized). Later we study well-known poems by writers old and new, ee with the latter the phonograph records of Eliot, Cummings, and 2 reading their own work. Considerable time is spent discussing the mant 258Z == THE SOUTHERN REVIEW ript of Keats’ Eve of St. Agnes, s two versions of the Lady of SS the revisions of Hyperion, Shalott. Examinations ¢ of particular poems, some of which have been Previously a for study. During the past five years the course has been sects bout a hundred advanced students, mi b Students, most of them English majors; out one-third have been graduate students in Engl, : In order to compare our results with those got by Mr. Richards at Cambridge, T open the semester with the first eight poems of Practica m Except for some differences arising from American and English Ss, the criticisms written by the two groups of students are rkably alike. The same errors or failures in understanding are dupl- cated (and repeated year after year in my course), the same uncritical ions, the same defects in training, the same temperamental differences, and the same general preference for mediocre or poor poetry. This preference is very striking evidence that our English courses do not develop the student’s ability to understand a poem or to consider ality with critical appreciation. The approval or disapproval of any group of English majors is likely to be a reverse judgment; the likelihood early to certainty with graduate students. For instance, Mr. Rich- first poem (some wretched lines from Bailey’s Festus) was praised 56 per cent of all students. The third poem (Donne's sonnet, “At the round earth’s imagined corners”) produced curious results. While many of the undergraduates did not understand it clearly, — of them knew that something extraordinary was going on, and they consistently approved the poem, two to one. The graduates were not only baffled but ae and as consistently disapproved, the score being 55 per cent thumbs ji x the worst of all Perhaps the most alarming performance occurred over the sie eight poems, “There was rapture of spring in the morning,” by “Woodbine Willie.” The under- G. A. S. Kennedy, whose pen-name was “ ee anes graduates in some years smelled its decaying sentiment Det 2 total vote of approval was only 55 per cent. 7 ee : on a Practical manly nee ee Leen (the dlaved its pe eee pe ieee the word “lad”). rae at ave the professors done to the students of poetry? One cam 259 and Tenny- : onsist entirely=== THE sourue RN REVIEW Sees m to many of st under their which younger readers suffer ate students try to « of some author or type; not accuse the teachers of the delinquencies. In two tutelage show acquired ch: f making any positive contributio respects, however, students longe aracteristics from less. When considering a new poem, gradu: ‘ tava dl as “characteristic” Place” it the proper response follows automatically. The student first quoted, for instance, is clearly thinking of my sonnet as by Shakespeare, although his ascription is a cautious Conditional statement. His assumption is so strong that it smothers his dissatisfaction with “forever more” and “standing by”; these phrases are two of dozens of poetic imbecilities in the sonnet, each a cleft through which an alert reader should penetrate into the central vacuity of the Poem and so explode the shell to bits of Christmas-tree rubbish, The same fatal habit is largely responsible for the graduate enthusiasm for “Woodbine Willie.” (In consternation a teacher must wonder what ex. Perience these people really had reading Shakespeare and Housman.) The second pernicious acquirement of older students is the satisfaction they feel in repeating, or even inventing, descriptive and critical verbiage, usually generalized or abstract terms. At random I quote a criticism of “Woodbine Willie’s” lines: There is nothing about the thought expressed in this poem which is stimulating or constructive. The philosophical content, if the outlook upon life contained in the four stanzas may be called philosophy, is essentially negative, or defeatist. I don’t usually care for such poetry mainly because I don’t agree and am unable to sympathize, entirely, with the poet’s point of view, but I often wonder just how far we should go in condemning or praising a poem depending on whether or not we agree with the ideas presented? In this case for instance, I don’t care for the author’s ideas and I feel inclined to argue about it. I do, however, think the idea or ideas are important enough to merit their poetic expression and I feel that the expression itself is quite successful. I enjoy the regularity of the meter, and I aes the poet has successfully provided us with an operons strange from his own—one which is imaginatively stimulating, pr viding us with a vicarious experience which, if not instructive oF 260ass THE SOUTHERN REVI 2 nv = profitable, is enjoyable and within the realm of o mmon experience and importance. In five years at the university this student g nothing. Whatever we may have taught our students, we them to read a poem. This failure seems to me fundamental. On what else can a student build a literary education? Our one excuse is that we sin in ignorance. Tam sure that most professors are unaware of how small or irrelevant or distorted is the re ‘ Sponse of a student to any poem of the hundreds “studied” in a course. What happens inside the hedd of a sophomore reading Lycidas as one day’s assignment? We do not know. We do not know what needs to be done to help him, or his older brothers, Here, it seems to me, is our most important and urgent job. As far as I know, very little has been done on it in America. Mr. Richards made a notable start in his Practical Criticism. I do not wish to argue in support of Mr. Richards’ critical theories, or even to discuss his “Analysis” of student criticism. I have found his “Analysis” in some parts very useful, in other parts too involved and tenuous to be of assistance. His book is of prime importance because it gave us for the first time clinical evidence of what happens when students read poems. Using this kind of evidence from our own students, we can begin to teach them to read. Our hope of cess should be modest, for the problems involved, as Mr. Richards has shown, are complex and tough. Methods of solving them will and should vary with different teachers. We are explorers. As one explorer with a little experience, I should like to suggest briefly, in general terms, what procedure seems indicated by the evidence at hand. : We should keep our methods as functional as possible, letting our instruction rest on the reading and discussion of particular poems, many of them “anonymous” and some of them bad. Since, for our purposes, only a few poems can be studied, we must forego, in pa of our oe the attempt to give young students a “wide acquaintance with poetry; we should center our attention on developing their ability to read poems. Our instruction at first should be kept free of theory. Some of the com- mon difficulties can be dealt with in class, but individual conferences are needed to discuss the response of an individual to a particular poem. We 261 had acquired complacency in have not taught=== THE SOUTHERN REVIEW SS have to do here with the most intricate matters of communication, with delicate adjustments of attitude and feeling and thought, with the essen, tial forms of human experience, In this education, growth fs of prime importance, so that we should make this type of study continuous, es. Pecially for our majors and graduate students, Tt should be recognized as the central discipline of literary education. T suggest that this central discipline might follow a pattern of work, In the freshman year (usually concerned with reading and writing prose) the student should get a clear understanding of the elementary problems of communication, beginning with the cruder forms and progressing to the more subtle forms, of which poetry is the most precise and efficient, A considerable part of every week of the second year (usually an intro. uctory or survey course in literature) should be a clinic in reading poetry, The same type of work, of increased difficulty, should continue during the junior and senior years for English majors and others interested in literature; for prospective teachers, in the senior year particular emphasis should be put on studying the difficulties of younger students. This under- graduate program would require a large amount of work by the depart- ment, but it can be handled if all members of the staff contribute. (I assure them it will constantly advance their own literary education.) The study of poems, and of pertinent critical theories, should continue through- out the graduate student’s career; and a part of the test of his fitness to become a candidate for the doctorate should be his performance as a critic of particular poems. One may even hope that the deadly thesis would find new life as an exercise in criticism. And finally one may hope that future teachers will not be complacent toward the clinical evidence of their ineffectiveness that can be found by anyone who seeks for it.