Education: How to Dislike Poetry

It is a very unpleasant fact, says British Poet-Novelist Leonard A. G. Strong, that many children enter school with a natural liking for poetry and are taught to dislike it. Who is to blame? Why, the poetry teachers, answers Strong, who has been a poetry teacher himself.* In his chapter in a new symposium, The Teaching of English in Schools (Macmillan & Co. Ltd., London), Strong distinguishes six common deficiencies in poetry teachers: The teacher dislikes poetry. “A great deal of the current British hostility to poetry dates from the careers of Byron and Shelley, reinforced by that of Oscar Wilde, which have connected it with effeminacy, goings-on, incapacity for sport.

[A teacher who shares this hostility] may show his contempt for poetry openly. . . .

If he is conscientious and tries to conceal his feelings, he can be far more dangerous … he will enforce it as a discipline.”

The teacher is embarrassed by it. “Nothing is more quickly communicated than a feeling of embarrassment; and even though the teacher may not be respected, the embarrassment tends to remain, and to be associated, however vaguely, with the subject which gave rise to it.”

The teacher is suspicious of all forms of emotion. “This seems to be a vice of women teachers more than of men.”

The teacher is indifferent to poetry. “This teacher is every bit as dangerous, because he has nothing at all to restrain him. … He makes poetry yield dividends. He gives marks for it. He asks his pupils to paraphrase it. … Ask anyone to paraphrase a poem and . . . you suggest that a poem is a sort of fancy dress for a statement that can be made equally well in plain prose.”

The teacher loves poetry uncomprehendingly. “Like a man who falls in love not with a real girl, but with his own picture of one … this sort of poetry-lover fastens his own emotions upon a poem and then believes that the poem has created them. … He misreads the poem.”

The teacher genuinely loves poetry but cannot communicate his love to others. “I am inclined to believe that this is the worst of the lot. He loves poetry—obviously—yet all he can do is to make it sound ridiculous. ‘Listen to this, boys ‘ he says. ‘Isn’t it beautiful?’ And he proceeds to quack or mouth or bleat out something which is a travesty of the beauty which has truly moved him. … He is addicted to giving classes poems to learn by heart . . . I was put off Milton for years by a fool who made me learn the sonnet On His Blindness when I was eleven.”

Faced with a class of 40 or 50 bloodthirsty, ten-year-old savages, what is the poor poetry teacher to do? Strong’s secrets: pick poems on subjects that will interest the pupils; stress sound and rhythm (“Vachel Lindsay will help you a great deal”); don’t be afraid of noise (“let them say it with all the ferocity they can manage”); keep explanation and annotation to a minimum (“I have heard more than once a heartfelt cry, ‘Oh, sir, please don’t explain it!’ “); never do violence to a child’s feelings or sense of reticence; be sparing in expressing opinions; put enjoyment first, second, third and fourth.

*At Summer Fields preparatory school, Oxford.