Teaching Poetry

Reading and responding to poetry in the secondary classroom

Amanda Naylor, Audrey Wood

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136493768
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Bildung
• Subtopic: Bildung Allgemein

Teaching Poetry is an indispensible source of guidance, confidence and ideas for all those new to the secondary English classroom. Written by experienced teachers who have worked with the many secondary pupils who 'don't get' poetry, this friendly guide will help you support pupils as they access, understand, discuss and enjoy classic and contemporary poetry.

With an emphasis on active approaches and the power of poetry to enrich the lives of both teachers and students, Teaching Poetry:

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• Provides a succinct introduction to the major ideas and theory about teaching poetry

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• Covers the key genres and periods through tried and tested favourites and a range of less well known new and historical poetry

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• Illustrates good practice for every approach covered, through case studies of theory and ideas in action in the classroom

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• Includes activities, ideas and resources to support teaching at Key Stages 3, 4 and 5.

Teaching Poetry tackles head on one of the aspects of English teaching that new and experienced teachers alike find most difficult. It offers both a comprehensive introduction to teaching poetry and a rich source of inspiration and support to be mined when faced with an unfamiliar text or an unresponsive class.

Chapter 1

Why Poetry?

The poet’s eye, in fine frenzy rolling,

Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;

And as imagination bodies forth

The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen

Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing

A local habitation and a name.

(A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act 5, Scene 1, 11.13–18)

This chapter presents some significant ideas about poetry that have been expressed over the course of the development of English as a subject. It does not present a comprehensive review, but rather examines a few particular moments in the history of poetry on the curriculum and as a social phenomenon. These ideas input into the complex relationship that we as contemporary English teachers have with poetry and the reasons why we believe that teaching it is important.

As English teachers we believe that poetry offers something that other forms of writing do not. We enjoy it and seek to pass on that enjoyment to our pupils. We also believe in the particular power of poetry to express ideas, captured by Thomas Gray in The Progress of Poesy as ‘Thoughts that breathe, and words that burn’ (Quiller-Couch 1927: 526). Poetry is integral to the way that we acquire language, rhyme and rhythm being essential to the ways that we learn. Poetry has been assigned a variety of roles in our society over time. The debate is ongoing about what poetry should be taught and in what quantities. This is not a new debate and one particularly important era for the position of poetry in the curriculum is the nineteenth century, when public education was being developed and the curriculum being established for a wider audience than just those in the grammar and public schools.

Matthew Arnold: Poetry and the Decline of Religion

One significant figure in the debate over the school curriculum and the position of poetry is Matthew Arnold. His ideas have provoked much discussion over the years, and he is regarded with mixed opinions, yet his position as an educationalist and poet enabled him to develop very interesting views on the development of the curriculum with regards to poetry. He held the position of school inspector for 36 years in the mid-nineteenth century and argued vociferously for English literature, and specifically poetry, to have a place in the curriculum for pupils in elementary schools.

Arnold was appointed school inspector in 1851, the same year as the Great Exhibition was held at Crystal Palace, celebrating the commercial and inventive successes of Britain and the Empire. This was an event that in Britain was followed by ‘a period of immense commercial prosperity – and immense self-complacency’ (Arnold 1932: xvii), as trade, manufacturing and the population boomed over the following twenty years. This was also a time of great scientific advances, as The Origin of Species was published in 1859, presenting the theory of evolution, challenging the essential precept of Christianity that God created man and signalling a scientific challenge to faith. Arnold saw these two forces as placing pressures on society and on the individual. Arnold was himself a writer of poetry and Oxford Professor of Poetry for ten years. He was appointed professor of poetry in 1857, and he was the first appointee to give his inaugural lecture in English, rather than Latin, which signals in itself a more democratic approach to the study and criticism of poetry than that held by previous incumbents of the post. Arnold was concerned that poetry should be accessible not only to those from élite, highly educated backgrounds and believed that literature could help guard against the twin assaults of materialism and the loss of faith.

Arnold’s most well-known poem, ‘Dover Beach’, published in 1867 but written much earlier, expresses ‘Arnold’s negative vision of modernity’ (Campbell 2008: 27) and his fears at the impact of the twin pressures of materialism and the loss of religion on the emotional welfare of his contemporaries and particularly the pupils he encountered daily. The poem, written around the time of Arnold’s honeymoon, is both a lyrical love song, expressing private emotions, and also an expression of public disquiet where Arnold ‘charge(s) science with draining the natural world of spiritual and metaphysical meaning’ (Brown 2000: 148). The poem opens:

The sea is calm to-night.

The tide is full, the moon lies fair

Upon the straits; on the French coast the light

Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,

Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.

Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!

(Arnold 1965: 254)

The scene seems to be in a room, perhaps the bedroom, and the speaker looks out at the English Channel, about to embark on a journey over the sea, and the mood is tranquil and lyrical. The tone is intimate and joyful, ‘sweet is the night-air!’:

Only, from the long line of spray

Where the sea meets the moon-blanch’d land,

Listen! you hear the grating roar

Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,

At their return, up the high strand,

Begin, and cease, and then again begin,

With tremulous cadence slow, and bring

The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago

Heard it on the Ægæan, and it brought

Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow

Of human misery; we

Find also in the sound a thought,

Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

The Sea of Faith

Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore

Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl’d.

But now I only hear

Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,

Retreating, to the breath

Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear

And naked shingles of the world.

(Arnold 1965: 256)

The tone has shifted from private to public, where the ‘Sea of Faith’ has withdrawn, and the ‘eternal note of sadness’, which was part of the classical world as well as our own, is the only song remaining. Religion, faith, once a protection, ‘a bright girdle furl’d’, is now retreating, leaving the speaker in the silence, listening to the noise of its retreat. So the only consolation is in love:

Ah, love, let us be true

To one another! for the world, which seems

To lie before us like a land of dreams,

So various, so beautiful, so new,

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;

And we are here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

Where ignorant armies clash by night.

(Arnold 1965: 256)

Arnold characterises the world, modernity, as one without certainty ‘nor help for pain’, it is a ‘darkling plain’, where confused armies ‘struggle’ and ‘clash’. Brown argues that ‘a readership acquainted with Darwin’s researches – as indeed most of its readership is likely to have been’ (Brown 2000: 146) would understand the allusion to the struggle and flight, ‘as animals prey upon one another in an ongoing “struggle” responding instinctively with “fight or flight”’ (Brown 2002: 146), that is, the allusion to the theory of the survival of the fittest. Arnold expresses a vision of a modernity where there is a loss of faith, a sadness, where the only consolation is in other humanity, the love of others, to replace the gap left by the withdrawal of the ‘Sea of Faith’.

Arnold held the position of school inspector from 1851 to 1887. His day-to-day work, visiting schools, advising and reporting on the education of pupils across southern and western England brought him into close contact with the reality of education for pupils who were not being educated in élite establishments. At the point in which Arnold was appointed inspector, the education of the poor was provided by religious bodies, with some small grants from the state. Very few children attended, and those that did struggled to attend for an extended period. The system of teaching was through the use of pupil-teachers, who were trained by the teacher and then taught younger pupils by rote, so that teaching consisted of drilling pupils mechanically in spelling and memorising ‘elementary knowledge’ (Wardle 1970: 86), which conjures up visions of Dickens’ Mr Gradgrind. In his report of 1867 Arnold records one pupil-teacher for every 57 pupils. During the period in which Arnold worked, state provision for the working class was being slowly developed and investigated by a number of commissions. Arnold believed that school pupils could be prepared for life, given moral strength and imaginative capabilities, through what they read. In his report of 1878 he writes:

A power of reading, well trained and well guided, is perhaps the best among the gifts which it is the business of our elementary schools to bestow; … good and sterling poetry learned for recitation … should be made to contribute to the opening of the soul and imagination, for which the central purchase should be found in poetry.

(Arnold 1910: 191–2)

Arnold also allies poetry in his report of 1880 with the formation of the ‘soul and character’ and with ‘high and noble principles’ (Arnold 1910: 200–1). Arnold was an admirer of the Romantics, writing essays about Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth, Byron and Coleridge and although ‘these writers’ Romanticism differs greatly’, Campbell notes that ‘they share values that centre on the importance of the individual, self-expression, feelings, creativity, imagination and nature’ (Campbell 2008: 19). Arnold believed in a ‘humanized democracy’ (Novak 2002: 595) and that schooling played a pivotal part of this. This ‘humanizing’ was best brought about by the use of English literature, and in its highest form, poetry. Arnold writes of poetry that:

No man … can fully draw out the reasons why the human spirit feels itself to attain to a more adequate and satisfying expression in poetry than in any other of its modes of activity. For to draw them out fully we should have to go behind our own nature itself, and that we can none of us do.

(Arnold 2000: 549)

Poetry is compared with religion in Culture and Anarchy as a force for moral good, in that it typifies perfection, an ideal to aspire to, ‘the idea of beauty and of a human nature perfect on all its sides, which is the dominant idea of poetry, is a true and invaluable idea’ (Arnold 1932: 54). During Arnold’s time as writer and inspector by 1871 English literature and grammar was a subject on the curriculum, and in 1880 elementary schooling was compulsory up to the age of ten. Arnold’s views have caused much debate, not least, as with the ideas of F.R. Leavis, over the question of who is to determine what aspects of culture exemplify ‘sweetness and light’ (Arnold 1932: 43) and who should determine what should be studied. As Eagleton, a Marxist and brilliant critic put it, Arnold’s ideas suggest that culture will have the anaesthetising effect of ‘controlling and incorporating the working class’ (Eagleton 1996:21) into the social hierarchy and that will ensure stability, not revolution. If education does not provide culture, the working class may rebel, ‘If the masses are not thrown a few novels, they may react by throwing up a few barricades’ (Eagleton 1996: 21). Whichever viewpoint one subscribes to, there is no doubt that Arnold was convinced of the power of poetry, and argued for its centrality in the curriculum for English:

Arnold played the pied piper of poetry for the cause of national education; he convinced education’s overseers to create a legal mandate for English literature’s place in the lives of the young. Where the Bible served as the reading matter of the poor in Charity Schools, and the classics served the privileged in Grammar Schools, English poetry had little place at all until it finally gained status as a ‘specific subject’ in 1871.

(Willinsky 1990: 345)

Material Culture: Poetry as a Social Object

Another lively moment in the development of the significance of poetry is the Early Modern period (1450–1700) because, ‘from this time the English were aware of their own literary culture’ (Palmer 1965: 2). The printing press had been introduced in England in 1476 and throughout this period printing was on the increase, although most texts were still in manuscript form. Literacy levels are difficult to assess, but a study of literacy levels in Norwich between 1580 and 1700, discussed in David Cressy’s Literacy and the Social Order: Reading and Writing in Tudor and Stuart England, reveals very few of those at the top of the hierarchy, such as the clergy and professional people, were illiterate whilst a very large number of labourers were unable to write their names. There was an improvement in general literacy rates in the Elizabethan period as well as a growth in the founding of grammar schools, such as the one that Shakespeare attended. University attendance reached a high point under James I, ‘peaking in Cambridge in the 1620s and in Oxford in the 1630s’ (Cressy 1980: 122) with ‘some 400 students a year matriculating at Cambridge’ (Cressy 1980: 122). The curriculum would have been based on ‘learning to speak and write classical Latin’ (Palmer 1965: 2) in the grammar schools, along with Greek and Hebrew, and at university studying rhetoric and a ‘close scrutiny of the classical texts prescribed’ (Palmer 1965: 3). Thus, the élite were highly educated in classical and rhetorical forms, and it is in this context that poetic forms, such as the sonnet, developed in English and held a place in the social interchange. Poetry, in the circles of the court and educated households, had a more significant daily presence in people’s lives than, arguably, it does today.

In the Early Modern period, people mostly read in manuscript form, that is, texts that are handwritten. Manuscripts were collected and circulated in miscellanies by many people in various different social environments. They were compiled from a variety of different texts that were circulated within specific groups and included poems, prose and translations of various lyrics. In 1557 Totell’s Miscellany was printed, one of the first of such collections to be published, which included poetry by courtly writers such as Wyatt and Surrey, whose work had previously only been circulated in manuscript. It contained ‘the sorts of verse that someone in contact with the political and social elite might include in a private compilation’ (Marotti 1995: 214). It demonstrated that ‘within the court circle it [poetry] was used to grace and comment on virtually every happening in life’ (Saunders 1951: 151) and that ‘the courtiers’ immediate experience is often reflected in this poetry’ (Marotti 1995: 52). In a system where poems are passed around between members of a group, there is much more interchange and exchange of ideas, motifs and styles than in one where text is stabilized in print. As Marotti comments, the ‘social and occasional character of composition’ (Marotti 1995: 52) marks poetic discourse ‘as continuous with other forms of communication’ (Marotti 1995: 52). To the modern reader, this marks a contrast to the use of poetry today, where it tends to be more isolated, used in a celebratory capacity in public and as a mode...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• 1. Why poetry?
• 2. Critical perspectives on teaching poetry
• 3. Aspects of form
• 4. Words and imagery
• 5. Voice in poetry
• 6. Settings as mirrors
• 7. Constructions of character through time
• 8. Narrative in poetry
• 9. The poetry of conflict
• 10. Multi-modality and new technologies
• Appendix: The Haward Version of ‘To His Coy Mistress’
• References
• Index