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Fall 2003 Distinguished Honors Lecturer: "The Necessity of Poetry" Before I begin my remarks, I want to take a moment to thank my colleagues here at Chapman, especially the Honors faculty, who graciously invited me to speak here today. I'm thrilled to have been granted this opportunity to share some of my opinions on the subject that, above all others, is nearest and dearest to my heart. We professors of humanities spend so much of our time reading and writing, we're often tempted to think of ourselves as pursuing a solitary occupation. Occasions like this one remind us, though, that the best of what we do takes place in a community that includes not only our students and colleagues, but also the writers whose words reach across centuries to capture our minds and hearts. The seventeenth-century English poet John Milton wrote that books "preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them." One of the most pressing needs that poetry fulfills is to assure us that since other's words have outlived their authors, our words have the power to escape time's cruel forgetfulness. The title of my talk this morning comes from Marianne Moore's famous statement that "poetry, that is to say the poetic, is a primal necessity." And that's about all I'm going to say about Marianne Moore, not because I don't think her a great poet, but because her words-like those of many other poets I've encountered-both elegantly express something I believe in and prompt me to think more about why I hold that belief. Just so there's no confusion as my comments this morning touch on several different disciplines-history, literary criticism, biology-I want to state my thesis up front. As I see it, poetry is necessary by virtue of its unmatched capability for helping people negotiate the difficult cognitive and emotional transition from late adolescence into early adulthood. By claiming this as the most important reason for the necessity of poetry, I know I run the risk of appearing to sell poetry short, not least because my thesis sounds so pragmatic, even therapeutic. Notice that I'm not advancing some of the more venerable justifications for including exposure to poetry in comprehensive educational schemes, such as its power to heighten the appreciation of beauty, its ability to strengthen the mind's analytic faculties, or its power to foster a deeper apprehension of the expressive and evocative powers of language. In fact, I believe poetry does all these things. But by themselves, these benefits don't make poetry necessary, since one could-and many people do-get along quite well in life with untutored conceptions of beauty, rudimentary analytic capabilities, and the native eloquence they acquire just by living and doing business in our sociable world. What poetry gives those who let it into their lives, though, is a more thorough immersion in the depth and breadth of actual and potential human experience. Such an immersion is of value to all, of course; but it's particularly important for people between the ages of about 16 and 23. The physical maturation that occurs during these years corresponds to an intellectual and cognitive maturation, in which the growing awareness of possessing a unique and discrete self draws young people from the dependent mode of childhood toward the independent mode of adulthood. It's an exciting time, of course, but it's also a perilous time, as all who have survived it can testify. There are dangerous waters to be navigated in these years, but perhaps the greatest peril arises from the young person's discovery of a vast inner life, of wells of thought and feeling so deep as to appear unfathomable even to a drastically expanded self-awareness. Suddenly, the young person apprehends the existence of what the poet William Wordsworth called "thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears," and is terror-stricken that these depths exist only in her, can never be plumbed, and certainly never understood by someone else. Behind teenage angst-the perennial and all-too-easily mocked subject of comic strips and sit-coms-lies a genuine existential problem: that terrible loneliness that people have to find their way through just as they're arriving at adulthood. As if acne, growing six inches in two years, and weathering an onslaught of hormones weren't enough! When allowed to do its work, poetry can lighten this burden of loneliness. A poet's words constitute the record of an intense self-consciousness as it struggles to illuminate, through words and phrases, the shadowlands of individual 'experience. Poetry helps people arrive at a healthy adulthood not because its formal complexities exercise the intellect or its beauties educate the taste, but because poetry tells us that we're not the only ones who have suddenly apprehended the dim and foreboding vistas that unfold in our minds. Poetry shows us that even when we descend to the deepest levels of our mental life, we're not alone. Someone else has not only embarked on that dangerous journey, but has survived and returned to give us the good news that something about those depths can be grasped and communicated. We all long to be understood, but at no time in life is that yearning more acute than at the end of adolescence, when the accumulation of experience and the growth of the intellect put us in touch with states of mind and emotions so complex that our language seems incapable of expressing them. Even when it goes no farther than attempting to find words sufficient to the task of capturing these thoughts, poetry gives us the encouragement we need to go on. It breaks the gloom of the solitary consciousness that weighs so heavily on us as we stand on the edge of adulthood. And it shows us that despite differences of time, customs, and manners, there are some facets of human nature that don't change. Poetry assures us that notwithstanding the barriers people raise in order to differentiate themselves from others, at the deepest level, where it counts the most, we share a common human inheritance, and we can talk to and understand each other. To illustrate my contention that a lot of poetry's necessity derives from its function, I want to tell you the story of how a notable 19th-century intellectual discovered the necessity of poetry in what we might call the hard way. John Stuart Mill was the eldest son of James Mill, who was a disciple of the eighteenth-century English thinker and social reformer Jeremy Bentham, who founded a school of philosophy called Utilitarianism. An unalloyed product of the Enlightenment, Bentham believed that all the problems that had bedeviled humankind since time immemorial could be solved if people were educated in and consistently pursued reason and logic as their guides to action rather than their feelings and emotions. James Mill took this to mean that feelings and emotions presented obstacles to the creation of a just and progressive society; and when John Stuart Mill was born in 1806, his father wrote to Bentham that the boy would be educated in strict accordance with Utilitarian principles about the supremacy of reason, in order to produce, Mill told Bentham, "a successor worthy of both of us." In his Autobiography, written a few years before his death in 1873 and published posthumously, John Stuart Mill described an education nearly unbelievable in its rigor and ambition. It began with Greek when the boy was three, Latin at the age of eight, both of which prepared Mill for years of reading the great masterworks of the classical authors in their original languages. After laying this groundwork, Mill embarked in his early teens on a wide-ranging course of study that had him absorbing everything from ancient history to contemporary treatises on mathematics, science, banking, politics, economics, and, of course, utilitarian philosophy. With so many fact-based disciplines to cover, one would think that the Mills would have no time for imaginative literature. Amazingly though, Mill recalls that his father admired some English poets-chiefly the neo-classical writers of the Renaissance and eighteenth-century-and even directed his son occasionally to write in verse. But this element of Mill's course of study was included not to temper reason with imagination. Mill writes that his father had two reasons for requiring his son to read and compose poetry, both strictly pragmatic. "Some things could be expressed better and more forcibly in verse than in prose: this, he said, was a real advantage. The other [reason] was that people in general attached more value to verse than it deserved, and the power of writing it was, on this account, worth acquiring." In at least one respect, this merciless education attained the outcome that James Mill hoped for. While still a teenager, John Stuart Mill began publishing complex analyses of economic and social issues of the day, and before he was twenty had established himself as a figure to be reckoned with on the London political and philosophical scene. For James Mill and Bentham, everything was proceeding according to plan: this remarkable young man seemed destined to use his accomplishments and youthful energy to advance the utilitarian philosophical and political program through the next two generations. But then, in the fall of 1826, the plan suffered a setback. [slide 9] In a chapter of his Autobiography titled "A Crisis in My Mental History," Mill sets the scene for what's about to happen by recalling that "From the winter of 1821 (that is, when he was fourteen),"
On a day when his spirits were a bit low, Mill "put the question directly to myself: 'Suppose that all your objects in life were realized; that all the changes in institutions and opinions which you were looking forward to, could be completely effected at this very instant: would this be a great joy and happiness to you? And an irrepressible self-consciousness distinctly answered, 'No!'" Mill reports that though he "mechanically" continued to pursue his usual occupations, for months the feeling that he had "nothing left to live for" continued to oppress him-and his condition was made worse by the awareness that he couldn't approach the person closest to him, his father, for sympathy or help. "Everything convinced me," Mill writes, "that he had no knowledge of any such mental state as I was suffering from, and that even if he could be made to understand it, he was not the physician to heal it." Only when a chance encounter with a passage from a novel moved him to tears did Mill find some relief: "I was no longer hopeless; I was not a stock or a stone," he writes. And from that moment he began slowly to find a way out of his depression. The crisis lasted only a half a year or so, but the chapter that chronicles it is one of the longest in the autobiography. Coming right after three chapters on his remarkable education, the narrative of Mill's crisis presents his retrospective understanding of exactly what that education, for all the reasoning power it gave him, tragically lacked. What did his education lack? Well, not poetry per se-he had read plenty of Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, Dryden, and Pope, as well as Homer and Virgil in the original Greek and Latin. Poetry was plentiful in Mill's education, but poetry's function as a way of reflecting on what it means to be human was resolutely excluded from consideration. Looking back, Mill realized that his father's eminently practical view of poetry probably stemmed as much from James Mill's personality as it did from his utilitarian principles. [slide 11] "In his views of life," Mill writes, "my father partook of the character of the Stoic." "He thought human life a poor thing at best, after the freshness of youth and unsatisfied curiosity had gone by. For passionate emotions of all sorts, and for everything which has been read or written in exaltation of them, he professed the greatest contempt. He regarded them as a form of madness. The 'intense' was with him a bye-word of scornful disapprobation. He regarded as an aberration of the moral standard of modern times, compared with that of the ancients, the great stress laid upon feeling." Little wonder, then, that Mill didn't turn to his father for help with a mental crisis brought about but the sudden realization that his vaunted educational scheme had left him with a withered emotional life. Instead, with characteristic thoroughness and resolution, Mill set out to find some way of cultivating the feelings that had been worn away by the habits of analysis into which he had been led by his father's teachings and temperament. He found much of what he was looking for in the verses of Wordsworth, and what Mill says about this poet fleshes out what I said near the beginning of my talk about the function of poetry, particularly for young people. "What made Wordsworth's poems a medicine for my state of mind," wrote Mill, was that they
I don't think you could ask for a clearer statement of poetry's functionality. Notice, though, that for Mill poetry's benefits go well beyond merely assuring him that it's all right to have feelings. Conditioned by his upbringing to view poetry as a self-indulgent distraction or diversion from the urgent project of improving society, Mill awoke into his crisis to find himself frantically toiling away for the betterment of creatures toward whom he felt neither affection nor obligation. The power of Wordsworth's poems to reflect Mill's feelings back to him enabled this earnest young man to solidify the deep bonds of human affinity that he had trumpeted, but never felt, in his youthful parroting of his father's politics and philosophy. Poetry made Mill a more effective reformer by assuring him that emotion had a vital role to play in his pursuit of social progress and justice, that a commitment to making things better draws its energy, its motive force, from sincere passion. But notice also that by validating the emotions that Mill had been taught to despise, Wordsworth's poetry enabled Mill to move out from under his father's shadow, and to transform an intellectual dependency on his father into an intellectually and emotionally integrated relationship with all of humankind. That's what Mill means by his comment that he drew from Wordsworth's poems "sympathetic pleasure, which could be shared in by all human beings." Mill's story of how his personal crisis arose and was resolved offers a vivid testimonial of the necessity of poetry. Equipped by this episode with an appreciation of the indispensable role poetry plays in forming a healthy adult consciousness, Mill would go on to become one of the leading voices of liberal reform in Victorian England, eventually writing books on philosophy, economics, logic, and literary criticism that fill 42 volumes. Our awareness of what Mill had to overcome in confronting his father's attitude toward feelings makes these accomplishments even more impressive. Luckily for us, James Mill's educational theories don't seem to have caught on; in fact, present-day thinking about education rightly acknowledges the necessity of cultivating feelings by prompting us to recognize and nurture "emotional intelligence." But for as much as we seem to have made peace with including emotion in our concept of reason, I'm not sure that poetry is playing as central a role in this aspect of education as it might. I say this because throughout my years as a teacher, I've noticed a decided tentativeness and wariness on the part of many of my students when my classes come around, as they all inevitably do, to reading and talking about poems. This reaction is so constant, in fact, that when I teach British romanticism, in which almost all the reading is poetry, I begin with a warning: danger: poetry ahead. I think I've stumbled on the reason for my students' wariness. In asking them about it, I've found that their early experiences with poetry in school were a lot like mine, which went something like this. The teacher would direct the class to turn our reading anthologies to a particular poem, like Robert Frost's "Stopping by woods on a snowy evening." She'd read the poem aloud, and then she'd look up from her book and ask, "All right, class, what does it mean?" This question produced a thunderous silence, which would hang heavy in the room, interrupted only by the faint squeaking of our desks as we looked furtively at each other and slumped down, in the vain belief that the lower we sat, the less likely it was that the teacher would call on us. After an interval that lasted only a few seconds but felt like an eternity, the teacher would break the silence by saying, "The sleigh ride symbolizes the journey of life. The woods are dark and cold because life leads to death. The meaning of the poem is death. Now, children, please turn to page 567: Emily Dickinson's 'Because I could not stop for death.' And the process would be repeated, though this time one of the more perspicacious of the assembled fifth-graders had learned enough from the previous example to suggest that the Dickinson poem might have something to do with symbolizing life and death. Of all the things that are wrong with this approach to poetry, the worst is what it does to fifth-graders who, as I did, find themselves captivated by the sense of depth that poetic language conveys, and who want to know more about both what poetry means and how poetry means. But all I got from these exercises was befuddlement. I'd stare at the poem and wonder how my teacher made the equation between the sleigh ride and life. And how did she know that the woods meant death? Once these equivalencies were pointed out, they made sense. They even seemed kind of obvious. How did I miss them? How could I find these sorts of parallels on my own? I remember thinking that poems must be coded messages, and that as part of their training my teachers had acquired a sort of inner decoding device, a master key that listed all symbols and their referents. Where do you get those devices, and how much do they cost? How long would I have to save up my allowance? Over the years, my students have confirmed that my experience isn't all that uncommon. That said, I do want to acquit my teachers of acting as they did out of any intentional misapprehension of the nature and function of poetry. In spite of Archibald MacLeish's statement that "a poem should not mean, but be," I think poems do have meanings. In retrospect, my belief that you needed to be a kind of code-breaker to understand and appreciate poetry was the result only of my teachers having failed to catalogue the step-by-step process they were using to distill a meaning from the poems. In their understandable haste to get through all the material that the state-mandated curriculum required them to cover, they skipped to the end, leaving me with the impression that the ability to draw the sorts of symbolic conclusions they did was an innate ability, not something that could be taught and learned. To try to counter the ill-effects of this unfortunately widespread pedagogical practice, in my classes I approach poetry in a way that encourages people who have been as befuddled as I was to build a sense of meaning not by guessing at the conventional significances of symbols, but by resisting the impulse to rush to a sweeping interpretive conclusion. Instead, I urge my students to respond immediately and feelingly to the words on the page, words which I tell them we must assume were carefully chosen by the poet to convey precise thoughts and emotional states. Like my teachers, I usually read the poem aloud (or have someone else read it); but when I'm finished, instead of asking, "what does it mean?" I ask the students to identify those words and phrases that simply stand out to them more prominently than others. Which words/images/ideas do you like? Which don't you understand? Only after this process of detailed noticing has run its course do I start asking meaning questions, and then as tentatively as possible. Why do you think that word stood out more than others? What does that phrase mean to you? What sort of feeling do you associate with the image or phrase that you noticed? My purpose in asking these questions is twofold. First, I want my students to recognize that poetry seeks to elicit feelings, and that therefore any genuinely experienced emotional response is valid and to be trusted. Second, I want to reconfigure how they conceive of poetic meaning-not as something deposited by the poet and meant to be dug up by the reader, but as a process, a negotiation between two vital consciousnesses, brought together by their shared possession of language, that uniquely human faculty. In deliberately delaying decisions about meaning for as long as possible, I demonstrate for my students that responding to poetry need not be for them as mysterious an activity as it was for me. In demystifying poetic response, though, I don't skirt poetry's complexity-in fact, I've found, my students emerge with a more nuanced appreciation of both the ways that poets push language to its expressive limits and how verse written in times and under circumstances far removed from their own retains the power to speak meaningfully to them. For the most part, students respond favorably to this approach-they've told me that they're relieved not to have to come up with a sweeping or clever interpretation. This, in turn, frees them to meander through a poem, to notice its music, and to linger over and enjoy the ways in which poetry expands our awareness of the language's capabilities. When, from time to time, I ponder how I'd like to be remembered by the thousands of students who will have passed through my classes, it's as someone who enhanced their appreciation of poetry. This hope is born partly out of my understanding of what it means to be an educator-that word comes from the Latin verb educare, "to lead out of." Educators find their students in one place, and lead them to another. But it's not accidental that the destination I envision for my students lies in poetry, not in literature, or knowledge, or critical understanding. And this leads me to the final justification I'll offer this morning for the necessity of poetry, in which I'll sketch out why I think poetry possesses the unparalleled capability to transform us that I'm claiming for it. To do this I'll have to start with a couple of definitions. The first of these is of poetry itself, which I define as the language of the soul. Fair enough-but what is the soul? The soul is what is unique about each individual-but that uniqueness manifests itself within a field of definitively human capacities and experiences. I know that's a little abstract, so I'll try to illustrate it with a scientific analogy and a poetic example. First the analogy. As a result of the nearly infinite possible recombinations of DNA, the genetic code of life, each of us possesses physiological individuality. The sum of our experiences and all the things that influence us accentuate that physiological individuality, further differentiating us from everyone else who has ever existed. But the physiological characteristics that we share-we have, for instance, the same nervous systems as all humans who have ever lived-mean that despite changes in customs and manners, there's a degree of overlap in the human situations and circumstances that arise in different historical eras and different cultural contexts. We are, therefore, unique individuals inhabiting, at any given moment, a shared place and time. In our everyday comings and goings in those shared spaces, we find that we get along better if, on the whole, we emphasize what we have in common and downplay our uniqueness. Over time, our awareness of our soul, that felt sense of our uniqueness, recedes farther and farther from the surface of life, though it always yearns not only to be expressed, but to be acknowledged in its uniqueness by someone else. I've never encountered a better expression of both the longing of one soul to be acknowledged by another and why this kind of recognition is so rare and fleeting than Matthew Arnold's poem, "The Buried Life," part of which I've reproduced for you here:
Soul, or what Arnold calls here "genuine self," struggles to break through the masks we don to face the world; most of the time, though, habit and the proprieties required of us by our social existence confine soul-to employ Arnold's metaphor-to the self's subterranean chambers. Poetry is unique among the arts as the best medium by which the underground streams of soul that course through individuals are able to make their presence known to another. Though the channels and rocks through which the streams of soul run are inevitably different between individuals, the "stuff" of the soul-which Arnold figures symbolically as water-is the same. Most of the time, soul churns and foams beneath the placid surfaces we project to the world. Yet there are moments when, through the agency of poetry and of love, soul rises to the surface, and can be perceived in its naked glory. As Arnold put it,
This, finally, is what both the urge to create and the desire to read poetry can put us in touch with: the paradoxical fact that the most essential characteristic we share with all other human beings is the longing to manifest our genuine selves, our souls. Like Mill at the beginning of his crisis, the first stirrings of adulthood come upon us as a debilitating mixture of self-pity and egotism: only I have seen my youthful ideals dashed by an indifferent world; only I have loved and lost; only I have despaired. Through its power to express and validate the soulful truth of these feelings, poetry assuages the pain of acquiring and maintaining an adult consciousness. It tells us that even in our moments of deepest despondency, understanding and deep communion with others is possible. So what does this mean for us in our role as educators entrusted with the care and feeding of our fellow creatures at this critical and vulnerable moment of their young lives? First, it means that no educational scheme that seeks to benefit students can dispense with poetry, the language of the soul through which we discover who we really are, and by which our best actions are energized. It means that we must take special pains to recognize and validate the soulful yearnings of our students, and to point them in the direction of the courageous forbears who left us the beautiful and challenging records of their struggles to bring the buried streams of their true selves to the surface. And it means we must commit to acknowledging both to ourselves and to our students that we all need poetry for its unparalleled ability to anchor us genuinely to the common humanity that, in the end, makes us all a great deal more alike than we are different. Thank you for your kind attention. |
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