ONE AND A HALF CHEERS FOR ACADEMIC ACCOMPLISHMENT

  E. M. Forster, the twentieth-century English novelist, wrote a little book called Two Cheers for Democracy.  He called it that, he said, because democracy wasn't worth more.

  So let me give a very generous one and a half cheers for academic accomplishment:  for what we have accomplished, building  the academic edifice.

I was trying, recently, to write some exercises for my university students, to help them learn to hear language.  Not phonemes and other linguistic gedangera, but words.  Words have been around in our language--as "words"--for well more than a thousand years.  And until recently we used them pretty well:  usefully, precisely, meaningfully, even beautifully.  I was thinking mostly about poems and poetry, and about teaching poems and poetry in the university where I now do my teaching.  Before I could finish what I was writing , ny computer (acting like a department chairman) deleted my work.

So I'll go at it another way.  A more direct way.  How about a frontal attack on the nomenalistic nonsense that is practised on students?  Is all that nonsense a way of subverting students' interest in that dangerous thing called poetry?  Or is it simply because "English teachers" don't know how to read--or teach--poems?

  Read is a good word.  It has to do with understanding--which is why fortune-tellers read palms or tea-leaves.

  It is not just poems that get abused by teachers who don’t or can’t read, who have no respect for works of art: for things made, or maybe for something so serious as meaning, for things asking to be understood.

But understanding is hard work. So instead of talking about Dickens’s representation of the Industrial Revolution in Dombey and Son—to readers who knew it but wanted to ignore it—professors will note how good Dickens was in representing the rhythm of a steam engine. Instead of paying critical attention to John Jasper in The Mystery of Edwin Drood, scholars try to solve “The Mystery,” or speculate about who Dick Datchery is (which is obvious, surely), or write essays about opium dens in nineteenth century London, or identify—oh, busy busy busy!—the items in the China shepherdess’s cupboards.

Instead of reading Keats’s “When I Have Fears,” we identify it as a Shakespearian sonnet. Instead of reading Hardy’s “Hap,” we notice that it almost a sonnet. Instead of reading Hopkins, we talk about “sprung rhythm.” We can spend a whole term teaching Yeats, identifying Maud Gonne and Lady Gregory, Connelly and Pearse, Parnell Mistress Mary Moore, Harry Clifden—and never even try help anyone understand and appreciate a poem. That is academic achievement.

How many generations of students have been taught to count iambs and trochees, anapests and dactyle (watch out for the spondee, and the phyrric foot!) instead of being asked to understand poems? How many students know they have read a Shakespearian sonnet—but haven’t had the opportunity to appreciate a Shakespearian sonnet?

In Thomas Hardy’s “During Wind and Rain,” the old poem looks at age-worn, rain-riven tombstones in a cemetery, and recreates simple scenes from the lives of “he, she, all of them.” But he knows they are gone. Even their names are gone: “Down their carved names the raindrop ploughs.” Those people didn’t do “great things,” but they lived lives—and Hardy appreciates their lives with a tender and true

and unsentimental care that is moving, immensely and importantly touching, and honest. The rhyme scheme is an odd one, however. And there is a lot of formal repetition.

Will what we teach students help them to understand—to get inside the sense or feeling of a poem? Is being able to recognise its form worth anything?

As a student, I was blessed by deafness to some of that stuff. The rest of it I learned, but in learning it figured out what its insignificance was. I was blessed, too, by having several really good teachers—well, two—as an undergraduate, and then by having Arthur Carr as a senior colleague when I started out as a young assistant professor at the University of Michigan. And by Having Donald Hall as colleague, friend, and mentor, starting two weeks before my first term there.

Don and I met in August of 1964, standing among the “H” baggage, waiting to be ferried out to the SS Mauretania for a week’s voyage back from Europe to the United States. We celebrate fifty years of friendship this year—and fifty years, for me, of learning so very much from him and being so very thankful for everything he taught me.

I had just finished my doctoral degree, and was about to start my career as a professor. I knew a good poem when I read one—but I hadn’t learned that, let alone how to appreciate a poem—from any of my teachers. I had learned what I knew from the poems I had read. Don and I spent about four hours a day on the Mauretania, reading Hardy poems. Not many: twelve or so. But Don and Hardy—and me, too: we taught me to read poetry. And to love it.

Now—fifty good years on from that class on the Mauretania—I am still teaching poetry. And teaching other literature the same way. But whereas I used to teach for or toward understanding, now I find that more and more I teach to undo nonsense my students have been taught and are full of. And then I try to help them to read and understand and enjoy and appreciate and even learn from what they read.

The first year I taught at Saarland University—my academic roost for six years now—I had eight senior or graduate students for an informal weekly poetry session. The group were very bright. One of them, a young German woman, introduced herself the first day in a perfect accent from Co. Antrim in the North of Ireland. She still has her accent—and I call her Aoife instead of Eva.

One day we read a small, beautiful poem by Jane Kenyon.

Biscuit

The dog has cleaned his bowl

and his reward is a biscuit,

which I put in his mouth

like a priest offering the host.

I can’t bear that trusting face!

He asks for bread, expects

bread, and I in my power

might have given him a stone.

Another student, also very bright but victimised by her education, made a quick cry of triumphant critical insight: “An anti-Christian, anti-religious poem. The priest tricks the dog. The eucharist is a stone.” There were three exclamation points in the air.

So I explained. Deconstruction is neither a nice nor a sensible thing to do to a work of art. Art, after all, is something made: which is to say constructed. Deconstruction is an act of violence.

For more than twenty-five years, Seamus Heaney generously met with the twelve summer study students I took to Ireland for ten weeks every summer. He was wonderful with them. One winter he came to visit where I was teaching, then, in the United States. At a session with about twenty students he began by chatting about things, and then started to read. And he stopped himself.

“There is something you need to know before we go on. Poems are not

written for university students to talk about and deconstruct in classes. Poems

have a much larger purpose than that. They are written for something far more

important than that.”

Then he read.

What I was trying to write when my computer interrupted me, administratively—was related to what I have been talking about, but a few giant steps back into the immediate and practical world trying to teach the English language. I wanted to create a set of exercises that would help students learn to use language well.

If the only language our students learn is the language of the marketplace—and academia is a big, big marketplace. And as the marketplace is dedicated (for profit reasons) to the new, academic develops new languages constantly, to fit marketplace requirements.

Shorthand was developed as a way of recording speech, verbatim. When the young Charles Dickens was a court reporter in London, he devised his own shorthand. But what he wrote for the Morning Chronicle was written—and printed—in English.

He wrote his novels—as long as they were, and as fast as he wrote them—in what we call longhand. And he wrote, word by chosen word.

He wrote letters, and spoke, with the same care. Language was his care, his medium, his gift. And as he was gifted, he gave us great gifts.

Our modern media –our mediums of communication—are neither precise nor particularly communicative, and they certainly aren’t elegant. (And what they say is paid for by sponsors, who—commerce is better than communication--get to hawk their wares as part of the show.)

The written word is bad, but the spoken word—and more and more our world is viva voce—is much, much worse. Whether you listen to Charley Rose, the banalissimo of television intelligence, or watch Wolf Blitzer, a tongue-tied idiot trapped in a phony “situation room,” you are worse off than we were in the days of ticker-tape communication. At least the ticker-tape and its operator didn’t pretend to intelligance.

(I was interviewed once, years ago, by Charley Rose. He was known to the crew of his late-evening talk show as “Charley Dumb.” And he lived up to his name.)

So we should try to teach our students how to use language well, and how to make serious use of good language. Which is to say we should teach our students how to speak and how to write, meaningfully, reliably, and even beautifully. And we should teach them how to read—and listen to—good language.

But we don’t. Which is what this brief essay is about. In the beginning I thought I was writing about the teaching of literature, but then I became distracted by “that other world.” If the marketplace—and “marketplace mentality”—can’t be

countered, then being able to read a poem well maybe won’t mean much.

But I won’t believe that. Those of us who know—understand—the things that art teaches will be able to live and die as humans. And the rest of our modern achievers, when the time comes, will not “cash in their chips” but will simply forfeit them to the current god, the Great Banker in the Sky.

One and a half cheers? No. That was a self-defeating act of generosity. Why any cheers for them at all? And why not three cheers for us who stand against them, in academe or elsewhere?