From Poetry (February 1952).
I AM QUITE WILLING to abide by the evidence—the work done—although if it were rubbish I still believe the effort justified. The lyric, particularly the short lyric, is a great teaching instrument. It’s all there, all of a piece, a comprehensive act. Even to “hear” a good poem carries us far beyond the ordinary in education. And to write a verse, or even a piece of verse, however awkward and crude, that bears some mark, something characteristic of the author’s true nature—that is, I insist, a considerable human achievement.
Let’s say no one would claim to make poets. But a good deal can be taught about the craft of verse. A few people come together, establish an intellectual and emotional climate wherein creation is possible. They teach each other—that ideal condition of what once was called “progressive education.” They learn by doing. Something of the creative lost in childhood is recovered. The students (and teacher) learn a considerable something about themselves and the language. The making of verse remains a human activity.
There’s no point in being grandiose about results. How many in any one generation are true poets? Some may be in a class just to improve their prose—and that’s all right. Some may be there to get a further insight into what a poem is. Undoubtedly some of them write because they are young. They may be mixed up, and the poem for them is a way out—yet something more than a psychological excrescence. It should be listened to and, in many instances, honored. I can’t share the disdain many professors have for the serious amateur.
It’s a departure, verse writing is, from the ordinary run of things in a college—for almost all thinking has been directed toward analysis, a breaking-down, whereas the metaphor is a synthesis, a building-up, a creation of a new world, however incomplete, crude, tawdry, naïve it may be. It will have, for better or worse, its own shape and form and identity—and how often can that be said of thinking today?
The class in writing poetry is a collective, cooperative act—most of the time. But to bring diverse people, including the neurotic, the pigheaded, the badly trained, into harmony is a task that must be assumed, at first, by the teacher and carried on without the appearance of a struggle. One compulsive, one older person who has been overpraised by the vanity presses, can make everybody freeze up. Discussions have to be free and easy, otherwise the whole method breaks down. And often, during the first weeks, the instructor has to bring all his energy, tact, teaching wisdom into play in order to get a genuine rapport, a sense of mutual respect.
Sometimes it is best to let matters develop from work at hand: old poems or new. In presenting these, the author provides enough carbons for everyone to see the piece on the page. He reads it, and some other voice reads it. Often, in the case of embarrassingly weak work, it’s best to ask firmly for positive reactions first.
Some have difficulty verbalizing about the aesthetic experience. But often their gropings make for the fresh insight. There is little shadow-boxing with terminology. The problem is to seize upon what is worth preserving in immature work—the single phrase of real poetry, the line that has energy—and to build it into a complete piece that has its own shape and motion. To this task students bring their candor, their explicitness, and, often, their truly fresh and naïve ears. The great lesson of cutting comes up again and again, but the applications are various. The war on the cliché is continuous, but poetry is not written by mere avoidance of the cliché. Little theorizing about rhythm, but a constant reading aloud to hear rhythms, to get a notion of how language flows. Essentially this is teaching by ear, by suggestion, by insinuation. Cross-references are thrown out repeatedly, and sometimes received and assimilated: a rain of examples, often from obscure or minor sources. Why? Either to imitate consciously or to look at and do otherwise. I use a great body of mimeographed material and several anthologies and collected editions; and the University has built special cases in the classroom so I can run to my own books in pursuing this referential technique. There is a constant effort to remind students that poetry is a classic art and requires that its exponents read intensively in all literatures.
Each student is expected to revise pieces when necessary and to preserve successive versions in a workbook handed in at the end of the course. He also includes the results of his reading in a selective anthology of his own making—somewhat on the order of Edith Sitwell’s Notebooks—consisting of remarks on craft, good lines, poems, anything that has been genuinely pertinent to his development. This is not a mere scrapbook or piece of intellectual window-dressing, but a highly personal compilation, often showing that the anthology can be a creative act.
There are several possible points of departure in group assignments: to play with sound; to work with a particular stanza form; to begin with strongly stressed simple poems, such as nursery rhymes. This last is hardest but probably best if the group is young and unspoiled.
The scheme is that every student pursue his own bent, write the poems he wants to write—and also do at least some set exercises as a discipline. The discipline may lie in composing a poem without adjectives; a poem based on adjectives—or perhaps sets of verbs, nouns, and adjectives; a straight observational piece, with or without analogy; a poem based on a single figure; a revision of someone else’s bad poem (Braithwaite and Moult are rich mines of examples); a translation; a poem developed from a first line; a poem of which first and third stanzas are provided; a song (some make a setting, too); a poem involving an incident; a piece of original rhythmical prose—and later a poem evolved from it; a dialogue in verse; a “hate” poem; or a letter in verse.
“Form” is thought of as a sieve, to use Auden’s metaphor, for catching certain kinds of material. Even a shabby pattern like the tetrameter couplet will throw the student back on the language and force him to be conscious of words as a medium; also it will teach him how to shape the sentence to a particular end, to get effects with full and off-rhyme, and to manage the polysyllable. He can embrace the form or resist it—either result can be useful.
Every teacher has certain gimmicks, stunts, favorite examples which he knows will work—often because he cares about them and brings to them an enthusiasm that carries conviction. For instance, in discussing form, to quote a poem from memory while walking around the room, then to write it on the board, carrying on an analysis as I write is more effective, usually, than just turning to what’s in a book, even though I use beautiful texts like Bullett’s The English Galaxy or The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats. But it is possible for a course dealing with what really matters to complicated people to become, like New York, too stimulating. I remember a class on the epigram—everybody got into the act: we had a wonderful time quoting ribald snatches from Elizabethans, Jonson, Prior; the more uninhibited Irish. And there was, I think, some pertinent advice. It was a “good” class; however, the “epigrams” that came in later were abominable. Why? Perhaps our euphoria had left us addled. Perhaps the epigram is a form that lends itself only to maturity, to a special sort of embittered wisdom that life brings later.
The perfect example. How we academics hunt and cherish it! One that won’t scare the slowest, that is within the ken of the earnest apprentice, and yet won’t bore the most gifted in the class. I use, to exemplify the tetrameter couplet, a poem like Stanley Kunitz’s “Change,” not his best piece, but one with structural devices, a technical cunning that can be made immediately apparent to listeners. It is excellent for such obvious things as its introductory participial phrase, the modifier before and after the noun, the absolute construction, the tercet—as well as subtleties in rhythm and meaning. Another example is Herrick’s “Delight in Disorder,” with its wonderfully managed epithets and light rhymes, its levels of meaning in the apparently artless verse. Still another is Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress”; in fact, almost anything he did in the form can be used. Or consider Vaughan. Or Charles Cotton. Or Cowley’s “The thirsty earth” in its superb plain style. But suppose some coed cries, “I want to write lyrics! This form is for wit-writing.” The answer might be a blast of Bogan’s “The Alchemist,” where the simple declarative sentences make for powerful effects. Then from there the class might move on to Bridges and Campion and Jonson.
At its highest level this kind of class might become like the poem itself, in that the full powers of the associational forces of the mind (or, rather, not one mind, but several) are brought into play. (The simile comes from a student, Mr. Claire J. Fox.) I’m not aware of ever initiating any such dance of the mind and heart, but I have seen collective excitement in a class rise to a point where even slips of the tongue or misunderstandings provided a further insight. “He should anchor the abstraction.” “That’s it—to anger the abstraction”—a metaphor for me evocative and profound.
To be sure, teaching is not the communication, or even intercommunication, of excitement. The test, obviously, is whether the ultimate result is healthy-mindedness, is good work. But again you can’t tell. Often, in teaching, the payoff is far in the future.
There are those who say the young have nothing to write about. This is wrong. For one thing there is the whole world of adolescence which they are in or have just departed from, with all its vagaries, its ambiguous loyalties, its special poignance. There are memories of childhood, still vivid in many instances. And they can go outside and look at things with a fresh eye.
My own shortcomings in this kind of course are many. I doubt whether I insist enough on technical finish, as, say, Winters or Humphries or Ransom might. I am perhaps unduly rough on the student who wants a mentor, a Papa. You can’t go out all the way; you can’t carry their spiritual burdens. I insist that the teaching poet preserve his identity; otherwise he may not only ruin his own writing and thereby lose his effectiveness with the best students, but he will also do them another disservice: unconsciously he will begin trying to create them in his own image.
The conference has its place, but most knowledge of technique is acquired obliquely. One suggestion, one lead, after class or in the hall, if really the thing needful at that particular time, is worth far more than any number of pipe-sucking, pencil-poking, lugubrious sessions in the office.
The surprises are in psychological growth. As in piano-playing, suddenly, for no explicable reason, someone jumps to an entirely different plateau of performance and understanding. A boy who has memorized most of Eddie Guest will appear with a poem, rough maybe, but a real “splinter of feeling.”
Most teaching is visceral, and the genial uproar that constitutes a verse class, especially so. It is as ephemeral as the dance, and as hard to localize or define. It is what is left after all the reading and thinking and reciting: the residue, the illumination.