Introductory Thoughts on Poetry

ilton: Paradise Lost

oday I have no agenda, not fixed point to argue or theme to express, so I am at my ease. All I really have to say, is this: I enjoy good poetry, and I think good criticism should help us to enjoy good poetry.

hen I first got fairly underway in Paradise Lost I found what I think everyone should find or hope to find: that I could not put it down. Many find it difficult or complain that there are too many long words. It was difficult enough for me, as a fourteen year old; there were words that I didn’t understand, there were occasionally whole chunks that made little sense to me – though you will find these very rare once you get used to Milton’s style – but these things did little to detract from my enjoyment: the plot was clear enough, and the plot is the main thing; the glories of the style are not marred by an occasional misunderstanding, so I did not mind misunderstanding occasionally. Sometimes the mystery and antiquity that linguistic difficulties clothe such a book with may be seen as improvements, not detractions – at least until you clear them up; and even once you understand a difficult and involved passage, you are often enough still expected to enjoy it primarily because you know that it is difficult and can see that meaning has been wrung out of a tight knot of complexity.

think it is crucial, in reading poetry or anything else – especially books written in an olden style – not to get hooked on the little details that we do not understand . This is particularly the case for long poems and epics. We do ourselves a disservice when we pause at every strange word, or foreign name or learned reference, or hint of possible symbolism. We naturally want to know what it all means, but it can all be saved for our second reading. If a poem is not good enough without our understanding all the details and technical matters, then it is not worth so much of our time as researching the details and technical matters might take. To that rule there are exceptions; I venture that next to no one enjoys Pindar without putting some work into understanding him. But it is better to assume the rule than to assume that a classic needs to be studied before it can be read.

never studied poetry at school. My acquaintance with it was entirely contained in my private reading, and I do not think I ever enjoyed it much before reading Milton. Naturally, this meant that I did not know how to read it properly: I did not know whether to stop at the ends of lines, how much to submit to the trotting of the rhythm and how much to strive against it, how much to stress the rhymes. Even where I did know, I had no one to pull me out of the bad habits that inevitably accrue when one reads solely to oneself in one’s head. I had a similar experience when I learned to read Latin and Greek poetry, though there the case was far worse: for the information I obtained was so varied and vague, so contradictory and unclear, that I ended up with bad habits it would never have occurred to me to invent on my own. The online articles of Mr William Harris, a Professor of Middlebury College, were the first clear and practical directions I got with regard to reading Greek and Latin verse. I commend them to students of the classics.

figured it all out in the end, though I still do not read classical verse particularly well. But it left me with this impression: the first responsibility of a literature teacher is to train their students to read well – even if simply by providing them with a good model. You cannot properly enjoy poetry if it sounds like an accelerated rocking horse in your head. I have had teachers who could explain the minutiae of Greek metre to me, but could not read it properly. They made it sound no different from prose. There was an ancient grammarian, as I recall, who defined reading, not as the ability to understand written words, but as the ability to pronounce them clearly, with good emphasis, without stammering or slipping. You cannot properly enjoy poetry if it sounds like an accelerated rocking horse in your head. I have had teachers who could explain the minutiae of Greek metre to me, but could not read it properly. They made it sound no different from prose. Nor do we speakers of English naturally read aloud well. We need to learn it.

fter that, of course, the teacher of poetry must teach poems. We have all heard, or at least heard tell of, literary criticism that ‘ruins’ the subject poem: whereas one of the primary concerns of the critic of a good poem is to enable us to appreciate it better. – I say this with a great deal of confidence, though I know that many schools of modern criticism belie me; but in my defense I will not here say anything more than this: that I like to enjoy what I read when I can and welcome what helps I can get; that I am sure many others concur on that point; and that I am quite certain that most poets of the past hoped and expected that their poems would be enjoyed. I love good literary criticism; but to leave students saying that ‘Shakespeare was ruined for them’ when they were forced to dissect him, leaves me with little doubt that the students were as misinformed – yes, misinformed – about Shakespeare as you or I should consider ourselves to be about the human body if, to borrow the metaphor of C.S.Lewis, we were shown one dissected, and taught all about the internal organs, and then told that there is no such thing as skin, and that anatomy proves that human beauty is an illusion. Is the enjoyment of Shakespeare an illusion caused by ignorance of the symbolism he employed? If not, then why does learning the symbolism kill the enjoyment? Symbolism was not a study for Shakespeare: when we study Shakespeare’s symbolism, we do best to then forget that we learned by studying, and pretend that the symbolism is as natural for us as it was for Shakespeare. And of course, you ought to reread the poem after you have learned about it, and not forget to notice the things you liked about it before you learned about all the details.

hy do I lay so much stress on enjoying things like Paradise Lost? I enjoy it. Why need I encourage others to? Why should I, a devotee of knowledge if ever there was one, rank the pleasure of the poem above the hard facts about it? The reason is this. Most books spring from their authors’ ideals, but poetry – and novels, and what people call imaginative literature in general – seldom gets much further than those ideals. A scientist writes papers because he wants to pursue understanding and truth; his readers need not care about the passions and desires that lead him to that pursuit, so long as they want to learn the facts that he has written. The poet, on the other hand, is filled with the horror of the tragic, or the love of adventure, or delight in the subtleties of language, or admiration of courage, and writes something purely to express these ideals. The reader of poetry who understands the poem properly, who is able to recreate the ideal in their own mind, is none other than the one who enjoys the poem. A student can learn understand the content of a science paper without enjoying it, because the content of the science paper is facts; but no one can understand a poem properly without enjoying it, because the contents of a poem are ideals.

f course, there are poems we justly decide that we should not enjoy. Not all ideals are noble.

ave I wondered far from my subject, Paradise Lost? As this series goes on, I expect that I will be able to stick closer to my chosen books. But I shall relate what I have said to Milton: on first reading him, or any other poet, you ought to read through, looking up as few words as possible, only skipping back up the page when you have completely lost the sense (do not worry about minor lapses), underlining, if possible, nothing – at worst put little dashes in the margins to remind you to come back later. The first thing to learn, with those kinds of books, is not the symbols or the historical significance or the plot structures: the first thing to learn is to enjoy them.