Let’s start with a little quiz. What comes after:
“I wandered lonely as a cloud…”?
“I met a traveller from an antique land…”?
“Half a league, half a league/ Half a league onward…”
If you got all three correct, I suspect that you entered secondary education before 1990, and a good number of you would have paid for that education. The past three decades, at least, have witnessed a cultural drift away from poetry, such that it is now often seen as eccentric, aloof, impenetrable and irrelevant. Announce to a classroom of teenagers that they are about to tackle some poetry, and register the groans - some out of contempt, but many out of fear.
This hasn’t stopped exam boards from including poetry in their assessments (thankfully) but it has made the process of learning and teaching it much more tricky. Poetry was once a mainstay of our society. It was a vehicle for politics, a way to woo lovers, and an uncontroversial way to express oneself, either privately or publicly. Today we have Pam Ayres and a wonderful poet laureate who has abstained from ”‘public duty” to write about gas meters. Try reciting a poem on Take Me Out and see how many lights stay on.
Yet, at the same time, we hear constant calls to mindfulness, and criticisms that young people cannot focus or think critically and that our culture takes another swirl down the lavatory with each series of Real Housewives or Made in Chelsea.
An answer to these concerns lies in poetry. It is slow reading of - and thinking about - poetry that helps us to stay in the moment, encourages us to think carefully and critically about what poets have said and are saying, and keeps us connected to the cultural riches of many different traditions.
Poetry ‘seen as dry and inaccessible’
Our first hurdle is that poetry is seen by many people of all ages as dry and inaccessible. This is partly because we have become disconnected from poetry as a genre, beyond the vacuous rhyming couplets in Hallmark cards. That disconnection has come partly because many educational establishments have shied away from something that looks hard, fusty or irrelevant.
A parallel drift has seen some poets and commentators argue that poetry should just be left alone, not forensically analysed, because to do so would be to pull apart a poet’s inner thoughts, desires and traumas. Poetry should apparently just be left to be. In Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s What is Poetry?, the Beat poet writes that, “Like a bowl of roses/ A poem should not have to be explained.” But to many people, especially those in school, if poetry is not explained it becomes unapproachable and frightening, and its manifold riches and benefits are lost, and risk being lost forever.
From a strictly utilitarian perspective, young people need to have poems explained to them, because they need to answer exam questions on them. But far beyond that unpoetic of reasons, understanding how poems work enables us to break down barriers between those poems and ourselves. We can then (to mix metaphors) unlock the messages within them, appreciate that our joys and difficulties have been experienced by all generations and perhaps become inspired to become better writers ourselves.
Poetry is also seen as increasingly distant and esoteric because, with honourable exceptions, the canon that has been taught in schools has often relied on a few old favourites. Of course, it is worth learning about John Keats, Rudyard Kipling and William Wordsworth. But, alongside them, we should be exploring the talents of poets like Anne Bradstreet, Frances Harper, Emma Lazarus, Sarojini Naidu or Rabindranath Tagore. To appreciate the evolution of British poetry from Beowulf to Carol Ann Duffy is not to ignore cultural achievements from elsewhere.
Then, of course, there is the perception that poetry is the preserve of the supine and lachrymose. Try telling that to someone like Brian Turner, whose phenomenal poems like Here, Bullet - from his tour as an infantry team leader - feature aggressive, visceral and dramatic portrayals of what it was like to fight in Iraq.
One oft-cited method to increase people’s engagement with poetry, especially in schools, is to encourage them to learn poems by heart. This movement has a lot to recommend it: learning by heart gives the brain a good work-out and aids retention in other areas of life or the curriculum; it is always good to have some old favourites cerebrally tucked away for moments of distress or boredom. But knowing a poem off by heart should not be mistaken for understanding how poems work. There is so much more to poetry than being able to recite Ozymandias or The Charge of the Light Brigade. It’s a good party trick, but it can detract from many of the true virtues of poetry.
Those virtues reside in its ability to calm, provoke, entertain and stimulate us. Poetry is also a way of looking into the past, how historical figures engaged with the vicissitudes of politics, how they navigated their love lives or how they viewed the world in general. Once we see that, we can be reassured that many of today’s challenges may be new, but a lot of their concomitant concerns and solutions may not be. It’s just that, temporarily, we have forgotten that.
Dr Matthew Jenkinson is the deputy head academic at New College School, Oxford. His book, written with Robert Gullifer, How Poems Work: meanings, techniques and effects in 100 poems from Beowulf to the Iraq War, is available here.
