Why Do We Teach Poetry?

by ARCHIBALD MACLEISH

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THERE is something about the art of poetry which induces a defensive posture. Even in the old days when the primacy of poetry was no more challenged than the primacy of Heaven, which is now also challenged, the posture was habitual. If you published your reflections on the art in those days you called them a Defense. Today, when the queen of sciences is Science, you do not perhaps employ that term but you mean it. It is not that the gentlemen at the long table in the Faculty Club whose brains have been officially cleared to serve as depositories of scientific secrets of the eighth and thirteenth classes are patronizing in their manner. They are still gentlemen and therefore still modest no matter how great their distinction or how greatly certified. But one knows one’s place. One knows that whereas the teachers of science meet to hear of new triumphs which the newspapers will proudly report, the teachers of poetry meet to ask old questions — which no one will report: such questions as, why teach poetry anyway in a time like this?

It is a relief in this general atmosphere to come upon someone who feels no defensiveness whatever: who is perfectly certain that poetry ought to be taught now as at any other time and who is perfectly certain also that he knows why. The paragon I have in mind is a young friend of mine, a devoted teacher, who was recently made headmaster of one of the leading American preparatory schools, and who has been taking stock, for some time past, of his curriculum and his faculty. Poetry, as he sees it, ought to be taught “as a most essential form of human expression as well as a carrier throughout the ages of some of the most important values in our heritage.” What troubles him is that few teachers, at least in the schools he knows, seem to share his conviction. He is not too sure that teachers themselves have “an abiding and missionary faith in poetry” which would lead them to see it as a great clarifier —a “human language” capable of competing with the languages of mathematics and science.

But though teachers lack the necessary faith, the fault, as my young friend sees it, is not wholly theirs. The fault is the fault of modern criticism, which has turned poetry into something he calls “poetry itself” — meaning, I suppose, poetry for poetry’s sake. “Poetry itself” turns out to be poetry with its meanings distilled away, and poetry with its meanings distilled away is difficult if not impossible to teach in a secondary school — at least his secondary school. The result is that secondary school teachers have gone back, as to the lesser of two evils, to those historical and anecdotal practices sanctified by American graduate schools in generations past. They teach “poets and not poetry.” With the result that “students become acquainted with poets from Homer to MacLeish” (quite a distance no matter how you measure it!) “but the experience doesn’t necessarily leave them with increased confidence in what poetry has to offer.”I can well believe it.

The reason why modern criticism has this disastrous effect, the reason why it produces “an almost morbid apathy toward ‘content’ or ‘statement of idea,’” is its excessive “preoccupation with aesthetic values.” Modern criticism insists that poems are primarily works of art; and when you insist that poems are primarily works of art you cannot, in my friend’s view, teach them as carriers “throughout the ages of some of the most important values in our heritage.” What is important about Homer and Shakespeare and the authors of the Bible is that they were “realists with great vision . . . whose work contains immensely valuable constructions of the meaning of life”; and if you talk too much about them as artists, those constructions of the meaning of life get lost.

Now this, you will observe, is not merely another walloping of the old horse who was once called the New Criticism. It goes a great deal farther. It is a frontal attack upon a general position maintained by many who never accepted the New Criticism or even heard of it. It is an attack upon those who believe — as most poets, I think, have believed — that a poem is primarily a work of art and must be read as a work of art if it is to be read at all. It is a high-minded and disinterested attack delivered for the noblest of purposes, but an attack notwithstanding— and an effective one. What it contends is that an approach to poetry which insists that a poem is a work of art blocks off what the poem has to say, whereas what the poem has to say is the principal reason for teaching it. What the argument comes down to, in other words, is the proposition that it is a mistake, in teaching poetry, to insist that poetry is art, because, if you do so insist, you will not be able to bring your students to the meaning of the poem, the idea of the poem, what the poem has to tell them about man and world and life and death — and it is for these things the teaching of the poem is important.

Now, I can understand this argument and can respect the reasons for making it. Far too many of those who define poelry in exclusively artistic terms use their definition as a limiting and protective statement which relieves them of all obligation to drive the poem’s meanings beyond the meanings of the poem: beyond the mere translation of the symbols and metaphors and the classical or other references — the whole apparatus of explication du texte. bar too many, indeed, of those who have to do with literature generally in our time, and particularly with modern literature, consider that meanings in any but a literary (which includes a Freudian) sense are not only outside, but beneath, their proper concern— that the intrusion of questions of morality and religion into the world of art is a kind of trespass and that works of literary art not only should but can be studied in a moral vacuum. Literature in the hands of such teachers is well on the way to becoming again that “terrible queen” which the men of the nineties raised above life and which Yeats, when he outgrew the men of the nineties, rejected.

But although I can understand this argument, and although I can respect its reasons, and although I believe it raises a true issue and an important issue, T cannot accept it; for it rests, or seems to me to rest, on two quite dubious assumptions. The first is the assumption, familiar in one form or another to all of us, that the “idea” of a work of art is somehow separable from the work of art itself. The most recent — and most egregious — expression of this persistent notion comes from a distinguished Dean of Humanities in a great institution of learning who is reported by the New York Times to have argued in a scholarly gathering that “the idea which the reader derives from Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and The Sea comes after the reader has absorbed some 60,000 words. This takes at least an hour. ... A similar understanding could come after a few minutes study of a painting by a skillful artist.” Precisely, one imagines, as the Dore illustrations gave one the “idea” of the Inferno in a few easy looks!

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IT is the second assumption, however, which divides me most emphatically from my young friend. For the second assumption seems to be that unless idea and work of art are distinguished from each other in the teaching of a poem, the idea—and so the effectiveness of the teaching — will be lost. At this point my friend and I part company. I am ready, and more than ready, to agree that it is for the meanings of life that one reads (and teaches) poetry. But I am unable to see how there can be a distinction between a poem as a conveyer of such meanings and a poem as a work of art. In brief, the distinction between art and knowledge which is made throughout my friend’s argument seems to me wholly wit limit foundation. That it is a distinction almost universally recognized in our epoch I know well enough. Science makes it. Poetry makes it. And the world agrees with both. “Whatever can be known,” says Bertrand Russell, “can be known by means of science.” Poetry, say its professors, has no “messages” to deliver. And no one dissents from either. The exclusive proprietary right of science to know and to communicate knowledge is not only commonly recognized in our civilization: in a very real sense it is our civilization. For the characteristic of our civilization — that which distinguishes it from the civilizations which have preceded it—is the characteristic which knowledge-by-science has conferred upon it: its abstractness.

But though the agreement is general, the proposition is not one I can accept. I argue that the apologists for science are not just died in claiming, nor the apologists lor poelry in admitting, the sole right of science to know. I insist that poetry is also capable of knowledge; that poetry, indeed, is capable of a kind of knowledge of which science is not capable; that it is capable of that knowledge as poetry; and that the teaching of poetry as poetry, the teaching of poem as work of art, is not only not incompatible with the teaching of poetry as knowledge but is, indeed, the only possible way of teaching poetry as knowledge.

To most of us, brought up as we have been in the world of abstractions which science has prepared for us, and in the kind of school which that world produces— schools in which almost all teaching is teaching of abstractions— the notion of poetry as knowledge, the notion of art as knowledge, is a fanciful notion. Knowledge by abstraction we understand. Science can abstract ideas about apple from apple. It can organize those ideas into knowledge about apple. It can then, by some means, introduce that knowledge into our heads—possibly because our heads are abstractions also. But poetry, wc know, does not abstract. Poetry presents. Poetry presents the thing as the thing. And that it should be possible to know the thing as the thing it is— to know apple as apple—this we do not understand; this, the true child of the time will assure you, cannot be done. To the true child of abstraction you can’t know apple as apple. You can’t know tree as tree. You can’t know man as man. All you can know is a world dissolved by analyzing intellect into abstraction — not a world composed by imaginative intellect into itself. And the result, for the generations of abstraction, is that neither poetry nor art can be a means to knowledge. To inspiration, yes: poetry can undoubtedly lead to that— whatever it is. To revelalion, perhaps: there may certainly be moments of revelation in poetry. But to knowledge, no. The only connection between poetry and knowledge we can see is the burden of used abstractions—adages and old saws— which poetry‚ some poetry, seems to like to carry— adages most of which we knew before and some of which aren’t even true.

But if all this is so, what then is ihe “experience of art” — the “experience of poetry” —which all of us who think about these things at all have known? What is the experience of realization which comes over us with those apples on a dish of Cezanne’s or those three pine trees? What is the experience of realization which comes over us with Debussy’s Nuages? What is the experience of realization which comes over us when Coleridge’s robin sits and sings

or when his eave-drops fall

And if all this is so, why does one of the most effective of modern definitions of poetry (Arnold s in his letter to Maurice do Guérin) assign to that art the peculiar “power of so dealing with things as to awaken in us a wonderfully full, new and intimate sense of them and of our relation with them”?

The answer is, of course, that the children of abstraction are wrong — and are impoverished by their error, as our entire time is impoverished by it . They are wrong on both heads. They are wrong when they think they can know the world through its abstractions: nothing can be known through an abstraction but the abstraction itself. They are wrong also when they think they cannot know the world as the world: the whole achievement of art is a demonstration to the contrary. And the reason they art* wrong on both heads is the reason given, quite unintentionally, by Matthew Arnold. They are wrong because they do not realize that all true knowledge is a matter of relation: that we really know a thing only when we are filled with “a wonderfully full, new and intimate sense of it” and, above all, of “our relation with" it. This sense— this knowledge in the truest meaning of the word knowledge — art can give but abstraction cannot.

There are as many proofs as there are successful works of art. Take, for obvious example, that unseen mysterious phenomenon, the wind. Take any attempt, by the familiar processes of abstraction, to “know” the wind. But beside it those two familiar lines of George Meredith: —

What will be the essential difference between the two? Will it not be that the first, the analytical, statement is or attempts to be a wholly objective statement made without reference to an observer (true everywhere and always), whereas an observer — one’s self as observer! — is involved in the second? And will not the consequential difference be that a relation involving one’s self is created by the second but not by the first? And will not the end difference be that the second, but not the first, will enable us to know ihe thing itself—to know what the thing is like?

It would be quite possible, I suppose, to semanticize this difference between knowledge by poetry and knowledge by abstraction out of existence by demonstrating that the word, know, is being used in two different senses in the two instances, but the triumph would be merely verbal, for the difference is real. It is indeed the realest of all differences, for what it touches is the means by which we come al reality. How are we to find the knowledge of reality in the world without, or in the shifting, flowing, fluid world within? Is all this a task for the techniques of abstraction — for science as it may be or as it is? Is it through abstraction alone that we are to find what is real in our experience of our lives and so, conceivably, what is real in ourselves? Or do we need another and a different way of knowing a way of knowing which will make that world out there, this world in here, available to us, not by translating them into something else — into abstractions of quantity and measure but by bringing us ourselves to confront them as they are man and tree face to face in the shock of recognition, man and love face to face?

The question, I beg you to see, is not what we ought to do. There is no ought. A man can “live” on abstractions all his life if he has the stomach for them, and many of us have — not the scientists only, but great numbers of the rest of us in this contemporary world, men whose days are a web of statistics, and names, and business deals, held together by the parentheses of a pair of commuting trains with three Martinis at the close. The question is not what we ought to do. The question is what we have the choice of doing — what alternatives are open to us. And it is here and in these terms that the issue presents itself to the teacher of poetry.

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COLLEGES and universities do not exist to impose duties but to reveal choices. In a civilization like ours in which one choice has all but overwhelmed the other, a civilization dominated by abstraction, in which men are less and less able to deal with t heir experience of the world or of themselves unless experience and self have first been translated into abstract terms— a civilization like a foreign language— in such a civilization the need for an understanding of t he alternat ive is urgent. What must be put before the generation of the young is the possibility of a knowledge of experience as experience, of self as self; and that possibility only the work of art, only the poem, can reveal. That it is so rarely, or so timidly, presented in our schools is one of the greatest failures of our educational system. Young men and young women graduate from American schools and colleges by the hundreds of thousands every year to whom science is the only road to knowledge, and to whom poetry is little more than a subdivision of something called “ literature” —a kind of writing printed in columns instead of straight across the page and primarily intended to be deciphered by girls, who don’t read it either.

This sort of thing has consequences. Abstractions are wonderfully clever tools for taking things apart and for arranging things in patterns but they are very little use in putting things together and no use at all when it comes to determining what things are for. Furthermore abstractions have a limiting, a dehumanizing, a dehydrating effect on the relation to things of the man who must live with them. The result is that we are more and more left, in our scientific society, without the means of knowledge of ourselves as we truly are or of our experience as il actually is. We have the tools, all the tools we are suffocating in tools— but we cannot find the actual wood to work or oven the actual hand to work it. We begin with one abstraction (something we think of as ourselves) and a mess of other abstractions (standing for the world) and we arrange and rearrange the counters, but who we are and what we are doing we simply do not know— above all what we are doing. With the inevitable consequence that we do not know either what our purpose is or our end. Ho that when the latest discoveries of the cyclotron are reported we hail them with the cry that we will now be able to control nature better than ever before — but we never go on to say for what purpose, to what end, we will control her. To destroy a city? To remake a world?

It was something of this kind, I imagine, that Adlai Stevenson had in mind when he startled a Smith Commencement last spring by warning his newly graduated audience of prospective wives that the “typical Western man — or typical Western husband — operates well in the realm of means, as the Roman did before him. But outside his specialty, in the realm of ends he is apt to operate poorly or not at all. . . . The neglect of the cultivation of more mature values,” Mr. Stevenson went on. “can only mean that his life, and the life of the society he determines, will lack valid purpose, however busy and even profitable it may be.”

As he has so often done before, Mr. Stevenson there found words for an uneasiness which has been endemic but inarticulate in the American mind for many years— the sense that we are getting nowhere far too fast and that, if something doesn’t happen soon, we may arrive. But when he came to spell out the causes for “the neglect of t he cultivation of more mature values" Mr. Stevenson failed, or so it seems to me, to identify the actual villain. The contemporary environment in America, he told his young listeners, is “an environment in which ‘facts,’ the data of the senses, are glorified and value judgments are assigned inferior status as ‘mere matters of opinion.’ It is an environment in which art is often regarded as an adornment of civilization rather than a vital element of it, while philosophy is not only neglected but deemed faintly disreputable because ‘it never gets you anywhere.’”

It is Irue that philosophy is neglected, and even truer that art is regarded in this country generally as it seems to be regarded by the automobile manufacturers of Detroit: as so much enamel paint and chromium to the applied for allegedly decorative purposes to the outside of a car which would run bolter without it. But the explanation is not, I think, that we set facts even fads in quotation marks above values, or that we glorify the data of the senses, unless one means by that latter phrase not what the senses tell us of the world we live in but what the statistics 1 hal can be compiled out of the data of the senses would tell us if we were ever in touch with our senses.

In few civilizations have the senses been less alive than they are with us. book al the cities we build and occupy — but look at them! — the houses we live in, the way we hold ourselves and move; listen to t ho speaking voices of the greater part of our women. And in no civilization, at least in recorded time, have human beings been farther from the facts if we mean by that word, facets of reality. Our indifference to ends is the result of our obsession with abstractions rather than facts: with the ideas of things rather than with things. For there can be no concern for ends without a hunger for reality. And there can be no hunger for reality without a sense of the real. And there can bo no sense of the real in the world which abstraction creates, for abstraction is incapable of the real: it can neither lay hold of the real itself nor show us where to find it. It cannot, that is to say, create the relation between reality and ourselves which makes knowledge of reality possible, for neither reality nor ourselves exist in abstraction. Everything in the world of abstraction is object. And, as George Buttrick pointedly says, we are not objects: we are subjects.

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BUT all this is a negative way of saying what a defender of poetry should not be afraid of saying positively. Let me say it. We have lost our concern with ends because we have lost our touch with reality and we have lost our touch with reality because we are estranged from the means to reality which is the poem —the work of art. To most members of our generation this would seem an extravagant statement but it is not extravagant in fact and would not have seemed so in another time, In ancient China the place of poetry in men’s lives was assumed as matter of course; indeed, the polity was based on it. The three hundred and five odes or songs which make up the Song-word Scripture survived to the fourth century B.C., when Confucius is said to have collected them because they were part of the government records preserved in the Imperial Archive. For thousands of years the examinations for the Chinese civil service were examinations in poetry, and there is no record that the results were more disappoint ing to the throne than examinations of a different character might have been. Certainly there is no record that a Chinese civil servant ever attempted to deny an honor student in a military academy his commission in the imperial army or navy because he was friendly with his own mother! Idiocies which the study of science and of other abstractions in contemporary institutions of naval education in the United States seem to nourish were apparently cauterized from the mind by the reading of poems.

It was not for nothing that Confucius told his disciples that the three hundred and five songs of the Song-word Scripture could be boiled down to the commandment: “Have no twisty thoughts.” You cannot have twisty thoughts if you are real and if you arc thinking about real things. But i a mother is merely a biological event to you and if you yourself are merely a military event called an admiral, anything may happen: you may make your country ridiculous, humiliate a promising boy, and deprive the navy of a good officer, all in the twisted belief that you are being a wise man and a patriot.

One can see, not only in the three hundred and five songs, but in Chinese poetry of other periods, what Confucius meant. Consider two Chinese poems of the second century B.C. and the sixth of our era, both written by Emperors. The first is a poem of grief—of the sense of loss of someone loved: a poem therefore of that inward world of feeling, of emotion, which seems to us most nearly ourselves and which, because it is always in flux, always shifting and changing and flowing away, is, of all parts of our experience of our lives, most difficult to know. We cannot know it through science. We cannot know it by knowing things about it—even the shrewdest and most intelligent things, helpful though they may be to us in other ways. We cannot know it either by merely feeling it — by uttering its passing urgencies, crying out “I love” meaning “I think of myself as loving” or sobbing “I grieve” meaning “I think of myself as grieving.” How then can we know it?

The Emperor Wu-ti wrote (this is Arthur Waley’s beautiful translation): —

Four images, one of sound, two of sight, one of feeling, each like a note plucked on a stringed instrument. Then a question like the chord the four would make together. And all at once we know. We know this grief which no word could have described, which any abstraction the mind is capable of would have destroyed. But we know more than this grief: we know our own —or will when it shall visit us — and so know something of ourselves.

The second is a poem of that emotion, that feeling, which is even more difficult to know than grief it self. The second is a poem of delight : youth and delight — the morning of the world — the emotion, of all emotions, most difficult, to stop, to hold, to see. “Joy whose hand is ever at his lips bidding adieu.” How would you know delight in yourself and therefore yourself delighting? Will the psychiatrists tell you? Is there a definition somewhere in the folios of abstraction by which we attempt to live which will capture it for you? The Emperor Ch’ien Wen-ti (again Waley’s translation) knew that there is only one mirror which will hold that vanishing smile: the mirror of art, the mirror of the poem: —

In this world within, you see, this world which is ourselves, there is no possibility of knowing by abstracting the meaning out — or what we hope will be the meaning. There we must know things as themselves and it must be we who know them. Only art, only poetry, can bring about that confrontation, because only art, only poetry, can show us what we are and ourselves confronting it. To be ignorant of poetry is to be ignorant therefore of the one means of reaching the world of our experience of the world. And to be ignorant of that world is to be ignorant of who and what we are. And to be ignorant of who and what we are is to be incapable of reality no matter what tools we have, or what intelligence, or what skills. It is this incapacity, this impotence, which is the tragedy of the time we live in. We are spiritually impotent because we have cut ourselves off from the poem. And the crowning irony is that it is only in the poem that we can know how impotent we have become.

Why do we teach poetry in this scientific age? To present the great alternative not to science but to that knowledge by abstraction which science has imposed. And what is this great alternative? Not the “messages" of poems, their interpreted “meanings,” for these are abstractions also — abstractions far inferior to those of science. Not the explications of poetic texts, for the explication of a poetic text which goes no farther ends only in abstraction.

No, the great alternative is the poem as itself, the poem as a poem, the poem as a work of art — which is to say, the poem in the context in which alone the work of art exists: the context of the world, of the man and of the thing, of the infinite relationship which is our lives. To present the great alternative is to present the poem not as a message in a bottle, and not as an object in an uninhabited landscape, but as an action in the world, an action in which we ourselves are actors and our lives are known.