There are many reports that students can only read a few paragraphs or pages at a time now. How then to teach English literature?
I faced that exact challenge when I taught mid-level ESL learners in China. My solution: poetry.
With the 12th graders I taught, who were applying to American universities, we read full books—the Iliad, Balzac, All Quiet on the Western Front, Michael Sandel’s Justice book, to name a few.
But with the 9th graders, most of whose English was not yet good enough for that kind of thing, I had them read and analyze poems from the start of school in September through about March.
There were many benefits to spending so much time on poetry. I used to think some of these benefits were unique to the ESL context but this new wave of reports has me thinking that they might now be more broadly applicable.
These include:
Poems are serious literature but they are also small and self contained. For the ESL learner mastery of a poem this feels like a small but significant sort of victory — when they complete a poem they have read, and understood, an entire work of literature!
(I experienced this myself in reverse when I read my first poem in Classical Chinese—it is demotivating to have to chip away at a book in another language without a real feeling of progress. But even a novice can fully comprehend a poem in one study session. I remember my excitement the first time I understood an entire work that was written in by someone who lived thousands of years ago in the language in which they wrote it. It was very special, even if it was only a few lines long).
Because poems are often small, they are very good tools for learning and practicing skills you need for other types of writing and literature.
These can be very broad—like point of view, or diction—or they can be narrow, such as anastrophe, apostrophe, or parallelism.
In my experience it is common for the broadest literary techniques and devices (eg point of view) to be taught and tested in our classrooms, but it is rare for the more granular techniques to receive much attention.
There are many reasons for teaching them, but this might be the most important: words are tools. Literary techniques are used to layer meaning but also to manipulate emotion—and you are liable to find yourself manipulated if you cannot recognize and name what you hear/read.
You could teach these things through novels, short stories, essays, and so forth, but I find that in most of those cases sentence level literary techniques and devices fall to wayside as you try to help students trace the structure or a plot or of a complex argument.
They need to master these skills first, and the best way to learn them is with poetry (and to a lesser extent, speech/oratory).
There are two other skills that close reading of poetry can help foster that most of these reports on failing reading ability note are particular trouble points:
A) Understanding sentences with complex clauses and parsing metaphorical language.
On B) metaphorical language I will not say much as the use of poetry here should be very obvious, but on A) I’ll note the following: I would sometimes have students diagram the grammar structures of the poems they read.
And I would try to train them to isolate pronouns and identify what THIS, THAT, and IT they find is referring to. I would also ask them to identify the object of the various sentences of most of the poems they read—at least in the beginning.
In my experience many “hard” and “opaque” poems are not so hard and not so opaque once you identify the subject and object, which are many times implied instead of repeated in each line. This is also true for the complex sentences that tend to give students the most trouble in prose writing—especially 18th and 19th century prose.
Poetry is very allusive — and as such, teaching poems was an effective way to introduce many of the bedrock allusions of western literature, be they Greek myths, Bible stories and verses, or historical figures.
You can and should do this with other types of writing and oratory—essays, speeches, narrative non fiction, short short stories, novels—but again, it is simply easier to do this with poetry because of their economy.
Most lyric poetry concerns the big questions. English poetry has a few perennial obsessions: beauty, joy, love, death, character, and the unpredictability or irony of human life. These questions are interesting to teenagers. Teenagers have opinions on them.
It is not hard to juxtapose two or three poems on the same topic and use this as a springboard for student discussion. When this is done right, students will debate not only their own thoughts, but whether the metaphors and language used by the enlightens or confuses the issue.
Again: the over riding purpose of teaching so much poetry, and teaching it before you teach other things, is to train students how language and metaphor structure thought and channel emotion—and do this at the level of the word, clause, and sentence.
On the one hand, poetry gives you language to think about the big questions; on the other hand, learning to parse poetry teaches you how to analyze ideas at the level of syntax and semantics.
Finally, poetry can and should be performed and memorized. Poems can provide wisdom, strength, and solace when those things are needed most. It is worth storing some away in your soul.
Performing poems can be an engaging and fun class activity; rote memorization is missing from most English classes—most students are not exercising that part of their brain, and they should be.
Memorization will also prepare them to better understand much later literature.
Poetry was the most popular form of English literature from the Medieval ages up to about 1920. The speeches, political tracts, plays, and novels of those centuries are just soaked with poetic allusions and quotations—all of which will be better recognized if you, like the people then, have memorized some of it.
That is my basic argument. In my experience it worked. You can get 9th graders not capable of reading much to read a poem. the poems they read will grow in sophistication by degrees; once they have done this they will be in a good place for longer material.
