Recommended Reading: Education by Poetry

Robert Frost gave a talk he called "Education by Poetry" to students at Amherst College. He subsequently revised the talk which was then published, in February 1931, in the Amherst Graduates' Quarterly. In the talk, he refers extensively to metaphor. I often misremember the title of the essay as "Education by Metaphor". My favorite part of this essay is:

All metaphor breaks down somewhere. That is the beauty of it. It is touch and go with the metaphor, and until you have lived with it long enough you don’t know when it is going. You don’t know how much you can get out of it and when it will cease to yield. It is a very living thing. It is as life itself.

Each of us is capable of inventing metaphorical relationships of our own. Is a tree in summertime a piece of broccoli for a giant? If you think a tree is such a food, you could find words to express that. And so on.

Toward the end of his essay, Frost talks about four beliefs. It is much more difficult to invent a belief than it is to invent a metaphor. Careful use of metaphor; i.e., careful use of language, will help us to better understand our beliefs. As one seeks to better understand one's beliefs, one begins to see the importance of one's own attitude toward each thing held in one's thoughts. Does language serve me? Do I serve ideas I didn't invent?

During his career, Frost saw the rise of New Criticism. I often wonder what Frost thought of their insistence on the preeminence of the text and their deliberate turning away from any significance the biography of the poet might have. I don't know that he had any interest in it one way or another.

And when the so-called Confessional Poets began doing their thing, what did Frost make of that?

Into this soup of thoughts I'd like to throw the notion of intuition. In particular, the sense of what's possible. Each of us has a sense of what's possible. This sense grows as we continue growing. We have a sense of what's possible not only for our own lives but for the communities in which we participate. Our sense of what's possible will tell us when the community is enervated, just as someone familiar with metaphor will be able to tell when the metaphor breaks down.

I suspect, however, that a community participant who senses that the possibilities for her community are somehow limited is somehow unable to use language sufficiently well to share with others in her community her concerns and ideas regarding the future of the community. And if she is unable to communicate intelligently regarding such matters with people in her community, what will she be able to say about those limited possibilities to anyone outside her community? And so her anxiety grows.

I started out with the idea of recommending Frost's essay to readers. And I do make that recommendation. But now I want to bring in another line of thinking. Recently I listened to arguments by Ken Robinson for creativity in education. "What if," Mr. Robinson asks, "we regard creativity in education as highly as we regard literacy?" His remarks have been recorded and posted at YouTube.



The video runs about 8min 20sec. I thought it was easy to listen to.

So where am I going with all this? I am saying that it seems to me that the activity of meeting informally to read and discuss poems is a profoundly healthy and liberating activity. I will develop reasons and arguments for this but my sense of what's possible tells me there is an abundance of rich possibilities here. To organize such informal occasions around the birthdays of poets is to simply find one way of organizing.

Similie & Metaphor

Sharon Olds talks candidly about metaphor and similie and her autobiographical work in this video posted at the Facebook page of the Academy of American Poets by the staff at www.poets.org. The video runs approximately 3 min 15 sec.

Thistles

Thistles

by Ted Hughes

Against the rubber tongues of cows and the hoeing hands of men
Thistles spike the summer air
And crackle open under a blue-black pressure.

Every one a revengeful burst
Of resurrection, a grasped fistful
Of splintered weapons and Icelandic frost thrust up

From the underground stain of a decayed Viking.
They are like pale hair and the gutterals of dialects.
Every one manages a plume of blood.

Then they grow grey like men.
Mown down, it is a feud. Their sons appear
Stiff with weapons, fighting back over the same ground.

"Thistles" by Ted Hughes from Collected Poems.© Faber & Faber. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)

from The Writer's Almanac accessed 7/20/08

Learn more about Ted Hughes and get a second opinion at Ted Hughes.

This poem caught me immediately this morning. I'd never read Hughes' poem before, but years ago I wrote a poem that included thistles in a similie. I don't have the full poem, but the part with the thistles was as follows:

Let's visit again the nation of heroes

along the flooded Yangtze

where thistles thrive like prayers in noble hearts

acknowledging enough, enough and too much ...

I like the similie, but instead of 'noble' a word like 'stoic,' 'trusting' or 'naive' would be better. Maybe even 'innocent.' It's hard to put an adjective in there without implying some sort of judgment of the people there. But then, the 'nation of heroes' phrase has really already done that, hasn't it. Clearly this is the work of an inexperienced poet.

But back to Hughes' poem. Apparently thistles are regarded in the UK much as they are in the US. That is, they are weed-like nuisances that are better left marginalized at the sides of railroad tracks, highways and other places that don't get landscaped. And thistles are reputed to be rough to the touch, and their flowers are not as lovely as for instance roses, chrysanthemums, fleur-de-lys, etc. But they are hardy and, as Hughes points out, they keep coming back, much like weeds, despite our efforts to remove them from our landscapes. It is this 'background knowledge' of thistles that enables the success of this poem. Someone who doesn't know anything about thistles might wonder at the violence Hughes associates with the plant in this poem. What, for instance, is 'blue-black pressure,' and do the plants really 'crackle'? I like the notion of the cow eating the thistle. The mammal, a species much different than the plant, casually destroying the 'revengeful burst/Of resurrection', the 'grasped fistful/Of splintered weapons and Icelandic frost thrust up' as it inexorably grazes its way through lunch - this could be elaborated on in a number of directions.