In our egalitarian and democratic societies, we expect and want all good things to be available to all people if they intend to have them. In fact, in the world of personal development you can achieve what you believe in (paraphrasing one of its main prophets, Napoleon Hill); and we know that poetry is a good thing, so can everyone, if taught well enough, be a poet? I spent a large part of my early career assuming it could be done. I was a high school English teacher for 15 years, teaching thousands of students and writing several successful how-to texts.

But back to my central question: they ought It might be possible to be taught to write poetry, but can it be done? Can they be taught to be poets? Lord Chesterfield said: “I am quite sure that any man of common understanding can, through culture, care, attention and labour, become whatever he pleases, except a great poet”, which unequivocally denies the possibility That a poet can be is done, although this does not mean that a poet is born. What I have come to believe is that a poet is a poet by vocation. In fact, he is called, and as with the famous words of Jesus in another context, “Many are called but few are chosen.” Why is this? And does this invalidate the teaching of poetry? Also, and more personally, were my 15 years of teaching poetry a complete waste of time? To answer in reverse order: No, my 15 years of teaching poetry were necessary and extremely beneficial, although I can’t name one person who is still writing poetry today. What I can do is name several people who have written or produced books or literature in one form or another, and many, many more than ever have forgotten their love of poetry as a result of that teaching. So waste of time, definitely not: I have outfitted and trained thousands of students. And so, for other poetry teachers, whether at the elementary school or graduate level, there are skills and disciplines to learn, and they need to be learned before the full fruition of poetry manifests.

We need to remember that even the great poet begins as an apprentice; he starts off writing a lot of rubbish and usually continues to write inferior stuff for the rest of his life. To mention the greatest of all poets, Shakespeare: it can hardly be denied that his output was wildly inconsistent throughout his career, a fact commented on at the time by his friend Ben Jonson, scrutinized in depth 150 years later by his greatly admired, Dr. Samuel Johnson, and alluded to by commentators ever since. How is it possible that a man who was so inspired by the Muse could also produce such hodgepodge? One is reminded of Socrates’ comment: “I soon realized that poets do not compose their poems with real knowledge, but with innate talent and inspiration, like seers and prophets who also say many things without understanding what they are saying.” Perhaps Socrates is exaggerating the inspiration a bit here, though it certainly seems to be so when a poet is in full swing. The key to living up to the lofty description of Socrates is the long and arduous preparation that is essential if the poet is to become a suitable conductor for the Muse. This is where the teaching comes in.

Oh! But I’m getting ahead of myself: the Muse? Inspiration? What does this have to do with teaching poetry? All. First of all, what we can teach the student are techniques, we can introduce models, we can unravel the complexity and show how poetry works on multiple levels of language. If we are very clever, we can get to the point where we can show the student that the poem, well understood, is not about a specific thing, or if it is, that is secondary; what is important is the language and how it works, not how the logic works. This matter of how language works can, curiously, go much deeper into the heart of reality, which is emotional, than any rational discourse. Sidney J Harris said this: “Pupils are more like oysters than sausages.” We see from this that the art of the teacher, then, is not to produce sausages, closed products full of dubious nutrition (like a National Curriculum in the UK or Common Core in the US) but to be like an oyster: to allow the oyster opens to reveal the pearl within. This requires patience and what John Keats called “negative capacity.”

The negative ability is not to pursue facts and certainties, but to let the imagination do its work; In other words, let the Muse come in and speak, because true poetry is inspired (or in-spirited), which literally means aspirated. It is of divine origin, and anyone who has written real poetry knows this to be true, for the mind goes into a curious state of excited passivity and the poem writes itself. Sure, it can be edited later and incubated for even longer, but the essence of the true poem is that it is inspired and therefore seems to come in one complete, enveloping movement (hence Wordsworth’s point that poetry is “emotion remembered in tranquility” – note that e-motion means out of motion. Poets have tasted this experience, and the fact that they can feel that they are not actually writing the poem from the beginning. Now this, clearly, it is difficult to teach, because it is not a skill but a quality or even attitude of being; there is a faith, a trust in waiting for the Muse – trust which in Latin means “with faith” – that is transcendental; in fact They, as in the case of Samuel, the biblical prophet, are waiting for the poets to call to hear the words that come to them, and they are not thinking, “What should I write?” because that would be prose. They are transcribing the words that call them At least they’re in their A It all happens to us many times that what we thought The divine words turn out to be mere verse, or worse, mere prose, or worst of all, below the verse and prose, mere nonsense.

But let’s not stray from the verse: the verse is good, sometimes outstanding, even if in the end it doesn’t reach the heights of poetry. And this can and should be taught. Give me good verses any day rather than free verses, which are mostly nothing and whose essential characteristic is ugliness, the opposite of the Muse. As an extended sidebar, the early 20th century English writer Hilaire Belloc commented: “There is (as the greatest of the ancient Greeks discovered) a certain indissoluble Trinity of Truth, Beauty and Goodness. You cannot deny or attack one of these three without at least at the same time denying or attacking the others, therefore, with the advance of this new and terrible enemy against the Faith and all the civilization that the Faith produces, comes not only a contempt for beauty , but also a hatred towards her; after this appears a contempt and hatred for virtue”. The poet José García Villa, whose book I recently reviewed, put it much more succinctly: “To be art, form is obligatory.” And we can teach the form and, by doing so, increase the appreciation of beauty in the world.

However, to better understand the difference between poetry and verse in an absolute sense, we must consider two examples that Charles Williams, part of the Inkling literary group that included CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien, gave in his wonderful essay on great poetry. He invites us to contrast this excerpt from the 19th century poet TB Macaulays Scales of ancient Rome:

It became round, as if it did not design

Those heathen rows to see;

Nothing told Lars Porsena,

He said nothing to Sexto

with this short passage from the end of Book 5 of John Milton’s lost paradise:

Thus spoke the Serafín Abdiel, faithfully found,

Among the faithful faithful only he;

Among innumerable impassive fakes,

Unshakeable, unassured, unterrifying.

Paraphrasing Williams, we could say that both passages deal with the same theme: courage or heroism in the face of overwhelming odds, but clearly Macaulay’s is verse and Milton’s is great poetry. What is the difference? And the difference is entirely experiential: we read The Ballad and think: “How funny to behave like that; how elegant; isn’t that so brave?” while we read the Milton and feel what heroism is: we enter the world of sheer courage and the pulse of it is felt in our bloodstream; in fact, he gives us the creeps, like, say, Shakespeare when the ghost of Hamlet appears and I could go on. We admire Horatio, but we become Abdiel, “albeit single”, as the power and sound of the language (rhetoric) makes us fully identify with the character and the situation. True poetry, then, is always a remarkable achievement because it always involves humanity’s primary imagination coming together as it enters into an experience or situation and expresses its inner reality. It is worth commenting here as well on IA Richards’s brilliant observation of his famous The principles of literary criticism that “The meter for the most difficult and delicate expressions is the almost inevitable medium.” Certainly Macaulay has meter, but it is of the most basic and sweeping kind; Milton’s meter is sinuous, flexible (see how the caesura changes from line to line), insistent, and overlapping with a whole host of other sound patterns; one could write an entire essay just on the technical achievements of these four lines; but I doubt, reading it, that Milton composed with precisely those technicalities in mind. Rather, the lines came to him, they flowed as the Muse spoke. And because he had spent a lot of time reading poetry and practicing verse writing when he was younger, he didn’t have to try too hard to concentrate all these technical points while the Voice of the poem spoke to him. This, by way of analogy, is like becoming an expert cyclist: once you’re that good, you no longer have to consciously think about balance, handling, pedaling, or any other aspect of cycling—mind and body merge. move in one effortless motion to guide the bike to its destination.

Here, then, is a reason for teaching poetry: not that it produces poetry, but that it prepares the person who is called to be a poet to be fully optimized, mature enough, capable enough, and technical enough, for when the Muse really does. I talked. or better yet, transmitted. Furthermore, the teaching of poetry, where we are actually dealing with poetry, promotes an appreciation of beauty and, as the late English screenwriter Christopher Bryant said, “Because beauty brings joy.” So this is worth doing whether or not a particular person is called to be a poet. And let’s not also forget the sheer therapeutic effect of writing, be it poetry or otherwise; that is important.

Finally, then, whether or not we can teach poetry writing, we must remember what contemporary English writer Patrick Harpur observed: “By humbly bowing our heads to the muse and losing ourselves in her imagery, we paradoxically gain greater freedom.” and meaning, and come to know what it is to be our true selves.