Poetry Should Not Just Be in Motion
Civitas, 12 January 2010
In a widely reported speech last week, former poet laureate Sir Andrew Motion urged schools to reinstate the rote learning of classic poetry. He said: “Learning by heart has got a very bad reputation of being dusty and putting people off poetry. But if you learn poetry by heart… it allows it to become interesting.”
What was really newsworthy about Sir Andrew’s speech is less what he called for, than that it should have been found newsworthy.
The idea that schoolchildren can derive huge benefit from having to learn classic poetry by heart is hardly novel. Back in the 1980s, an earlier poet laureate Ted Hughes made exactly the same point when he said:
‘In English students are at sea, awash in the rubbish and incoherence of the jabber in the sound-waves – unless they have some internal sort of anchor/template of standards… What kids [need]… is a handful of… blocks of achieved and exemplary language. When they know by heart 15 pages of Robert Frost, a page of Swift’s ‘Modest Proposal’… etc etc, they have the guardian angel installed behind the tongue… a great sheet anchor in the maelstrom of linguistic behaviour.’
A century earlier, the requirement that schoolchildren memorise and recite poetry received the strong support of Matthew Arnold who combines the distinction of having simultaneously been, not only Oxford Professor of Poetry, but an elementary schools inspector.
When English literature became a compulsory part of the elementary school curriculum in 1871, about the only thing in the new regulations to Arnold’s liking was the inclusion of a ‘recitation exercise’. This exercise required schoolchildren to learn by heart each year so many lines of poetry and recite them before the schools inspector at the end of year tests on whose results depended a large part of teachers’ pay.
As Arnold was to put it in his annual report for 1872:
‘”Recitation” is the special subject which produces at present, so far as I can observe, most good.’
Arnold returned to the same subject in his annual report for 1880 by observing there that:
‘Good poetry… tend[s] to form the soul and character; it tends to beget a love of beauty and of truth in alliance together, and it inspires emotion so helpful in making principles operative. Hence its extreme importance to all of us; but in our elementary schools its importance seems to me to be… quite extraordinary.’
That the assertion today of such elementary truths should be considered a major item of news reveals how far this country has fallen prey to the Philistinism that Arnold so feared would be its fate, unless high culture, ‘ the best that has been thought and said’, could be disseminated as widely as possible through schooling. The time for a major reappraisal of our educational priorities has surely arrived.
This won’t happen, of course, so long as schools are subject to an inspectorate which, following the inspection of a school, could send out a letter to its pupils from the lead inspector which ran:
‘Your headteacher, along with her team, is working tirelessly to ensure your school makes your experience in education enjoyable and successful. You can of course contribute to this by attending regularly, practicing [sic] your grammar and spelling and working as hard as you can in all lessons to achieve your best.’