It is an unfortunate fact that we have gone from the appreciation of poetry to a concerted attempt to discredit it, as though its very existence were a defamation of wholesome and unpretentious prose. This is almost certainly a consequence of the systematic vivisection of verse that is practiced in schools and colleges.

In the professor walks to his first class of the day, sets down the Oxford Book of English Poetry, and proceeds to draw upon the blackboard several esoteric symbols. He then turns to his mystified students, and tells them, with the air of a conjurer producing a rabbit, that the first line represents iambic pentameter and the second line represents anapestic hexameter. Then, to clinch the matter, he announces that the examples of the use of the iamb can be found in the plays of Shakespeare.

No further explanation is forthcoming; by the time his students have copied down his hieroglyphs, he has begun the lesson. Since the recitation of poetry is an unwanted relic of the repression of the Raj, he launches straight into the analysis of the first line, ascribing to each word innuendos which the poor poet never intended, pausing every minute or so to tell his class that this is why seventeenth-century writing is politically incorrect and has no place in public institutions. Under such circumstances, one can hardly blame the students for regarding metrical forms as rigid and inflexible straitjackets to which every poet from Euripides to Byron conformed under the threat of being disallowed to rhyme night with bright.

Some students may read the poetry again later, hoping to discover that there is more to Homer than unflinching adherence to dactylic hexameter. But after the eventful morning, they hear, not the sweeping grandeur of epic verse, but what “’ – – ‘ – –” would sound like if it were said aloud.

Poetry is like exotic cuisine: it must be tasted in complete ignorance of its finer nuances; only when one has experienced it and loved it enough to be unmoved by its earthy aspects should one even try to take it apart.

The unsullied enjoyment of verse is a lost skill. We cannot hear a poem recited without despising it for its very beauty. We deride Ode to a Nightingale as though it were conceited of Keats to put into his lines as much splendour as he heard in the song of the bird. What is the point, we ask, of Tennyson devoting so much time and energy to the Light Brigade when a two-line epitaph would have told the story just as well?

In all this we forget that Tennyson does not try to tell the story, which a history textbook can do in far greater detail. He tries to do what is often considered the exclusive province of the cinema: quicken the blood with the thunder of horses’ hooves and the roar of the cannon, rouse in the soul the fury and pathos of the battle-charger.

In the primitive age before Technicolour, people did not have the services of Dolby Digital and ILM to bring to life cannonades and clashing armies. They had, instead, the lines of the greatest wordsmiths of history; lines which, when allowed to go about their business without being placed in a Petri dish for observation, can make an audience writhe as effectively as an IMAX screen with 20,000 watts of surround sound. If those lines fail to do so today, it is because, in the roar of exploding cars and erupting volcanoes, and after the travails of high school English lessons, we cannot let the words do their work without trying to meet them halfway with a microscope and a bottle of Leishmann Stain.

Another blow to the appreciation of poetry has been the modern insistence on realism and meaning. These are two entirely separate issues; each by itself would be capable of prejudicing people against verse to a high degree. Together, the effect is ghastly.

Realism is far more restrictive a demand than adherence to meter or scansion. We would feel aggrieved to learn that Lines Written upon Westminster Bridge was in fact written in an armchair, as though our pleasure in reading the poem derived from the idea that Wordsworth, struck with a blunt instrument by his Muse as he was crossing the bridge, recovered from the blow and, instead of retiring to the comfort of his home or favourite pub, produced pen and ink from his pocket and proceeded to write the sonnet with the notebook on his knee and the inkwell perched precariously on the bridge railing. (The same people who would feel cheated to learn that the inkwell was on a desk would find fault with me for writing that line without ascertaining whether Westminster Bridge had railings in Wordsworth’s time, and if so, whether they were the type upon which an inkwell could be placed.)

It is distinctly unfair to say a great poem must be socially and morally meaningful. A great poem may plummet the unfathomed depths of the soul, but it is no less great for being lighthearted. It is harder to write a funny poem than a poignant one; Eliot and Carroll and all those masters of sheer nonsense do not deserve to be taken less seriously, as they often are, for their failure to seize the heartstrings and tie them in complicated lovers’ knots.

Most cruel of all is our habit of neglecting the nursery rhyme and, in its stead, providing children with books and verses that will serve to educate, elevate, and give a generally jaundiced outlook on the world. The child who smiled and shivered with Snow White is likely, despite all odds, to grow into a balanced individual; the child who read The Emancipated and Freethinking Democratically-Elected Female Ruler of Unspecified Ethnicity is likely to become the kind of person who will see a racial slur in a three-thousand-year-old Egyptian inscription and demand the abolition of the pyramids.

The most serious damage, though, is that we have forgotten the purpose of poetry itself; we look at it now as a highbrow way to express serious and unpleasant thoughts, failing to recognize that there is far more to a great poem than a brilliant idea alone.

There are fine essayists and there are fine poets, but they are two very different things. A verse must have beauty; it must, whether it moves people to laughter or tears, certainly move them to read it again and aloud. If it lacks that, it lacks what distinguishes it from prose. A great thought written down is a great essay. To turn it into a great poem requires more than writing it two words to the line.

That, when all is said and done, is the entirety of why Bacon is not Byron and Byron is not Bacon. Literature needs both, individually, not in an unsatisfactory amalgam. And that is the entirety of why politically relevant plays and short stories should be taken out of high school English textbooks and Shelley and Keats returned to them.

(Aditi is in B-School, where she divides her time between being the despair of all who teach her, catching up on the reading and movie-watching she missed in her first year, and giving people cause to question her mental health. She is currently contemplating starting an NGO to protect the rights of the apostrophe.)

{mosimage}

Also by

• Consultation Freeze - September 4th, 2006
• Need for Speed - August 28th, 2006
• Meals on wheels - August 14th, 2006
• Whither tomorrow - August 7th, 2006
• Bombay Dreams - August 7th, 2006

Share This