Poetic Diet

New Zealand Listener, Volume 5, Issue 122, 24 October 1941, Page 5

Poetic Diet

:, HERE’S the crux of the matter. You have at school a magnificent opportunity of ruining or establishing a child’s literary tastes for ever. Feed him with the wrong stuff and he very rightly gets literary indigestion. Bring him to literature the right way and he’s yours for ever. Success lies partly in the approach and partly in the books you give him to read. " Areopagitica" is one of the noblest pieces of English prose, but the first form think it’s pretty stuffy, "Paradise Lost" may be our greatest epic but the twelve-year-old would prefer the " Ancient Mariner" or the "Lays of Ancient Rome," or something from Kipling. You can no more force a literary taste than you can force a swing at golf. You can’t in effect say to a child: "This poem is good.. Professor Saintsbury says it’s good. The Cambridge History of English Literature says it’s good. Learn it off by heart by Thursday, and if you don’t you will write it out three times." If the victim doesn’t know the meaning of the poem, if the mode of thought is in advance of his years, all your work is wasted and another poem has been added to the graveyard of murdered verses, and another man will say in adult life: " Poetry’s beyond me." B: Quite so. But there’s more in it than that. If we’re going to cultivate genuine literary taste, I think we must be a good deal more candid and understanding. We must regard the classics with much less awe, and respect the opinion of pupils if they don’t care for these writers. What we should do is to try to get pupils to like something that is good, but not everything that, is good.- ("Can Literary Appreciation Be Taught?" A discussion with Professor I, A. Gordon, Professor of English, Victoria University College, 2YA, October 13.)