Poetry Nowadays, we literary critics are sai

Poetry
    Good morning. In today’s lecture, we shall discuss poetry.
    We literary critics often get accused of not talking enough about actual literature. On one’s blog, that is probably forgivable, partly because it generally seems more pressing to talk about what is happening currently in the world than to do long close-readings. Writing about literature in a meaningful way every day is hard!
    Still, here is an excerpt from the final lecture I gave in one of my classes this fall. Maybe it will give readers who do other things in life some idea of what people like me do in the classroom. And for my colleagues in English, I’m posting this with a request for feedback and criticisms.
    This fall I taught an introduction to the major course we have called "Working With Texts". Though the course is supposed to have a particular focus(on developing close reading skills and the methods of criticism), how we teach it is actually up to us. I decided to do a unit on each of the three literary forms—poetry, fiction, and drama. With the poetry,(1)I used an old textbook called Understanding Poetry, edited by Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren. I had found this anthology in a used bookstore, and was really impressed by both the selection of poems and the analyses of many of the poems included. I find this better than the usual poetry anthologies. With those,(2)students are highly dependent on my(subjective)readings of the poems. In Brooks and Warren, studying poetry is at least partly a matter of objective comprehension. They also helpfully had sections of poems without analysis, which are necessary if you want to get students to apply lessons they learned from the textbook editors to something else.(3)In fiction, I decided to go with just short stories—no novels. Novels in a course like this can bog you down. Swamped with short story anthologies, I went with Updike’s The Best American Short Stories of the Century, probably a little arbitrarily(it worked out just fine). And finally,(4)I used a more-or-less generic drama anthology, edited by R. S. Gwynn, for the drama section of the course. There are several good drama texts out there,(5)but this one seemed to be a bit cheaper than some others. And the introduction is helpful.
     (6)I also used a course blog to get students to find out more about the authors we were reading. For the most part they used simple web searches. Some students took it a little further, and wrote more opinionated or personalized comments on the blog. It was moderately successful. The students didn’t comment much on each other’s entries, and I got the sense that they weren’t reading each other’s entries all that much either, so some of the functionality of the blog format might have been lost. Maybe next time around I’ll try and evolve the uses of the course blog a bit more.
    "Working With Texts" is not meant to be a definitive course, in the sense of "I’ll never look at a work of literature the same way again. " Studying English and American literature is an incremental process—you’ll only know it all once you’ve read lots and lots of books.(7)Over the course of a good English major experience,(8/9)you should read upwards of 100 novels, 300 -400 poems, and maybe 50 plays. But even if you’ve read that many books(and I mean, you’ve read and understood every page—you’ve given a real block of time to each text),(10)you’ve actually only scratched the surface of major literature. For each author you read, there are likely to be 10 other authors from the same period you haven’t read. And the same goes for even the authors you have read—there are ten other books waiting for you. The point is, English literature is very, very big.
    Unlike, say, an Engineering major, you don’t graduate with an English major as a capable expert in literature.(11)A graduating English major is probably better described as an exceptionally well-prepared novice, someone who might be able to pick up a novel or a poem from virtually any period, and make sense of it. Also,(12/13)English majors have a pretty good sense of how to continually find new things to read, which might capture their interest. It’s partly a matter of recognizing names and titles in the library or bookstore, but it’s also the ability to size up new things you haven’t heard of, that you might just happen to pick up.
    Though we did do some close technical work at various points in the term, the course was not meant to be highly technical in nature. We did the most technical work with poetry and poetics, and the reason for that is that poetry—especially poetry from early periods really requires it. The romanticized notion that you pick up a poem and are vaguely moved by its contents doesn’t hold up for any except the easiest poetry. The best poetry involves the reader(or the listener)in an intensified experience of language itself. It can’t be read casually.
     (14)I believe it’s extremely important that English majors develop some familiarity with the incredible diversity and complexity of English language poetry.(15)The idea of a serious awareness of the inner workings of poetry is kind of a dying art in English departments around the country, and its decline suggests that poetry as a whole may be in a little trouble. In earlier eras, people gathered around campfires to hear poetry recited. People memorized poems: people felt it in a very natural, organic way. Now, however, it’s not always clear what the role of poetry is for ordinary people. How many people actually seek it out? How many people would read poems if their English teachers didn’t require them to do so? I do hope that you will realize the importance of poetry and enjoy it during your whole life! That’s the main aim of today’s lecture. Thank you!