I don’t really get why all of our stories happen to be in prose form. Poetry can be intimidating, yes, and I know a lot of people have horrible memories of poetry from high school and so tend to shy away from it at all costs. They think Shakespeare or Chaucer and want to run and hide. I blame a lot of that on the school system, considering teachers present it to you like it’s the hardest stuff in the world and you’ll never be able to understand unless someone explains. But actually guys, poetry is not that hard. Ever heard of Occam’s Razor? It’s a theory that says the simplest explanation is usually the correct one, and he’s right. All of this stuff about poems observing flowers on rainy days standing as allegories to the Holocaust are utter nonsense ninety-nine percent of the time and started because of Reader Response Theory.
What’s that? Don’t worry my non-English Major friends - I shall explain. You see, in the early days of literary criticism, all anyone cared about was the author. They looked at the life of the author and the history of the time in which the author lived and used that to try and figure out what the author meant. These schools of thought were the largest, and for many years were the only ones out there. Then, inevitably, came what I like to call the Trend Swing. As in all things, literary critics rebelled against the system and went in the exact opposite direction. Thus came Death of the Author and Reader Response Theory. They took the author out of the proceedings entirely and stated that the true meaning of a poem is whatever the reader gleans from it. And since people are different and everyone interprets poems differently, the stated ‘no wrong answers in English class’ came about. With this nice little scholastic shield, people thought up crazy things like the above example, and because scholars like to make things ridiculously difficult and clever whenever possible they took to it like a fish in water and ran with these outrageous ideas so long it became a teaching cannon.
Guys, sometimes a blue curtain really is just a blue curtain.
But our years in school define lots of us, instilling instinctive fear and trembling at the mere thought of reading poetry. Irving? Longfellow? Gah! And don’t even get me started on [insert fear and trembling and mental breakdowns] Shakespeare!
Thankfully, I grew up reading Shakespeare and with a theatrically-minded mother, so I was largely immune to this conditioning. Which is why I look around at my fellow students and just feel depressed. An avid novel junky, I will be the first to proclaim the wonders of prose from my soapbox to any bored pedestrian who will listen. But there’s just something about well-written poetry. Refusing to read the Homer, Virgil, and Dante units was mainly because I read them all last year, but considering I could have then skipped the reading and done those weeks from memory (thus saving a lot of time to devote to a college students favorite pastime - procrastinating!) I wouldn’t touch them because they’re prose. Virgil is not meant to be prose. Epic poetry is not meant to be written in prose - period. I know poetry sends some people into convulsions, but it’s not that bad. Honestly!
If we’d all get over this taught fear of anything written in staggering lines instead of a neat left-to-right block the world would be so much bigger! Prose sounds stilted when it’s converted poems because poetry takes time to describe things. Yes, Homer goes off on a lot of tangents (I’ve read both his epics and yes, it bugged me too at times) but they’re lovely. Poetry has a way with words you don’t find anywhere else, a way to sweep you off your feet and show you the world from a new angle. That’s the entire point of poetry, and the defining mark of a good poem. Every time I read the words ‘converted to prose format’ in the notes to our readings I just get sad. There is nothing wrong with poetry, guys, and anything less is just disrespectful to the author and the work itself. It takes a lot to write an epic poem and get it all following the correct rhyme scheme and format.
Call me a snob if you want - considering my major it’s probably at least somewhat true.
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Hi Elizabeth, SO TRUE that people are convinced (often by high school) that they hate poetry. I included a few poetry units where the poetry is really THE thing (Hiawatha and then Kalevala, for example)... but I'm guessing they will get almost no readers (Hiawatha got one reader I think) because the prejudice against poetry runs deep. And then there's the whole translation dilemma. Vergil especially is ruined in translation; he is just such a Latin-for-the-Greek-speaking-Roman-literati type of poet. Ovid too, but less insanely so than Vergil. So, when it comes to the non-English authors to begin with, I'm not even sure verse translations are the best option. Poetry suffers badly in translation; it's just inevitable. Luckily, though, there's more than just epic poetry to ponder - the English nursery rhymes are in verse, and so are the Robin Hood ballads, and the people who chose those units last week were very happy with them, so I was happy about that too! And those are not translations: English verse for real!
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