I spend a lot of my time reading and also teaching people to read poems. Occasionally someone suggests to me that the reading of a poem either cannot or should not be taught. The argument for the impossibility of teaching someone how to read a poem might begin from a definition of poetry that attributes to it some fundamentally human or idiosyncratic nature, that either appeals to everyone by virtue of their common humanity, or can only appeal to anyone by virtue of her individuality.

The argument against the propriety of teaching poetry probably stems from epistemological or ethical assumptions: either one contaminates the reader’s ‘innocent’ interpretation by schooling him in artificial word-play (‘rhetoric’) or sophisticated interpretative techniques (really just a form of the earlier objection), or one spends one’s own and another’s time and energy in a way that might more ethically be spent on something of common or social benefit. I worry about these arguments every time a student walks through my door, not because I am unsatisfied with my own response to them, but because I fear that the student may not know why she is doing what she is doing – and if she did, would want to stop doing it immediately.

Should you bury your talent? If not , for whose sake should you trade it?

I also worry about these problems when I read Varsity, mainly because it seems to me that poetry has become in our time a part of intellectual and communal life that is preserved marginally, among the specialists, and does not inform the thoughts, and the structures of thoughts, that occur to people in the everyday negotiation of their ethical, political, psychological, metaphysical (and other) problems. So I thought I might use this space to suggest some reasons why poetry can and should be taught, not to one person or a few people, but to everyone. Perhaps you might want to teach yourself.

The first thing we need to do is to agree on what a poem is. These days, almost anything made of words (and sometimes things that aren’t made of words) can be called poetry, by someone. Certainly the words of poetry no longer need to rhyme or to fit a fixed metre, as once it was agreed, among English poets, that they did; though, again, metre and rhyme – or phonic effects, generally – are tools available to poets in the construction of poems. If you found this passage in a newspaper, would you consider it a poem? “In Buckinghamshire hedgerow the birds nesting in the merged green density, weave little bits of string and moths and feathers and thistledown, in parabolic concentric curves.” Probably not. But Marianne Moore quotes it, in full, in the first four lines of one of my favourite poems in English (‘The Icosasphere’).

If the same verbal material can be both non-poetic and also successfully integrated into a poem, then perhaps it is not the material of the words, at all, that makes the poem; perhaps it is the poet’s intention behind the disposition of the words, or the reader’s assumptions about the ways in which the words ought to be attended to, or construed. It was once argued by the English aristocrat, soldier, and poet Philip Sidney (in his Apology for Poetry, c. 1582) that what made a poem a poem was the combination of the poet’s moral and didactic intention, on the one hand, with her skill in the creation of “notable images”. Sidney is so far my exceller in all things that I won’t presume to contradict him, but many practising poets today would probably laugh at the idea that they were discharging a morally didactic function. And maybe Sidney was joking, anyway.

It might be better, possibly, to take a more contemporary witness. Elizabeth Bishop writes in her poem, ‘Poem’, about a little painting of Nova Scotia conserved as a family heirloom, but rarely regarded. It shows some houses, a meadow, cows, an iris and geese, all in a suggestive but not delineative style; as the narrator comments, storm clouds are ‘the artist’s specialty’. The speaker of the poem lets an eye wander over the discrete elements of the painting until suddenly, at the head of the third stanza, a clap of surprise throws up the poem’s matter: ‘Heavens, I recognize the place, I know it!’

This short poem is what poets and critics call an ekphrasis, or a description of a visual within a verbal work of art, and like most ekphraseis it implicitly compares the supposed visual with the verbal perspective, likening them but also distinguishing them. The poem also brings its speaker and the painter of the picture into a coordinated relation, and one that seems to say something about what a reader might take from a poem (and thus what a poem, with respect to its reader, might be). It ends, speaking of the painter:

I never knew him. We both knew this place,
apparently, this literal small backwater,
looked at it long enough to memorize it,

our years apart. How strange. And it’s still loved,
or its memory is (it must have changed a lot).
Our visions coincided – “visions” is
too serious a word – our looks, two looks:
art “copying from life” and life itself,
life and the memory of it so compressed
they’ve turned into each other. Which is which?
Life and the memory of it cramped,
dim, on a piece of Bristol board,
dim, but how live, how touching in detail
– the little that we get for free,
the little of our earthly trust. Not much.
About the size of our abidance
along with theirs: the munching cows,
the iris, crisp and shivering, the water
still standing from spring freshets,
the yet-to-be-dismantled elms, the geese.

It is typical of Bishop to seem careless while being precise: ‘“visions” is’ is grammatically unsound, for example, until you recall the citation marks, and remember that the word, like the painting, is a sign for something – here, itself. And those two looks – not, it turns out, the look of the painter and that of the poet, but the two looks, natural and artificial, ‘life and the memory of it cramped’. Bishop suggests in this poem that a poem is a two-looks thing, a cramped thing, the interactive system of perception and memory. The reader of the poem, who will likely be neither the painter nor the poet, nonetheless still participates in the two-looks dynamic, because although both the painter and the poet have their ‘specialty’, this is a universal experience, one we have all had – the recognition of a coinciding, a coincidence. “Heavens, I recognize the place, I know it!” (Don’t be too careless; reality is precise!)

The echo that Bishop leaves dangling – very nearly a rhyme – between “coincided” and that strange, strange (dim, dim) word, “abidance”, is one of the precise-casual paths into (incide, inside) the poem. What remains or ‘abides’ of us, when we like the elms have been dismantled, is our similarity, and not our distinction; that old paradox of the Shakespeare sonnet, that only that universal part of the particular can survive, here exhales melancholically from Bishop’s lost but lingering geese.

If this is what poetry is – a model of likeness, like to itself – can it be taught? Should it be taught?

Does a poem, then, thrust our consciousness up against similarity or likeness itself, as a way of forcing us to confront, in all of its painfulness, the alien survival of that most universal, and least particular, part of ourselves? (“Along with theirs.”) Is the recognition that we achieve in the reading and study of poetry an analogue for our metaphysical condition? The consequences of Bishop’s poesis of humility are many, and this short article cannot even aspire to read this one poem’s meaning fully. But I would like to suggest, at least, that the model of cognition and recognition that she presents as the work of ‘Poem’ is an exemplary one. (Obviously, by this definition, many kinds of texts – not just versified ones – would, and should, be considered as poems.)

If this is what poetry is – a model of likeness, like to itself – can it be taught? Should it be taught? The skill of reading poetry is effectively that of writing poetry. The skill of writing poetry, like that of painting, or of making a good sandwich (ut panini poesis), may contain some furious elements only achievable by direct infusion from the muses, but there are technical aspects that can, and must, be learned if the writer of poetry (who reads her works into existence, after all) is to imitate the constructedness of nature, of social or political life, of cognition, of what-you-will.

Surely only the perverse would argue that having more tools for understanding the world around you impoverishes your experience of it; similarly, having more tools for the reading and plumbing of poetry can only enrich the experience of its significance. An understanding of Bishop’s ‘Poem’, for example, will be substantially enriched by reading it alongside Matthew 25:14-30, the parable of the talents; it becomes obvious, when conferring these two texts, why the painting of ‘Poem’ is likened to “an old-style dollar bill”, why its creator went over sea “back to England”, and why the narrator of the poem worries about the “collateral” and unprofitable nature of the painting’s, and the poem’s, social circulation – all of which connections throw even further weight onto that culminatory word, “abidance”. Understanding poems requires learning, in the same way that humanity requires it.

But the really interesting question – the ‘should’ question – is whether you, the reader, should be taking time away from your lab-bench, your social life, your sleep, your computer, your generous and charitable acts of human kindness, to worry about poetry. Like no other art that we have, the art of words can immerse you in an aesthetic experience at the same time that it forces you to witness yourself experiencing. The poetic mode is for this reason the pre-eminent mode for the experience and understanding (the cognition and the recognition) of value.

To learn about the two-looksness of skill and inspiration, of memory and perception, of you and me, is to learn how to do and be in the world. Should you bury your talent? If not, for whose sake should you trade it? Moral philosophy demands, how should I live? A poem, like the master returning from a far country, demands that the reader both do, and reckon with that doing as it is done. The special recursiveness of poetic cognition makes us all into artworks (ut persona poesis) as well as readers, impelling us with one look toward a universality that might be moral, and with another look toward the vanishing experience that we might call a self – cast into outer darkness with weeping and gnashing of teeth. Perhaps Sidney wasn’t too far off.

Dr Andrew Zurcher is a lecturer in the department of English