Educators are conscious of the value of exposing students to great works of poetry, but the teaching of poetry often lacks a key ingredient: orality. The standard teaching in high school and university classes presents a poem as an abstract object on a page, encouraging students to see poems as riddles to be solved. But history shows that poems are best understood and taught as oral performances, using all the techniques of interpretation and communication of a great actor. When students encounter a virtuosic performance—especially a recitation—they can experience poems more immediately and in a way that resonates with their basic nature.
My own experience as a student taught me the insufficiency of the ordinary textual method. The class was British literature, the poet John Donne. I remember seeing page after page of elegant, clipped lines of verse. Blank spaces surrounded the skeletal stanzas, as if to say, “Focus on these, they are important.” I remember enigmatic sentences—“Our ease, our thrift, our honor, and our day, / Shall we, for this vaine Bubles shadow pay?” and strange rhymes—“west” and “based”— which I could not hear with the ear of my mind. The way we struggled over meanings in seminar suggested a poem was a puzzle, something for philosophy majors. I didn’t recognize the blood and earth I’d seen in my favorite novels—Lonesome Dove, The Lord of the Rings, The Big Sleep, even A Game of Thrones. I began to wonder if I’d chosen the wrong major.
In my second year of college I discovered a YouTube channel, Spoken Verse, hosted by the excellent Tom O’Bedlam, who read classic poems in his characteristic throaty drawl. It was a miracle. I remember his recitation of Tennyson’s “Ulysses,” really hearing the voice of the speaker and the author. Here were character, drama, images, the sweep of epic travel, the rhetoric of great power—all carried on the vital instrument of voice. For me, the difference between reading a poem and hearing a poem read aloud was the difference between the description of a man and meeting him yourself.
In an essay called “The Fire of Life,” philosopher Richard Rorty discussed the tragic news that he had inoperable pancreatic cancer. The only discipline that helped him in his spiritual struggle was poetry, specifically poetry recited from memory. He reflected on the calm he felt after reciting some lines by Swinburne: “I found comfort in those slow meanders and those stuttering embers. I suspect that no comparable effect could have been produced by prose.” Rorty’s emphasis on the power of rhythm and rhyme suggests that what a poem provides is not content to be learned or meanings to be understood but something else. He longed for more poetry, he says “not because I fear having missed out on truths that are incapable of statement in prose. There are no such truths; there is nothing about Death that Swinburne and Landor knew but Epicurus and Heidegger failed to grasp.” Rorty suggests that he suffers for having learned too few poems for the same reason he suffers for having made too few close friends: he missed out on intimacies, on experiences.
Rorty’s analysis and confession is intense and moving, especially in light of his death not long after writing the essay. To his account of the difference between prose and poetry, I add the distinctiveness of not only of reading but hearing poetry, which makes it the vital experience it is.
Before a poem is a text, it is a performance, evidenced by its long connection with music. The Ancient Greek mousikḗ”—the origin of our word music, meaning the arts of the Muses—meant both the lyrics of musical songs and instrumental harmonies themselves. In our own context, contemporary spoken word or “slam” poetry exists on a continuum with rap and singing. The sharp distinction between poetry—something written down with an internal ordering rhythm of its own—and music that is accompanied by lyrics is narrow and scholastic. A wider historical view shows that the most exquisitely “poetic” compositions, such as Horace’s, were perhaps put to music, that many medieval and early modern poets had musical training, and that the reading aloud of poems was an ordinary method of presentation into the twentieth century.
Like music, poetry provides a certain structured experience, a procession of sounds that have distinct physiological and psychological effects on us. It operates in words and concepts, but also beyond them. In all cultures, poetry has its roots in music, and something of the profound wordlessness of music’s meaning lingers in its rhythms and rhymes. Poetry wouldn’t exist without words and concepts, to be sure, but its power lies in the performance and usually nowhere else.
The best example of this phenomenon is John Milton’s Lycidas (1637). Written to commemorate the death of Edward King, Milton’s classmate at Christ’s College, Cambridge. Lycidas cannot possibly tell its hearers anything they do not already know. Milton’s poem was published in a commissioned volume alongside other memorial poems on the same subject. In all these poems, expressions of sadness are buttressed by ejaculations of Christian joy at King’s new immortality and of God’s providential care for those left behind.
As doctrine, Lycidas expresses no more than this. But what a poem it is! About fifteen minutes long when spoken aloud, Lycidas is a crystallization of the ritualistic and oratorial aspects of poetry. Milton’s speaker creates an impeccably solemn atmosphere, appropriate for lamentation, invests his subject with a Renaissance declinist sense of the gradual breakdown and ruin of the world, the sense that time and death are eating away all public and personal meanings. The “grim wolf” of Antichrist is eating out the heart of Christendom, just as the flowers and nymphs of classical poetry are wilting and dying.
Two-thirds of the way through the poem, Milton raises this sense of collapse to its apogee. The speaker brings the body of Lycidas—his poetic, pastoral name for Edward King—down to “the bottom of the monstrous world”, under the “whelming tide”, “wash’d far away, where’er thy bones are hurl’d”. We are made to feel and live the utter disintegration of meaning represented by Lycidas’s death, or by any promising person’s death, only for Milton to say what he might have said at any time: that just as the “day-star” sinks “in his ocean-bed”, Lycidas has gone down low so that he can “mount high” and live the eternal joy of God’s blessed saints. Whatever our beliefs, we more easily hear these bright assurances after we have experienced the terrors of death and meaninglessness Milton conjures before our sight. Consolatory imagery floods the frame: imaginary dolphins waft Lycidas’s body to his home shore, the lazing immortal Lycidas washes his “oozy locks” in the heavenly streams, while the poet, his work completed, quietly goes home.
What is the meaning of Lycidas? First, it is a statement of the triumph of Christ over sin and death and the decline of the world. More intricate and hidden meanings abound, such as the peculiar protection of England for God’s purposes, or the vast insecurity of the poet, who has sacrificed so much for the immortality of fame, only to be confronted by the possibility of early death. But in a sense, these qualities of the poem are secondary. The primary quality of Lycidas is its own evolution—first a ceremony of loss, then a holocaust of meaninglessness, completed by an ecstasy of hope and order—a powerful evocation of contrasting states of mind and feeling. To experience Lycidas is more like enjoying the great compositions of Bach or Handel than reading a treatise about life and death.
When Stonewall Jackson was questioned about one of the points of a lecture at the Virginia Military Institute, he answered by repeating his lecture, word for word. If someone were to ask me the meaning of Lycidas, I would be tempted to recite the poem from beginning to end. Until we feel that progression, until each vital part of it is vivid for us, we need not trouble ourselves about more complicated explanations. The meaning of Lycidas is what happens in the experience of hearing it.
This is not to suggest that it is wrong to read poems silently to yourself, nor that all poets write their works explicitly to be heard rather than read. To be sure, there are advanced techniques of wordplay that depend upon being read. But if I propose a beginning to students, one that will acclimate them to the sweep of English poetry, it is to read poems aloud. Hearing poems for the first time rather than reading them will give us access to the majority of poems in the majority of their beauty.
Teachers should model the value of reading (and memorizing) poems themselves. This means experimenting with a bit of theatricality. Dialogue poems make excellent duets. Students are likely to remember the time an English and math teacher put on an elegant love-play. Fun, after all, is also an essential part of learning. Improving literacy outcomes involves many factors, but one that should not be lost is inculcating the love of poetry. Passion can be contagious.
If teachers are uncomfortable with reciting poems themselves, many quality recordings are available to high school and university students. The aforementioned Tom O’Bedlam has an extensive library of recited poems, all recorded in his signature Tom Waits-like voice. LibriVox, a crowdsourced project of audiobooks, boasts readers who are passionate, informed, and powerful.
Occasionally a dramatic recitation can draw too much attention to the reciter, leading listeners to miss the poem’s subtler effects. An informed recitation is essential. The reader must understand the meaning of the words he reads. In this sense, he should have an “interpretation” of each line that communicates something in each reading section, rather than simply speaking unmeaning words. It is better to hear the poem for the first time when it is read by someone who understands what it says. Intonation, the spacing of breaths, all the details of communication can make a puzzling passage come alive, as many an audience of Shakespeare’s plays can attest.
Poetry is not “hard,” as students occasionally claim. Horace, Milton, Shakespeare, and Shelley did not set out to write enigma codes to be deciphered by scholars. They composed beautiful verse meant to live beautifully on the human voice. To recite poetry is to discover (as students) or rediscover (as educators) the ability of poets to speak down through the generations, using us as mouthpieces. It is a way to keep the flame of civilization alive. The great poems of classical antiquity survived the collapse of the Roman Empire and the chaos of the Middle Ages. If we speak the love of poetry to our students, the great poems will certainly survive our modern upheavals of social media, video games, AI, and even the public education system.
Clay Greene is assistant professor of literature at the University of Austin.
