Robert Frost, who went for a walk one day and took one path, but then spent some time thinking about a different path he kind of thought about taking but didn't.
Poetry is a genre of writing whose audience is generally limited to its practitioners. That is, the largest population of readers for most practicing poets is other practicing poets. Poets like to get together and bitch about this, bemoaning a lack of education about poetry in elementary and high schools, or the over-intellectualization of poetry, or the under-intellectualization of poetry, or the entering of creative writing programs in academia, or the dumbing down of the American public via TV/the internet/smart phones, or any other number of straw men. Why aren’t more people reading poetry? This question is similar to questions like, “Why don’t more people go to the ballet,” or “Why don’t more people listen to opera?” Is it simply that we are failing to educate young people about arts and culture?
I think a lot of people have bad experiences with poetry at a young age. When I w as in the eighth gr ade, I had a terrible English teacher. Although he did teach me to a diagram a sentence (a skill I think would benefit all school children), he was also mean. My middle school was housed in a run-down former high school in a rural school district. The 1930s building was literally crumbling around us. The classroom where this teacher taught had a hole in the sheetrock of one of its walls wall and one day in class he slammed a student who was picking at the hole forward in his desk so hard that the desk rocked over. To provide a little context, this occurred at a public school in the early nineties, long after corporal punishment had been prohibited in public schools.
This teacher was also prone to assigning “journal” topics that all students were required to write about. These journal topics were really just restatements of his own opinions. If you didn’t agree with him, you got a bad grade on your journal. One that I remember in particular was the adage, “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” We all had to write a one-page journal in which we agreed with this statement. I was old enough to recognize the nincompoopery of that platitude and disagreed. I got a bad grade.
One week this teacher came in to class and had us read Frost’s “The Road Not Taken.” It was clear that he fancied himself similar to the speaker of the poem. His interpretation of it was narrow, and, I would now say, incorrect: that taking the road less traveled leads to a more fulfilling life. So often Frost’s poems are misinterpreted down to simplistic morals, as though they were Aesop’s fables. Whenever I teach “Mending Wall,” I have students insist to me that the message of the poem is that good fences make good neighbors, despite the fact that the speaker of that poem openly mocks that sentiment. This bad teacher no doubt assigned a journal on “The Road Not Taken;” I’m sure I got a bad grade.
My point is, this bad experience was enough to turn me, a person who was inclined to reading and loving poetry, and who started reading Emily Dickinson independently at fourteen, off from Frost for nearly ten years. It wasn’t until I was studying at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and took a class with James Galvin in which we really read and considered Frost’s more complex poems like “Home Burial” that I realized Frost’s poetic genius.
In another class at Iowa, I remember Bob Hass telling the students that he’d recently read that the most hated poem in America was “The Red Wheelbarrow,” because so many high school students were asked to read and “interpret” it in English classes. Presumably, many of them were told their interpretations were wrong, or many were frustrated at the task of interpreting a sixteen-word poem that mostly consists of a single image. I usually teach Williams’ “This is Just to Say” in Intro to Creative Writing, a poem with a little more meat on its bones than “The Red Wheelbarrow.” I’m surprised, though, at how many students have horror stories about “The Red Wheelbarrow” that they feel the need to confess during our discussion of “This is Just to Say.” One student I had a couple years ago told me that her English teacher insisted the poem was about Communism, and that she had to write a paper to that effect. Communism? I guess because the wheelbarrow is red?
All of this has left me wondering what other poems are being ruined by bad teachers, at both the high school and college level, who insist on monolithic, limiting interpretations of poems, and, in the process, reinforce the idea that poems are confusing riddles that only certified experts can decode. Perhaps this is part of the reason why so many Americans don’t read poetry. Of course, if there really were only one interpretation of a poem, it would be easier format the acquisition of poetic knowledge to a scan-tron and slap it on to one of the many zero-sum standardized tests we subject school children to.
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Thank you. I loved poetry as a little girl. My mother would read or recite poems to us children. There were five of us and we worshipped her then. Later in high school, I began to hate poetry. Every feeling I ever had about poetry was knocked down, dragged through the dirt and analyzed to the point of oblivion. It wasn’t until my late 30s that I began to love poetry again. But I still have the feeling that what I think or love about the poetry I’m reading must be wrong.
Karen, that’s such a shame. In the case of “The Road Not Taken,” I can remember thinking that if the road less traveled turns one into a grouchy, abusive, old middle school English teacher, then it’s a road I’d like to not take. What a pity that that experience ruined a good poem for me, and put me off of Frost for years. I wonder how many people have stories like this.
I encounter a lot of students who think that whatever they think or love about poetry must be wrong, but the truth is, there is no one way to interpret or experience poetry. Robert Pinsky’s book Democracy, Culture, and and the Voice of Poetry discusses his Favorite Poem Project, which I love because it gives poetry back to the people, and really considers how people outside of academia consider and value poetry.
Mrs. Lehmann, your statement that only poets read poetry is valid for the USA only , because it doesn’t fit with the American spirit (pragmatic). I am from Eastern Europe and I can confirm to you that almost everybody there reads poetry, it doesn’t matter how educated or not, how rich or not. My grandma read poetry and I couldn’t tell for sure if she ever finished high school; most probably not. The same way you guys here go banana for whatever singer or football team, the same way we were idolizing poets back home. Long discussions about poetry, even fights between the partisans of one poet against others, wall posters, girls dreaming to marry a poet (can you imagine that happening in the USA?) – and I am talking about a very poor neigborgood, not at all high class.
Regarding your other statement, why don’t more people go to opera and ballet? It’s very snobbish and show a deep social fracture – with some candid people on one side questioning education without thinking of its price and other obsessing only about the price of food – if you think that the answer is failure to educate. You actually called the parents “uneducated”, which is unfair.
While the truth is that it’s too darn expensive to go see opera and ballet, that’s why. That’s your answer: prohibitive ticket prices. It’s 80 bucks for a kid to see a show from the balcony at the Opera. I call that artist greed. They should be happy with less in life if they are true artists, so 1. the darn tickets wouldn’t be so expensive, 2. so their art would reach more people, and 3. so they have the right to call themselves artists, not artisans. They don’t need to make a million bucks in one season, do they? Books are easier, thank God for the libraries.
That’s why poetry is not popular with the Americans and opera, theatre, ballet is reserved for the socially privileged (not necessarely intellectuals) – too much hedonism and mercantilism and greed. As for the bad teachers ruining the love for poetry, hm, I dunno, I had one teaching us literature and the more he slapped us, the more I despised HIM, not the poets he obviously didn’t have a clue about it and who became our dreamy refuge. p.s. I find Frost to be mediocre and boring – your typical poetry for masses, with an inch of depth.
Hi AnaNita,
You raise a good point: I was talking about poetry and its readers in the US. I have a good friend from Mexico who has said similar things about the number of people there who read poetry. I’d still ask why that is, however. What makes people in Eastern Europe gaga for poets but people in America so resistant? Wouldn’t a “pragmatic spirit” also preclude Americans from listening to music, which we do willingly and, in some cases, obsessively?
I can only speculate about why Americans listen to music obsessively – rock music, that’s it. Because they are the engineers of the worlds who like to work on their machinery while listening to something to infuse a rhythm to their working hands, while for example Germans with a more inclined philosophic spirit obsess about classic music, which requires total dedication and doesn’t allow multitasking.. Don’t get me wrong, Mrs. Lehmann, I do love America, but I am upset about the price one has to pay for higher forms of art – the ones you mentioned already. Back home it was cheaper to go to a play than to go to a movie, opera every weekend, idem ballet…Why, you asked? Maybe because we weren’t sold on television the way Americans are