The Teaching of American Literature

Source: The English Journal, Vol. 46, No. 3, The Teaching of Poetry (Mar., 1957), pp. 183-185 Published by: National Council of Teachers of English

BROADCAST
NBC'S 13-WEEK SPECTACULAR

In a bold and widely-hailed gesture of broadcasting statesmanship, the National Broadcasting Company recently celebrated its thirtieth anniversary by offering its production facilities and network lines to the twenty-five hard-pressed educational television stations throughout the United States. In collaboration with the Educational Radio and Television Center in Ann Arbor, the network is completing production plans for almost a half million dollars' worth of programming in American literature, American government, world geography, mathematics, and music to be piped "live" to the ETV outlets for thirteen weeks beginning March 11. Each weekday, from 6:30-7:00 P.m., E.S.T., a university professor or similarly qualified authority will preside in rotation over his specialty, Albert Van Nostrand of Brown University for American literature.

English teachers in the last two years of high school and the first two years of college should find the American literature series an excellent stimulus for their students. Each program will be devoted to one of the following topics: the business man, war writing, novels of the Far West, American historical novels, the South, the American family, the moral climate, the disinherited, Americans abroad, the novel of adolescence, the nonconformist, the writer's world, "the great American novel."

Within each of the categories Professor Van Nostrand will attempt to reveal tradition and continuity by starting with a current best-seller and working backwards into the American past for further examples: e.g., Edwin O'Connor's The Last Hurrah will initiate a discussion of All the King's Men, Number One, and other political novels of the twentieth century on back to works like Bellamy's Looking Backwards; or Martin Russ's recent novel of the Marines in Korea will start a discussion leading through The Naked and the Dead and A Farewell to Arms to The Red Badge of Courage. The purpose of the series is to generate popular interest in searching beyond the best-seller lists for books whose pleasures are lasting, if momentarily lost from public view. The producers will use as many paperbacks as possible to make their reading suggestions practical.

English teachers within range of one of the following ETV stations might want to find some other ways of using Professor Van Nostrand's series of free lectures: WTIQ, Hunford, Alabama; WBIQ, Birmingham, Alabama; WAIQ, Andalusia, Alabama; KQED, San Francisco; KRMA-TV, Denver, Colorado; WTHS-TV, Miami, Florida; WTTW, Chicago; WILL-TV, Urbana, Illinois, WGBH-TV, Cambridge, Massachusetts; WTVS-TV, Detroit, Michigan; WKAR-TV, East Lansing, Michigan; KETC, St. Louis, Missouri; KUON-TV, Lincoln, Nebraska; WUNC-TV, Chapel Hill, North Carolina; WCET, Cincinnati, Ohio; WOSU-TV, Columbus, Ohio; KETA, Norman, Oklahoma; WQED, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; WKNO-TV, Memphis, Tennessee; KUHT, Houston, Texas; KCTS-TV, Seattle, Washington; WHATV, Madison, Wisconsin; WHYY-TV, Philadelphia; WYES, New Orleans, Louisiana; and KTCA, St. Paul, Minnesota. Complete details on the individual programs will appear weekly beginning March 4th in Scholastic Teacher (33 W. 42nd Street, New York 36, New York).

RECORDINGS

The LP seems to be the English teacher's special gift from the cornucopia of technology. Perhaps the most useful aspects of this bonanza of sound is the opportunity it provides to hear a poet reading his own work. Two new Decca recordings merit a place, sound unheard, in every high school English department's library. "Robert Frost Reads the Poems of Robert Frost" (DL 9033, 12" LP) is a sampling of his work from most direct narrative to more metaphysical statements: "Mending Wall," "The Runaway," "The Woodchuck," "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening," "Provide, Provide," "Birches," "The Death of the Hired Man," "Choose Something Like a Star," "Once by the Pacific," "The Gift Outright," "One Step Backward Taken," "Departmental," "Two Tramps in Mudtime," "A Lone Striker," "A Considerable Speck," "Come In," "Spring Pools," "Closed for Good," "A Soldier," "Happiness Makes up in Height," "It Is Almost the Year 2000," "Fire and Ice," and "Why Wait for Science." A similar recording by Carl Sandburg (DL 9039, 12" LP) contains "Grass," "Primer Lesson," "Put the City Up," "Fire Logs," "Southern Pacific," "Prayers of Steel," "Upstream," "Bilbea," "Father and Son," "Cool Tombs," "Tall Grass," "The People Speak," and a series of "Proverbs" and "Prejudices" on the second side.

A comparison of the sound or tone of the two poets is very revealing. Sandburg's voice approaches bombast and bathos; Frost's is as unsentimental and bracing as a North wind. The LP then, besides providing the glamorous dimension of the poet's presence, also serves as a teaching metaphor of the meaning of "tone" and mood in a poet's work.

The poet's voice as physical symbol of the poet's sensibility is even more striking in "The Caedmon Treasury of Modern Poets Reading." (Caedmon TC 2006, 2-12" LP's, $11.90). Many of the poets sampled in this treasury have cut full-length records for the same publisher, a shrewd enticement to further Caedmon purchases. Eliot, Yeats, Auden, Edith Sitwell, Dylan Thomas, Louis MacNeice, Graves, Stein, MacLeish, Cummings, Marianne Moore, Empson, Spender, Aiken, Frost, Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, Richard Eberhart, Elizabeth Bishop, and Richard Wilbur have all achieved the plastic immortality of this poetic pantheon.

The complexity of a good many of the poems chosen (Eliot's "The Wasteland," for example) make much of the album of limited utility in a high school classroom, but it should certainly interest English teachers seeking materials to stimulate the superior student; and faculty libraries will be stronger for its inclusion. One difficulty with recordings of modern poets is that texts are prohibitively expensive; it would save purchasers discouraging bibliographic goose chases, however, if a list of the most available texts, e.g. the paperback edition of "The Wasteland" (Harvest, HB 1, 950), could be listed on the album jacket or at least on a mimeographed sheet sent to those who ask for it.

PRINT

Like most good things, it is possible to make too much of the advantage of "hearing" poetry read either by critics or the poets themselves. The magic of the creator's voice is not often equal to the magic of listener understanding. For the complex modern poet, we need complex criticism. Criticism or explication is still necessary for all but the most sophisticated. Lloyd Frankenberg has tried to relate a record of readings, "A Round of Poems," Columbia (ML 5148, 12" LP), to his new anthology, Invitation to Poetry: A Round of Poems from John Skelton to Dylan Thomas (Doubleday, $6.75).

He has not been too successful although his voice is pleasant and effective enough in the three-quarters of the LP he devoted to the poetry itself. On the remaining quarter of the LP, Frankenberg discusses the poems he has read and the nature of poetry in general. His criticism is interesting but would go just as well, if not better, in print; further, the isolation of the criticism from the poetry compartmentalizes a craft that justifies itself in specific practice. What we need are recordings of first-rate critical commentary on a few representative poems-poem followed immediately by analysis. Such records could really revitalize the teaching of poetry in the schools since we have not yet been able to fully assimilate the "new criticism." Possibly we could persuade young poets-in-residence who are used to the intricate mazes of undergraduate instruction to read and comment on their own poetry.

Rolfe Humphries, himself a poet, critic, and prep school teacher, is the ideal man to create such a pioneer teaching recording for his paperback anthology, New Poems by American Poets (Ballantine, 350). Robert Francis, Philip Booth, and Walker Gibson are the kind of poets that, though almost completely absent from our anthologies, provide the really best introductions to poetry for our students. Humphries' admirable introductory essay is sufficient assurance that he could persuade the poets to comment on their own work without violating their own sense of privacy. Basing a recording on an already existing paperback would anticipate one of the most frustrating problems of using discs of modern poetry--the unavailability of texts.

But, spinning turntables aside for the moment, magazines are still our best source for poems that will touch our students' modern sensibilities. The study of contemporary verse is, after all, only a Readers' Guide and ditto machine away. Students will gladly join the curious teacher in an open-ended quest for new and interesting poetic voices in current magazines. A convenient way of assessing the poetic richness of quality magazines is to read Wellesley instructor Philip Booth's first volume, Letter from a Distant Land (Viking, March, 1957, $3.00). Booth's verse transforms the commonplace for the common man, who sees in Booth's poems what he has often felt but ne'er so well expressed.

High school students are at home with his situations (a couple on the beach, a father teaching a daughter to swim, a railroad crossing, a raker on a fall lawn, burning the old Christmas tree, a farm in spring, a summer resort, a young airman taxiing a big bomber); and his diction is a transcendence of the vernacular. Most of his poems have appeared in magazines-the New Yorker, the Saturday Review, and similar popular outlets for quality poetry. Your students need to know about this leading edge of poetic creativity as much as they need to know the traditional achievements. Indeed, the new poem is the best tactical preparation for studying the old.

Their joy of discovering a new poet, free from the cultural compulsions of "appreciating" a standard Titan, will enable them to grasp what Keats really felt about Chapman's Homer. They will have seen their own Pacifics. And, finally, if we are to build a greater audience for our poets, we must promote the quality magazines, for these are the chief instruments of poetic communication at the present time. Contemporary journalism has proved a friend to poetry; all the more reason for encouraging patronage of this public art in the schools.