Taking Lyrics Literally: Teaching Poetry in a Prose Culture

Abstract

Having spent two fruitless weeks attempting to write an essay offering practical advice on how to teach lyric poetry, I had to face the perhaps bizarre truth that I feel much less hollow elaborating theoretical projections about how to direct one’s teaching than I do pretending to offer practical wisdom. In this case my hollowness may in fact have been as close as I could come to wisdom. For it suggests that I have yet to find a current theoretical approach to values capable of providing an adequate framework for the practical tasks involved in teaching lyric poetry. But in my view it will not suffice to rely on sharing moderately successful teaching strategies without formulating the ends they serve or the visions of poetry that define the qualities they foreground. So here I will try to elaborate a way of thinking about the lyric that can cogently draw connections between how we might best structure conversation about particular poems and how we might describe the basic values lyrics make available or reinforce for cultural life. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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