The teacher who takes a class for poetry (a freshman class, let us say), will feel entitled to expect that each student has read the poem that is being discussed that day and that each has ideas or questions to share with the class. We won't pause to examine the various possible reasons why the teacher's expectation is often disappointed. There is one major reason that I want to consider, which is probably more fundamental than several others we could mention.

Academic discourse, of the kind expected in a class on a literary text, deals primarily with ideas, propositions, arguments, and the like. These are the currency of discussion: they can be examined, compared, exchanged, rejected or accepted. By contrast, a feeling cannot be shared. Others cannot argue with your feeling, or dispute it (although they may try). A feeling, as far as it is a feeling, is private to the individual. If you mention a feeling and are invited to account for it, what you produce is not the feeling itself, but evidence, ideas, propositions -- you are quickly back in the cognitive domain once more. If you are fortunate others will recognize the feeling for themselves, or discover it, and discussion will then have a firm purchase on a point for analysis. But this may not happen, or you may be unable to articulate the evidence for your feeling with any confidence, or not know what the evidence is. Or you may be unwilling to risk the attempt in case the feeling is deemed to be inappropriate.

It is for this reason that many traditionally organized class sessions with first year students proceed only with difficulty: having read the poem you now have some feelings about it, but perhaps no very clear ideas or questions. The class invites discussion, but this is premature, because it is forcing you to produce ideas and arguments before you have had the opportunity (or been shown a method) for eliciting evidence for your feelings. So you probably hang back, waiting to see if anyone else has something more concrete.

At this point several things can happen, each of them potentially damaging. Perhaps the teacher intervenes, proposing ideas of his own in order to get the discussion started. Or two or three other students suggest what the poem is "about." Whatever course the discussion now takes as a result, it is unlikely to coincide with the feeling that you have had about the poem. But because ideas in discussion seem so much more concrete and usable, and you may believe them to be ideas that you should have had yourself, you forget your feeling and give all your attention to understanding the ideas. By the end of the class you may have reached an understanding of the poem, but it is not your understanding, and it has been reached at the expense of your own starting point for an understanding.

Feelings about a poem are vulnerable: they are crowded out too readily by ideas. Moreover, you may begin to have another, less useful and more pervasive feeling: you are anxious to have some understanding of the poem, however you acquire it. You are going to be assessed on your understanding, after all. Under these circumstances, with classes on different poems two or three times a week, your own response to a poem may never be adequately developed. The prospect is that you will arrive at the end of the year only thinking other people's thoughts about poetry. This is demoralizing: it offers no basis for developing an independent approach to your study of texts; it has only provided you with separate items of information about the specific texts you studied, rather than with a method for approaching any text; and it downgrades your own authority as a reader. If this is the prospect you face, then you must help your teacher to find a way of making class work more constructive for you and others.

As an alternative to premature discussion, I want to show what can happen when we clear a space to allow a student's response to a poem to develop in its own way. The comments I will be discussing were written by a first year student whom I shall call Liz. The students in this class had been asked to look at two poems for that day's class, one of which was Dylan Thomas's "Fern Hill." At the beginning of the class the students were given twenty minutes to study one of the poems. They were asked to write notes on what they were thinking and feeling, and to indicate which part of the poem was being referred to, as they worked towards an understanding of the poem as a whole.

Liz's comments, based on "Fern Hill," are typical in some important ways, as I shall mention, of the comments that students at her stage can produce. They are less typical for being written more in connected sentences, which makes them easier to follow. They are also less typical for not working through the poem a line at a time, in the order it appears on the page. While a line by line approach has the advantage of being systematic, and ensuring that nothing is overlooked, it tends to remain close to the detail of the poem and give less opportunity for a sense of the whole to develop. Liz's approach enables her more quickly to see relationships across the poem. [Continued . . .]