A VOICE IN THE WILDERNESS
Hate poetry? Good.
You’re in the right place. Journey Through Poetry is a free course that might just change your mind.
Poetry may not give us all the answers. It may not even give us any of the answers. But it may, perhaps, give us the courage to ask the questions.
Poetry – literature generally – is supposed to be a way of enriching our lives, not a puzzle to be solved. Wordsworth got it right when he said: “Our meddling intellect / Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things — / We murder to dissect.” Unfortunately, all too often, education has done exactly that. It’s not that intellect doesn’t have its place. It’s just that the emotions also have their place, and poetry is all about keeping intellect and emotion in their right place.
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Wordsworth’s talking about nature, but the same thing happens in the classroom. Instead of fostering a love of poetry, too much of what passes for poetry education has murdered it — turning something that could have been a lifelong source of enrichment into a set of problems to be solved for an examination.
It doesn’t have to be that way. I remember my English teacher, “Jumbo” Smith, reading poetry to us in his plain, down-to-earth Hampshire accent, bringing it to life with his laconic comments, and inspiring us in a way no one else could. And I was deeply influenced by my father, Raymond Wilson — poet and educationalist — who tossed poems my way from earliest childhood. As he used to say, “Without an education of the emotions, science and technology cannot of themselves bring happiness.”
That’s really the whole thing in a nutshell. Because, properly understood, that is what poetry is — education of the emotions. Whether you’re a student, a lifelong learner, or someone who simply wants to know what all the fuss is about, that’s what this site is for.
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