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How William Wordsworth and I saved a marriage

“Strange fits of passion have I known” William Wordsworth circa 1807 by Henry Edridge. Courtesy of the Wordsworth Trust.” Poor Ken Mannion’s struggling with the essay he has to write for his 19th Century British Literature class. The topic’s Wordsworth’s “spots of time” as they appear in “The Prelude.” He doesn’t have to focus on the whole poem. The essay, however, has him filled with self doubt and confusion. He asked me to give him some advice, so I canada goose outlet legit took a look canada goose outlet in uk over the assignment. My heart sank. The professor’s very exacting. He’s given his students a canada goose outlet seattle long list of Do’s and Don’ts, Musts and Must Nots. canada goose outlet trillium parka black I understand what he’s trying to do and I applaud his goal. He’s teaching his students how to think and write critically, how to develop a thesis and canada goose outlet store new york argue from evidence, and if he’s successful they’ll have learned lessons that will be useful not just in all their future classes but in their future careers. This is good.

But he’s not teaching them to love poetry. Not with this assignment. There’s nothing in the assignment that even suggests poetry is meant to be loved, can be loved. There’s nothing to make them love this poem or love Wordsworth. (Actually, I don’t think you can love “The Prelude” unless you already love Wordsworth.) There’s no need to love him or it or anything to ace canada goose outlet the paper. You just need to know stuff. And when they’re done, if they do it right, they’ll know stuff about Romanticism. They’ll know what marks Wordsworth as a Romantic, the Romantics’ Romantic, in fact. They’ll know his themes, his techniques, his conceits. They’ll know what he meant by “spots of time” and why he felt they were so important that he built a fourteen book epic poem around them. But Book XI contains canada goose factory outlet toronto location one of Wordsworth’s most famous set of lines

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That’s evidence to argue from right there. It needs to be in the essay and I told that to Ken when I recited the lines for him. But there’s nothing in the assignment that tells you that those lines are meant to be recited. There’s nothing that makes you want to recite them. Nothing about the assignment that will stamp those lines on your heart in a way that you’ll remember twenty, thirty, forty, canada goose uk site fifty years from now so that they’ll come bursting out of you spontaneously, rapturously, lovingly, for no reason you can explain except that you needed canada goose outlet store quebec to hear yourself say them. You like the sound of them canada goose outlet store uk that much. And that’s the problem.

Canada Goose sale You can understand the themes, know the history, be able to put it all in a critical, literary, and biographical context, but if you never really hear it, if you don’t know and love the sound of it, you’ve missed the point. Canada Goose sale

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I don’t know what if any good I’ve ever done as a teacher. I suspect not much. That’s why I take comfort in what Wendell Berry’s said about there being “no teacher meter”:

A teacher’s major contribution [Berry writes] may pop out anonymously in the life of some ex student’s grandchild.

canadian goose jacket Now that I think about it and I’d rather not think about it my first group of students is old enough now that a few of them probably are grandparents. canadian goose jacket

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Not on my own.

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canada goose coats on sale There was a young married couple in one of the freshman comp classes I taught in Indiana when I was just out of grad school. They’d met in Korea when he was in the Army and stationed over there. They’d fallen in love despite their cultural differences, which didn’t include the one you’d expect, that she was Korean and he was a Hoosier and about as Midwestern an American as you can find, and did include one you might not expect I didn’t, at any rate. She loved English poetry, the Romantics particularly and Wordsworth especially, and hedidn’t. canada goose coats on sale

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canada goose clearance It happened that I’d turned those comp classes into Intro to Poetry classes (The department chair let me get away with this.) so we were reading some Wordsworth. Not “The Prelude”! “Daffodils,” couple of sonnets, including one I’m going to get to. She was thrilled. He was in despair. It canada goose outlet los angeles wasn’t that he canada goose clothing uk was worried canada goose outlet toronto location about flunking the class. He was scared he was flunking his marriage. She struck me as already pretty well Americanized, but she wanted to become even more American so that she could get a degree in English Literature and become a teacher herself. I don’t remember if she wrote poetry, but it seems likely. But her main ambition wasn’t to be a poet but to help students canada goose outlet store near me to love poetry as much as she did. And it hurt him that there was this whole important side of her that he couldn’t talk about with her. He felt left out. He felt left behind. He wasn’t angry about this or resentful. Just sad. He felt sad for her. Sad she was stuck with him. Sad at that thought that it would eventually dawn on her she didn’t have to stay stuck with him. canada goose clearance

Canada Goose Jackets This wasn’t something I knew from watching them in class. To see them together was to see a very happy couple. And I don’t think they were pretending. They were in love. But they both told me about it separately, she before canada goose outlet online and he after. In her telling, it wasn’t a major problem, just a bit of a disappointment. She https://www.thebeatlestimeline.com loved poetry and she wished he did too so canada goose outlet real she could share her enjoyment with him. In his version, it was looking like the end of all their happiness, until Canada Goose Jackets

By the way, neither one came to me to confess anything. They’d both showed up at different times during my office hours to talk about their rough drafts for different assignments and things just came out. I can’t remember for certain which assignments. I had my students write a standard critical essay, although I wasn’t anywhere near as exacting as Ken’s professor, but I also had them write a personal essay about a poem, any poem, their pick, from our anthology in which they found parallels with their own lives or from which they could draw lessons that applied to their own experiences. This is anathema among many English professors because it was essentially assigning them to pick a poem they liked and tell why they liked it, guaranteeing, supposedly, that the most critically exact phrase put to work in every essay will be “I could relate to this.” Probably she came in to discuss the personal essay and he dropped by to go over the draft for the critical essay because that’s the order I assigned them. I know she wrote about Wordsworth. I don’t think he did. But we talked about him.

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Canada Goose online It was thanks to me, he said. Well, thanks to my class. Something I’d said, something that got said, something we read, had caused a switch to flip in his head. Suddenly he understood poetry. Canada Goose online

canada goose coats He wasn’t claiming anything like a critical appreciation. He simply meant that when he heard a poem he heard it as ordinary spoken English and not a foreign canada goose outlet online store review language he needed somebody to translate for him. And when he said he heard a poem he also meant when he read a poem because now when he read canada goose outlet store toronto one he heard it in his head. He heard a human being canada goose outlet online store talking. He wasn’t always sure what that human being was trying to say, but he understood there was something being said and that he could understand it the way he could understand anything anybody said if it was said well and he thought about it. He could follow the conversation. So he and his wife had spent an evening talking about what the poets in our textbook were talking about. Which is another way of saying they’d spent an evening together talking. canada goose coats

And on top of that, he now had a poem by Wordsworth that he loved.

canada goose clearance sale It was one I’d read in class. We read all the poems we discussed out loud. Usually I had students read them. I wanted them to hear the poems as spoken words but I also wanted them to hear their own voices. I wanted them to hear and feel themselves speaking in poetry. I wanted them to feel the poems belonged to them. But now and then I’d take over to show them how it was done and because I wanted to hog a poem I loved canada goose clearance sale.