dumbfoundry

"When the demands of our formal education grow heavier, a lot of us lose sight of this: the pleasure of poetry is transformed into the study of poetry, and its direct appeal to our feelings has to adapt to include other kinds of address to our intellects.

This isn’t all bad – but for many people it means that poetry’s primitive power gets overlaid, or corrupted, or altogether suppressed.

Hence the reputation that poetry acquires in many secondary schools (especially among boys, apparently) of being ‘too difficult’, or ‘irrelevant’ or simply ‘boring’. To tell the truth, poetry is no more irrelevant to us as human beings than breathing, which in certain respects it resembles."

This entry was posted by Ivy on Friday, August 29, 2008 at 7:16 PM. You can skip to the end and leave a response.