"Quickly, to the Panopticon!"

Elaine Showalter’s Teaching Literature begins with a focus on teaching and anxiety, moves through theories and methodologies, and then in chapter four gets down to the nitty-gritty of teaching by genre. She begins this section with a focus on poetry and I appreciate her arrangement. She notes that poetry tends to garner a fair bit of student resistance (indeed, I would argue that poetry in some ways becomes the horrid face of literature to a number of resistant students), and that, quoting Ann Lake Prescott, “even good students can arrive at college afraid of it” (62). If poetry is, as I think, emblematic for many students of all they expect to loath about a literature class, then perhaps it is important to put it out on the table, poke it a bit, and show them that it is not so awful after all. If nothing else, the short story might just seem a little easier afterwards.

I have taught Intro to Lit classes in a couple of different versions and formats. While I may not always have poetry as the first unit when I divide by genre, I have always addressed poetry in the first class. After doing some introductory getting to know you stuff, and going over the syllabus, and a very brief intro to what we’ll be doing in the classroom, I bring out “Dover Beach.” I’m a Victorianist generally so it’s my milieu. I bring copies for students who don’t have their anthologies yet, and I read the poem aloud to the students. Afterwards we go back through the poem line by line and explicate it together as an introduction to close reading.

I do this for several reasons. The first is, as I mentioned above, to put poetry on the table. There are also practical considerations too. I want my students to get some idea of the content of the course on the first day, and reading a poem out loud to them is more manageable than setting them all to read and respond to a short story during the remaining class time. I also do it, in some respects, for entertainment value. I know “Dover Beach” really well, I can give them the context, and more importantly I can poke fun at Arnold’s seriousness (this is his honeymoon after all!) and invite them to do the same. I can ask them, “how would you feel if your girlfriend, or boyfriend, or husband, or wife, said ‘honey, the world is a terrible horrible place, everything is awful, it’s really bad, there’s nothing good about it, except you. You’re it. So you’d better love me,’? Would you consider it romantic?”

At the same time it allows me to prompt them for critical thought, I can ask them specific questions that allow for the first steps of interpretation: “What does it mean to describe faith as a sea, and then express that the sea has gone out with the tide?” I’ve had very good experiences prompting students with these kinds of questions. I use “Dover Beach” because I have command over it, but also because it is just the right kind of alien for them. It is close enough to contemporary language for minimal gloss, yet far enough in time and context for them to feel that when they grasp it, they are grasping something other.

Reciting poetry to students is something that Showalter represents as an often times useful “teacher centered approach”. I agree. In general I don’t want to be the center of the discussion. I want to facilitate, and I don’t want to subscribe to such a “teacher centered” pedagogy on the whole. However, I think taking a little bit of time and effort to hold court on a poem the first day of class is an appropriate use of such an approach. It helps to introduce not only the literature, but you as an individual to the students. In the same way a successful introduction of poetry can set the tone for an engagement with the literature generally, a successful introduction as an instructor can set the tone for the rest of the class.