Learning Literature

I had to look up a 19^th century British poem for some reason the other day, and so I went to one of only four books I’ve retained from my undergraduate English major days, the Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. 2 (the other three are the Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. 1, and Norton’s The American Tradition in Literature, vols. 1 and 2, anthologies I used in at least four classes from 1969 to 1972). I don’t know why I went to this source, probably just habit. I could have probably found the poem more quickly online with a simple search. But going to the Norton Anthology I found not only the poem but also my annotations to scores of poems through the 19^th and 20^th centuries, scribbled by me some 40+ years ago. They aren’t at all familiar, though I can recognize the hand, or at least hands, as there is an apparent development over the two or three years as I worked to establish some affectation of personal style in my printed scrawls.

More curious is the content of the annotations. I can’t imagine that I came up with most if any of them on my first lone reading, though some of the underlining and definitions might have come from my grasping with understanding. But I have to think that the note above Gerard Manley Hopkins’ “The Windhover” summarizing the poem’s theme – “It’s not single things that make an act beautiful, it is the combination of the parts.” – is my sitting in class taking (grammatically flawed) notes from what the professor was professing. Would I have on my own added “compare to [Matthew Arnold’s] Dover Beach”? (And what is the point of that comparison anyway?) Nor would my 20-year-old self had explicated “dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon” as “Falcon is heir to daylight’s kingdom – drawn from dawn – also outlined by the dawn.” And I can’t imagine that I came up with the “3 parts” structure laid out in the margin: “description of bird” – “appreciation of bird’s mastery” – “comparing bird’s mastery to God’s.”

I have to think that these annotations – and most of the others throughout these anthologies – are not my thinking but rather the recording of what my teachers were feeding me. That’s the way literature was taught then. I don’t know that there was anything intrinsically wrong with it. I did learn about literature, how to study and appreciate it, the history, terms, and conventions, and I wrote myself, poetry, fiction, drama, and nonfiction, and I became myself a professor of English. But beginning in the late 1970s and through the 1980s, there was a shift in teaching literature from the teacher imparting interpretations to the student extracting meaning and significance for themselves, albeit lining up their readings with those of others, past and present, including their teacher’s. We call it “reader response.” And looking back over my annotations from 40 years ago, I prefer it. Not because I didn’t learn anything from my education. But because I wish I could find in these annotations my personal engagement with these works – I hope I had some, but wish there was a record – not just the accepted wisdom passed on by my professors.