Thomas Gray (1716-1771)
Among the riffs developed by
Garrison Keillor for the formerly brilliant “Prairie Home Companion,” was one
about a fictional association called P.O.E.M.—the Professional Organization of
English Majors. The name was a
lighthearted contribution to a fairly copious genre of English Major Jokes,
but one offered by a man whose powers of articulation and imaginative narration
showed just how vital the fundamental skills of literacy remain for the life of
the spirit.
Outside of the joke world, however,
the English major would seem to be in marked decline. This is a theme confirmed by my mailbox. Since I spent my life as an English
professor, it is not surprising that so many of my alumni friends are
interested in the subject. It is a rare
week in which no old friend or acquaintance forwards to me some essay or op ed
column discussing the decline of the humanities in general or the specific
debilities of the current study of literature.
One of the oddities of American academic culture is that although our
faculties are hotbeds of political radicalism, our alumni bodies tend to be
champions of the unchanging eternal verity.
The Princeton light bulb joke is this.
Q: How many Princetonians does it take to change a light bulb? A: Two.
One to change the bulb and the other to talk about how much better the old
bulb was.
I noticed over my years of teaching
that the selection of students’ majors, undoubtedly influenced to some extent
by parental advice, varied sharply (and quickly) with national economic
conditions. You can see this in the
dramatic rise in numbers in students choosing economics (or business in
institutions that teach it) and computer science. Even so, the long-term decline of literary
study is dramatic. Over the last ten-year
period, while the total annual cohort of American bachelor’s degrees was
increasing by 26%, the number of English majors was declining by about 20% in
absolute terms—from roughly 3.7% of all graduates to 2.2%. (In 1970 it was 7.6%).
I am less inclined to mourn the
statistics than to ponder their causes.
Obviously undergraduates are voting with their feet, but I believe that
their motivation is less economic or vocational than it is intellectual or
spiritual. College students tend on the
whole to be comparatively smart; many I have known are brilliant. I fear that very bright students who love literature are concluding that English
departments are not particularly good places to study it. Even though they never enjoyed the
illumination of the old bulb, they can tell when the light is dim and
indirect. Race studies, gender studies,
“cultural” studies—all these can be studied less obliquely in other programs
and departments. One can also avoid the
middle-man altogether. Programs in
“creative writing” and the visual and performing arts are burgeoning.
It is true that literature is a word with different
meanings. It can and sometimes does mean
simply anything written, as in “I have read most of the literature on gastric
ulcers, and…” But when we speak of English or American literature, or of the
literature of any nation or language, we are talking about a set of
relationships and a tradition. There
would be no classical Latin literature without explicit Greek antecedents. There could be no Dante without Virgil, and
no Virgil without Homer. Reading Joyce’s
Ulysses will never be easy, but it
will be impossible if you don’t know that.
This fact demands of the literary student not merely some erudition but
an attitude of informed conservatism incompatible with many post-modernist
trends, and certainly its more narcissistic, even solipsistic ones.
A genuine political radical, the
Scottish socialist and classicist J. W. Mackail, succinctly expressed the
fundamental principle of literary study in a brilliant little book published
more than a century ago by. Mackail was
in his time a famous Virgilian. He had pretty good cultural connections. He was
the friend and biographer of William Morris, the son-in-law of Edward
Burne-Jones, and the father of Angela Thirkell.
His book, a revised version of lectures given at Oxford during his
tenure as Professor of Poetry, is entitled The
Springs of Helicon: A Study in the Progress of English Poetry from Chaucer to
Milton. The title itself is
allusive, invoking lines from a once-famous Pindaric ode written by Thomas Gray
in the 1750s, “The Progress of Poesy”.
Helicon was the mountain sacred to the Muses; the two springs on its
slope were Hippocrene and Aganippe. “From
Helicon’s harmonious springs” wrote Gray, “A thousand rills their mazy progress
take”.
Gray’s poem is brilliant, but it is
not easy, as the fancy classicism of his image might suggest. Let Mackail himself make the necessary points
in the brief introductory remarks in which he defines his subject as the “...Progress
of Poetry, or in other words, the consideration of poetry as a progressive
function and continuous interpretation of life.
Poetry may be thus regarded, and it is thus that Gray regards it in his
great Ode, whether in relation to the life of the individual from youth to age,
to the life of a single nation or language, or to the larger movements and
progress of the life of mankind as it successively embodies itself in different
ages and countries, and is there re-embodied and re-interpreted by art.”
Except for such “cultural
revolutionaries” of the last century as produced the hecatombs that stagger the
human imagination, culture is ever a fruitful commerce of tradition and
innovation. “In our own literature
Chaucer, Spenser, and Milton have been the subject of such long and minute
study, that for criticism to return to them now might seem like laboring in a
thrice-plowed field. But in truth not
only is that field inexhaustible, but each generation must work it anew to gain
its own food….The most high poets, unwasting also and unweariable, not only
repay, but require perpetual reinterpretation.
To each age, to each reader, they come in a new light and bear a fresh
significance: the progress of critical appreciation follows the progress of
poetry; and the whole interpretation of the past becomes, in its turn, a part
of the thing to be interpreted.”
