Poems, Poets and Poetry at Harvard

April is a month much celebrated in English verse, showing up every-where from Chaucer to T.S. Eliot '09. And this April marks the second annual National Poetry Month, a celebration created to direct public attention to a genre of literature our culture increasingly neglects.

Harvard has a long tradition both of nurturing new poetic talent and in supporting academic study in the field.

But now, three-and-a-half centuries after its founding, how is poetry faring at the nation's oldest university?

And gladly wolde [they] lerne, and gladly teche.

English Instructor Nicholas Jenkins echoes the feelings of many faculty members when he says that "Harvard is the center of a flourishing poetic culture." Creative talent includes both the well-known poets on the Harvard faculty--such as Professor of English Peter Sacks and Briggs-Copeland Lecturer Henri Cole--and poets living in the Boston area, like Derek Walcott, Frank Bidart and new Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky. Harvard also boasts such nationally acclaimed critics as Arthur Kingsley Porter University Professor Helen Vendler and Fredric Wertham professor Barbara Johnson. And the university's Boylston Professorship of Rhetoric and Oratory, a position often held by practicing poets, is presently occupied by recent Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney.

Non-affiliated poets are also drawn to visit the University. "All the great poets come through Harvard," Jenkins says--from W.H Auden, who gave his first American reading at Harvard, to influential Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai, who gave a reading at Hillel earlier this month.

What dread grasp / dare its deadly terror clasp?

But if professional poetic activity at Harvard is flourishing, it's less clear that the student body feels deeply connected to the subject.

"A lot of students are very scared of poetry," says Judith Ryan, Robert K. and Dale J. Weary Professor of German and Comparative Literature. Ryan feels that "many students have unfortunately come to believe that they can't 'do' poetry--that they can't read it, that they can't write satisfactorily about it...Those people...immediately end up with something akin to math phobia--only it's poetry phobia."

A feeling of guilt can make "poetry phobia" explode into sheer terror of the genre. As Professor of English James Engell puts it, "If you're not accustomed to [the technical features of poetry], then it makes you a little scared of it. But then...the guilt factor kicks in. You feel [that] if you're in college, you ought to be able to scan a poem." As a result, "sometimes there is a hesitancy" on the part of students to approach poetry at all.

The professors say that they try to teach their students that poetry is not innately arcane or inaccessible and that there is no shame in asking questions.

"What I want to do," says Ryan, "is to persuade students that although [the analysis of poetry] might seem like a secret skill, it's something quite learnable."

Teach me to hear mermaids singing.

"It's important to keep in mind that we haven't done a very good job in secondary institutions--nor in college, as far as I can tell--of teaching basic elements of the technical aspects of poetry," Engell says. Vendler agrees, adding that the decline of Anglophilia in America after the World Wars led to the decrease of English poetry in textbooks--leaving an educational "poetry gap" which has not yet been adequately filled up with the work of the great American poets. "[That] seems to me deplorable," she says. "I think there should be a sustained effort to present Americans with their own cultural heritage."

Vendler also says that the historical restriction of literature to an educated upper class continues to linger to this day, leading to the perception that poetry is an elitist art form. And Engell suggests that the cultural milieu of the past few decades may have been more heavily "saturated with cinema and politics" than with literature of any kind, leaving even less room for poetry.

I celebrate myself, and sing myself...

But how relevant is poetry to the modern American student?

Vendler feels that poetry serves a valuable function in the way it allows people to express and explore their private existence. "Fiction and drama--which students see more of, even on television or at the movies--have to do with a person's life in society: You usually have to have two people to make a drama, and a novel tends to have a wide social canvas...[But] the only place where you hear what the soul says to itself when it's alone is poetry."

Vendler also speaks of the "patterning instinct" innate in human beings, which, she says, is ramified in many art forms--visual and musical as well as verbal. She comments that many mathematics students also take great pleasure in highly patterned musical forms, and that, when they turn to poetry, they often find it there as well, "Poetry is the most concise and highest form of verbal patterning that we do," she says.

Jenkins offers a different justification in his own life-transforming encounter with poetry: "I realized that a lot of the things that I remembered as I was walking along the street or staring up at the sky were lines of poetry; the words would float up into my mind unbidden...[Poetry] provided a way of understanding the world."

Fame is the thirst of youth...

Harvard's connections to poetry include the remarkable stream of major poets who passed through its gates as undergraduates: Gertrude Stein 1897, e.e. cummings '15, T.S. Eliot '09, Robert Lowell (who attended '35-'37) and John Ashbery '49, among others. Is the University still producing geniuses?

Brian Phillips '99, who was nominated earlier this year to read his poetry at the 10th annual Intercollegiate Poets' Festival at Suffolk University, claims that "poetry at Harvard is very unlike poetry on other campuses around the country. Great poets have come from Harvard in nearly every century that America has been around...that's very stirring to think about."

Phillips sees the undergraduate poetry community of poets as "a loose network of groups, all of whom know each other and who overlap." He feels the community centers around both the English department's creative writing courses and the Harvard Advocate. A member of the Advocate's poetry board, he says that the magazine's "tradition of poetry" makes it a place where many students committed to poetry wind up. But, he adds, the community on campus is also "wider and deeper" than this might imply.

Kendra Lider-Johnson '98, who is also on the Advocate's poetry board, takes a more critical view of the state of poetry among the undergraduates. "We compete against each other to get into the classes. We compete against each other to get published," she says. (Admission to the Advocate's editorial boards is also a competitive process.)

Lider-Johnson says that the Advocate, founded in 1866 and the major publisher of poetry on campus, has become an institution, leading to an atmosphere not always congenial to new voices or to appreciation "without judging the work." Other younger campus publications such as Diversity & Distinction and Cellar Door also publish undergraduate poetry, but the Advocate remains the dominating voice of student poetry.

Lider-Johnson also believes that "there are a lot of closet poets here," students who do write poetry but keep it a private matter. Though Etienne Benson '99, poetry editor of the Advocate, is more pessimistic about the actual number of student poets on campus, the numbers he provided suggests that there are some out there. While an average issue of the Advocate receives submissions from no more than "15 or 20" people, this spring's contest issue, closed to Advocate members, received submissions from "about 50 people...with an average of two or three poems per person." That's a substantial amount of poetry from a supposedly poetry-apathetic student body.

...one discovers in [poetry], after all, a place for the genuine.

On a more encouraging note, there has been renewed interest poetry performance in the past few years in coffeehouses and bookstores across the country. Cambridge's Cantab Lounge and the Phoenix Coffeehouse in Central Square, for instance, both hold weekly open mikes and periodic slams and readings. And on a larger scale, Poetry in Motion, the tremendously popular project which brought poetry to the walls of New York City subways last year, is now gracing the Boston "T".

Nobody can regulate the public's engagement with poetry, and Engell doesn't think that mandating its study would be productive. "I'd be really doubtful that we could successfully require it," he says. "I'd rather that people were able to come to poetry with a sense of curiosity and interest, and were able to overcome any anxieties they might have about studying it." If National Poetry Month and the professors who teach poetry at Harvard achieve their goals, then we may expect to see more students doing just that. After all, beyond all the educational and philosophical advantages poetry can offer its readers, engaging with it provides a much more basic advantage: Entertainment. As Ryan puts it, "I think poetry is fun."