Tennyson is Dead and Frost is Dying: A Case for Poetry

                          Tennyson is Dead and Robert Frost is Dying: A Case for Poetry

                                                                  Published in Marietta Daily Journal Sept. 6, 2015

            Is there anything offensive about the following poetic lines?  Do they merit a place in the classroom?  Could it possibly be productive for America’s youth to read, discuss and (dare I say) memorize them?  They were written by Maltbie Davenport Babcock and appear to be words of both challenge and encouragement.

            “Be strong / We are not here to play, to dream, to drift / We have hard work to do and loads to lift/ Shun not the struggle, face it / ‘Tis God’s gift.”

            Of course the word God is probably illegal, but based on the overall content of these 5 lines, my own take on them is that they are sorely needed, mainly because we simply aren’t as tough as our grandparents were.  Seems to me everybody needs to be challenged and encouraged from time to time.  Certainly youth do.

            Try these words of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.  “Let us, then, be up and doing / With a heart for any fate / Still achieving, still pursuing / Learn to labor and to wait.”  If the national mood was ever in need of Longfellow’s poetic trumpet, it is now.  Yet, poetry is not in vogue in any degree to speak of.  Because of all the emphasis on testing, job readiness and “practical learning,” schools are giving the humanities (literature, history, music, etc.) short shrift.

            Besides, literature – especially poetry – contributes nothing (many think) to the acquisition of trades and professions.  Literature is an “extra,” intended for the bookish.  Strange, then, that throughout the 19^th and early 20^th century when industrialization was expanding and American laborers and farmers were building a nation and moving America toward post-World War II dominance, literature was a mainstay of education and a source of inspiration in the poorest of homes.  Many a city urchin and many a country boy like myself was encouraged to “shun not the struggle” and to be “up and doing.”  That encouragement came largely at school from literature.

            What happened?  Where’s the hunger of our youth to be “still achieving, still pursuing?”  Not all youth lack the hunger.  If you think all do, go judge an oratorical contest for the American Legion.  You will be inspired, but by a small minority.

            Much of today’s youthful malaise is caused by parents who give their children cars as soon as they reach driving age.  Much of it can also be ascribed to what we de- emphasize in education, namely the humanities which don’t lend themselves to testing as well as math does.  In fairness to educators, public schools are social institutions that must respond to the public.  He who pays the fiddler calls the tunes and today’s tune is “Prepare my kid for a job.”

            Jobs are a reasonable concern.  But what about values which the public also expects schools to teach?  As essential as math and science are, these subjects don’t and can’t teach values.

            But literature can.  The question is what is the need of the hour?  The answer is both “practical learning” and the humanities.  We should welcome the emphasis on educating the hand as well as the head and should kick ourselves for doing away with “shop” in the first place.  But in addition to hand and head, man has a heart.  Man is a doer and a thinker, but he is also a feeler, a possessor of a moral sense that must also be attended to, educated and fed.

            Math is an exact science.  We are fools to argue about math but derelicts to discount literature, history, music and the values they import.  Perhaps there will always be tension between the humanities and studying for things practical, but to ignore or downplay studies that inherently teach values is to court social disaster.  Isn’t any laborer’s life richer if, in addition to plying his trade and feeding his family, he can also tell his children about David and Goliath, Paul Revere and Pinocchio?

            Mr. England himself, Alfred Tennyson, bids us “To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”  Who among us doesn’t need that poetic line?  Robert Frost, with the help of an 11^th grade teacher, finally convinced me poetry wasn’t just for girls.  Frost wrote, “Two roads diverged in a wood, and I - / I took the one less traveled by, / And that has made all the difference.”

            Teens love that line and teens are not automatically predisposed to hate poetry.  More than ever they need poetry. 

 If we kill off our poets, we starve our souls, all for … bread, I suppose.  And we all know the line about trying to live by bread alone.

Roger Hines

9/2/15