Here's Auden by way of
Alan Jacobs. It has been a very long time since I read
The Dyer's Hand, and this excerpt is wonderful and rather impossible, given how our schools are structured. I like the focus on memorization, language, and finding a job that has little to do with writing. And I might just consider what my dream schooling would be, given the constraints of current education and times.
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One of the unused images by Clive Hicks-Jenkins
made for The Foliate Head poetry collection
from Stanza Press in the UK, 2012.
The green man is an evocative image
of exuberance and natural abundance and,
I think, a good image for a poet. |
“
In my daydream College for Bards, the curriculum would be as follows:
(1) In addition to English, at least one ancient language, probably Greek or hebrew, and two modern languages would be required.
(2) Thousands of lines of poetry in these languages would be learned by heart.
(3) The library would contain no books of literary criticism, and the only critical exercise required of students would be the writing of parodies.
(4) Courses in prosody, rhetoric and comparative philology would be required of all students, and every student would have to select three courses out of courses in mathematics, natural history, geology, meteorology, archaeology, mythology, liturgics, cooking.
(5) every student would be required to look after a domestic animal and cultivate a garden plot.
A poet has not only to educate himself as a poet, he has also to consider how he is going to earn his living. Ideally, he should have a job which does not in any way involve the manipulation of words. At one time, children training to become rabbis were also taught some skilled manual trade, and if only they knew their child was going to become a poet, the best thing parents could do would be to get him at an early age into some Craft Trades Union. Unfortunately, they cannot know this in advance, and, except in very rare cases, by the time he is twenty-one, the only nonliterary job for which a poet-to-be is qualified is unskilled manual labor. In earning his living, the average poet has to choose between being a translator, a teacher, a literary journalist or a writer of advertising copy and, of these, all but the first can be directly detrimental to his poetry, and even translation does not free him from leading a too exclusively literary life.
”W. H. Auden, from The Dyer’s Hand
