Poetry is the most subtle of the literary arts, and students grow more ingenious by the year at avoiding it. If they can nip around Milton, duck under Blake and collapse gratefully into the arms of Jane Austen, a lot of them will.
Interpretation
The quote highlights how poetry, while being a refined literary form, is often avoided by students who prefer more accessible genres.
Terry Eagleton suggests that poetry is a complex and nuanced form of literature that challenges readers, yet many students tend to shy away from it. They often prefer to engage with more straightforward authors like Jane Austen, indicating a preference for the more palatable aspects of literature while sidestepping the depth and intricacies found in poetic works by figures like Milton and Blake.
In practice
In a literature class discussion, one could use this quote to highlight the challenges students face when engaging with poetry.
Nations sometimes flourish by denying the crimes that brought them into being. Only when the original invasion, occupation, extermination or usurpation has been safely thrust into the political unconscious can sovereignty feel secure.
One side-effect of the so-called war on terror has been a crisis of liberalism. This is not only a question of alarmingly illiberal legislation, but a more general problem of how the liberal state deals with its anti-liberal enemies.
All communication involves faith; indeed, some linguisticians hold that the potential obstacles to acts of verbal understanding are so many and diverse that it is a minor miracle that they take place at all.
The New Testament is a brutal destroyer of human illusions. If you follow Jesus and don't end up dead, it appears you have some explaining to do. The stark signifier of the human condition is one who spoke up for love and justice and was done to death for his pains. The traumatic truth of human history is a mutilated body.
Capitalism will behave antisocially if it is profitable for it to do so, and that can now mean human devastation on an unimaginable scale. What used to be apocalyptic fantasy is today no more than sober realism.
Works of art cannot save us. They can simply render us more sensitive to what needs to be repaired.
I have to say, I grew up with fashion because my mother was a seamstress, and she had an atelier. She would cut the first pattern, and then she had people working for her. So I grew up in an atelier, watching people all around me sewing. I was fascinated.
I've always envied people who compose music or paint, because they don't have to be bothered with the sort of crude mess that language normally is, in everyday life and in the way we use it.
I think most people gain some sense of how to look at a painting, but no one ever teaches you how to look at a piece of silver.
What I learned from Lennon was something that did stay with me my whole career, which is to be very straightforward. I actually love talking about taking pictures, and I think that helps everyone.
Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you-trippingly on the tongue; but if you mouth it, as many of your players do, I had as lief the town-crier spoke my lines. Nor do not saw the air too much with your hand, thus, but use all gently; for in the very torrent, tempest, and as I may say, the whirlwind of your passion, you must acquire and beget a temperance that may give it smoothness.
Try to distill the character of your subject. Understand how he moves, thinks, acts. It's difficult to put into words. Consider each drawing as a problem that did not exist before, and then try to solve that problem to the best of your ability. That i what caricature is all about
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