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.
It sometimes takes a foreigner to come and see a place and paint it. I remember someone saying they had never really noticed the palm trees here until I painted them.
Fashion is architecture: it is a matter of proportions.
I take six or seven years to write really small books. There is a kind of aesthetic of leanness, of brevity.
The crown of literature is poetry.
I dreamed of having a book of my own, of writing one that I could put on a shelf.
The life of a writer is tragic: the more we advance, the farther there is to go and the more there is to say, the less time there is to say it.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.