So poetry is to become optional (apart from one of Shakespeare’s plays) in English education. It’s enough to make one weep.
It’s easy enough to see why Shakespeare should be so favoured. After all, everybody – apart, that is, from oddities like George Bernard Shaw and Tolstoy -- agrees that he is the best English writer there has ever been, perhaps just the best writer ever. But what do they know of England who only England know? Samuel Johnson put it in characteristically pungent words when said, ‘As among the works of nature no man can properly call a river deep, or a mountain high, without the knowledge of many mountains, and many rivers; so in the productions of genius, nothing can be styled excellent till it has been compared with other works of the same kind.’
That means we have to compare Shakespeare’s verse with the output of, say, Ambrose Philips, otherwise known as Namby-Pamby, to have any idea of excellence in writing. Sadly, in the absence of such discrimination, doggerel is often confused with poetry. It is like failing to recognise the difference between a soap-box racer and a Formula One machine. It is like putting Worzel Gummidge alongside Michelangelo’s David and asserting they amount to the same thing. It is to bestow admiration upon the verse of Winifred Emma May (aka Patience Strong) when admiration should be confined to the kind of love that’s not time’s fool but the star to every wandering bark whose worth’s unknown although his height be taken. It’s important that we learn to differentiate – and that kind of learning does not come from books alone but can be gained from them.
Bad poetry debilitates. Doggerel degrades. Dud poems are like counterfeit coins. They spoil the rest of the currency. Poetry is language at high voltage. It can bring to life an idling engine in a not very creditable way – as does La Marseillaise. It can invigorate a questing soul, as does 1 Corinthians 13.
And this is where we have to say that an appropriate response to poetry is necessary when we come to read the Bible. Much of the Scripture is poetry and we need a discerning taste to respond to what we find in the given words. Failure to see the Bible for what it is shuts us – and more importantly shuts the next generation – off from ‘the most valuable thing this world affords’, to quote from the Coronation service. Hyperbole? Truism? The only way to find out is to put other books aside for the moment, to open the Bible and start reading.
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