Desai, R.W.
(2016)
Can poetry be taught?
Language and Language Teaching, 5 (1).
pp. 8-11.
ISSN 2277-307X
Abstract
The question in the title of this paper has been addressed in different ways (Perrine, 1963, pp. 3-246; Birk&Birk, 1965, pp. 366-88; Kramer, 1968, pp. i-xviii; Panda, 2014, pp. 149-89), so I do not expect the reader to find anything startlingly new in it except, perhaps, some points of interest from my own experience as a teacher. Students are often told at the beginning of the session that poetry cannot be “taught” like Commerce or Mathematics. However, since poetry is written using familiar words they need not be intimidated by the subject but rather, they can look forward to the pleasure they will feel while traversing a terrain that has no formidable obstacles. As they will probably discover, the poems in their syllabus will awaken their interest,sensitivity and self-awareness on account of the poets’ adroit use of well-known words, while
simultaneously creating a new kind of language to surprise, delight, and define areas of experience hitherto unsuspected to exist.
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