Indeed Tom, the capacity of media grows much faster than the content to fill them. Like TV sources, now universities will accept almost anything to fill that the vast gapping yaw can filter, Moby Dick - like, whirl-pool like, widening gyre falcon-like, to leave us deadened Phlebuses down where most loves end. A person I consider a good friend once sent me the following enunciated by a former prof.:
[Thought you might enjoy this excerpt from a faculty address my old
professor gave round about 1963. Sorry I couldn't get the format to
hold. The attachment might be better]:
Yeats declares that those who edit and annotate the poetry
That young men, tossing on their beds, Rhymed out in love's despair
would be incapable of meeting the poet Catullus should he walk that way. Yeat's point is made in more sober prose by the Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce. About professional students of poetry
he has said:
They seem gifted with a strange immunity, which lets them all their life handle the books of the poets, edit and annotate them, discuss their
various interpretations, investigate their sources, furnish them with
biographical introductions, and all without so much contagion as to
experience in their own persons the poetic fever.
About the preparation of professional students of poetry Austin Warren and Rene Wellek (themselves teachers) said:
For at least a generation, now, Americans of literary interests have
felt ill at ease either within or without our universities. Young men
have gone to graduate school . . . with the hope of receiving a serious
literary education. Some have dropped out; others have become bitter but resigned .... What is the matter with our "higher study" of literature?
We find their criticism restated by Mark Van Doren:
Literature is not well taught unless it is taught as if to poets. It is
not a thing to teach people /about /.... Criticism now plays with words
as if they were sufficient in themselves. They never were. Which
suggests that the worst place to study literature may be a department of English .... For departments of literature are interested only in
literature. Which explains why it bores them so. And why so many
students have at least the illusion that if they go elsewhere they will
find out how the world turns on its inward, its well-hidden parts.
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