Term Paper----Done

Kevin Luby

Professor Sexson

English 300

26 November 2008

Channeling the Barman Poet

            Every May, I pack my things here in Bozeman and move to North Idaho to sling drinks for vacationing doctors, stockbrokers, and other practical professional types at Hills Resort on Priest Lake.  A typical conversation with a patron follows this general format: 

Patron: “Where do ya go to school?”

Me: “Montana State University in Bozeman”

Patron: “Oh ya, whatchya studying?”

Me: “English Literature”

Patron: While trying to hold back a smirk “what are you going to do with that?”

About this time my brain clicks on searching for some profound and elegant answer to this probing question however the following occurs in reality.

Me: “Graduate”

Upon answering so simplistically, I wish to amend my answer and quote the rhetoric of Shelly or Keats or Pater.  I wish to skillfully argue using the words of Arnold explaining, “more and more mankind will discover that we have to turn to poetry to interpret life for us, to console us, to sustain us. Without poetry, our science will appear incomplete; and most of what now passes with us for religion and philosophy will be replaced by poetry” (Arnold par. 2).  I yearn to scream for the study of poetry as the most crucial and meaningful pursuit in the common age.  A questioning of the study of poetry deserves more than a one-word response because the true motive for my study in English involves much more than a diploma yet my basic response is all I can muster.

I desire nothing more than to explain to my patrons that the study of poetry encompasses a broader range than a simple understanding of the artful utterances of literary masters.  By studying poetry, we English students study the nature of language.  We learn from Northrop Frye that “all structures in words are partly rhetorical, and hence literary […]” thus students of English learn the methodology to comprehend literature from every field of study offered by modern universities (Frye 350).  The primary goal of language involves the conveyance of knowledge and a student of poetry expertly works to unearth that knowledge.  English students conceptualize the literature of business, politics and science just as we do poetry because the skills ingrained in us from the study of language transcends all language, poetic or otherwise.  With this understanding of language and literature, an English student becomes much more adaptable to the problems of today’s professional world because we specialize in the extraction of knowledge from language. 

More importantly, to study poetry is to study the nature of Nature.  Northrop Frye argues poetry imitates myth and myth imitates ritual, therefore a liberal English education also teaches us something of anthropology and history and any number of other topics expressed in the infinite canon of myth.  Furthermore, in poetry’s ultimate state, “literature imitates the total dream of man, and so imitates the thought of human mind which is at the circumference and not at the center of its reality” (Frye 119).  Poetry grants the English student the ability to reach beyond the limits of the human mind.  “[…] Nature becomes, not the container, but the thing contained […]” for a student of English (Frye 119).  Though the study of poetry we see nature from an unorthodox view with unorthodox possibilities. One may create worlds or reorder existing ones as in “The Idea of Order at Key West” by Wallace Stevens. The woman’s song eclipses the power and beauty of the ocean in Stevens’ poem and thus poetry becomes the ideal. The English student knows no limitations unlike students of the more didactic studies.  Through poetry, one may exist in multiple realities, across the plane of linear time, and even achieve immortality.  This broad reaching belief structure of possibility seems much more useful in today’s society than the narrowed, realistic, and “practical” fields of study.

If I truly desired to explain my motives behind studying English to a patron of my bar, I would look no further than Don Quixote.  Harold Bloom makes a keen insight into the characters of Hamlet and Don Quixote saying, “Here are two characters, beyond all others, who seem always to know what they are doing, though they baffle us when ever we try to share their knowledge" (Bloom xxxv).  Like Don Quixote, English students “know” the benefits of studying poetry while outsiders remain ignorant to the knowledge an English student may impart.  We English students need no explanation of the inherent worth of the study of poetry because we already “know.”  We see value in every passage written in Don Quixote just as Don Quixote sees a daring adventure around every corner.  An English student pursues knowledge just as Don Quixote pursues knight errantry.  Others may see our path as slightly mad yet like Don Quixote, we “know,” and continually battle wicked enchanters through the cyclical development of literature from the anagogic to the ironic and back again.  All the while through this discovery, we maintain the ability to stop and appreciate “[…] a brook whose cool waters, like liquid crystal, run over fine sand and white pebbles that seem like sifted gold and perfect pearls […], a fountain artfully composed of varicolored jasper and smooth marble […], another fountain fashioned as a grotto where tiny clamshells and the coiled white-and-yellow houses of the snail are arranged with the conscious disorder and mixed with the bits of shining glass and counterfeit emeralds, forming so varied a pattern that art, imitating nature, here seems to surpass it” (Cervantes 429).   Like an English student attempting to truely understand Don Quixote, those outside the realm of English studies, no mater how hard they try, will never fully share our indescribable state of “knowledge.”  Literary study like Don Quixote is the greater good, beyond the greater good, and most simply, good for its own sake.

Standing behind my bar every summer I wish nothing more than to dictate this entire apology to patrons who ask me why I study English, however I stick to my one word answer to avoid headache both on my part and the part of the inquisitor.  I prefer to differ to Stanley Fish to justify the study of English and the Humanities.  He states: “To the question “of what use are the humanities?”. the only honest answer is none whatsoever. And it is an answer that brings honor to its subject. Justification, after all, confers value on an activity from a perspective outside its performance. An activity that cannot be justified is an activity that refuses to regard itself as instrumental to some larger good. The humanities are their own good” (Fish par. 13).  Though I apologize to my patrons for holding back my apology, I realize this answer would fall on deaf ears.  If at some point the world returns to Vico’s golden age, I will happily relate this apology to the patrons of my bar to the joyous sounds of saluting trumpets, rather than the bank stares I receive today.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Works Cited

Arnold, Matthew. “The Study of Poetry.” The Harvard Classics Vol. XXVIII. Ed. Charles W. Elliot. New York: P.F. Collier and Son, 1909-14. Bartleby.com, 2001. 23 Nov. 2008

Bloom, Harold. Introduction. Don Quixote. By Miguel de Cervantes. Trans. Edith Grossman. New York: Ecco-HarperCollins, 2003.

Cervantes, Miguel de. Don Quixote. Trans. Edith Grossman. New York: Ecco-HarperCollins, 2003.

Fish, Stanley. “Will the Humanities Save Us?” Weblog entry. Think Again. 6 Jan 2008. 23 Nov. 2008

Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism. 15^th ed. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000.