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T. S. Eliot's Literary Criticism and Its Implications on the Image of Teacher

T. S. Eliot's Literary Criticism and Its Implications on the Image of Teacher

國立臺灣師範大學教育學系碩士論文

指導教授:林逢祺 博士

艾略特(T. S. Eliot)文學理論及其教育藴意 T. S. Eliot’s Literary and Its Implications on The Image of Teacher

研 究 生:陳 冠 妤 撰

中 華 民 國 一〇六年 八 月

i 謝誌

在卸下近二十年的學生身份之前,最要感謝一直在身後支持協助我的家人,每次都

肯定我的努力和付出:謝謝陳爸早上叫我起床還幫我準備早餐,在我餓的時候煮麵給我

吃,你是我心理最大的支柱,我想這就是我最不想離開家的原因;謝謝陳媽每天都會關

心我有沒有吃飽、有沒有穿暖,看到我愛吃的蛋糕一定會買回家給我吃,儘管有時對你

說話的口氣不好,但你最在意的還是我過得好不好。陳爸陳媽,你們女兒終於要畢業了!

感謝我的口委,永泉老師及佳瑾老師。很幸運地在進入師大第一年修了永泉老師的

西教史,因為這堂課的啟發才能讓我有今天的論文的成果,也謝謝老師在課堂上及口試

中給的建議,讓我有進步的機會;非常感謝佳瑾願意擔任我碩班的口委,從大一開始就

非常喜歡上老師的文學課,且西概和英史是我在東吳最喜歡的兩門課,還記得當時下課

後到老師研究室問問題時老師說過「你很適合做研究」,而也是因為這句話我才有勇氣

讀研究所。最重要的是感謝逢祺老師,無時無刻傳遞最正面且溫暖的能量,每次團咪時

都非常鼓勵我在研究上的發想,讓我大膽地寫出自己的想法;雖然在生活上常常讓老師

擔心,但是您還是像爸爸關心女兒般要我注意身體健康,我想進入碩班後最幸運的事就

是成為您的指導學生,而您就是我心目中的「教師即詩人」。

感謝碩班的好友既視野交融成員們:謝謝愛憫總是很有愛,雖然我倆常陷入恐慌;

謝謝遲筠總是給很多寶貴建議、謝謝一直有著很棒笑容的俐蘋、謝謝一直都很可靠的宜

航、怡心、甯雅、皓旻、怡如、郁棠,還有其它這三年間給過我協助的崔麐、冠華、鈺

婷、展有、香汝、仲恩、皓昀,以及身邊好友們:五太太、貴婦團、東吳三加一、逄逄、

Rachel、Vivian、還有很多很多人,因為你們的陪伴讓我在師大這三年感到相當安心且

溫暖。還要感謝無怨無悔陪伴我寫論文的華軒,總是能在我煩躁不安時給我最溫暖的依

靠,因為有你我才能走到今天。最後感謝此刻正在異鄉追夢的摯友佳叡,謝謝你送我你

i 的生日願望 ,在澳洲的這一年不知道你過得好不好,但是謝謝你這十年來無間斷的支持

與陪伴,也謝謝你一直在我身邊看著我一步步實現夢想,未來你還要見證我站上中正講

台的那一刻呢!

最後感謝自己,謝謝陳冠妤勇敢且堅信自己心中的那個夢想會實現,即使動搖過,

卻不曾放棄,一路上的跌跌撞撞辛苦了。最後引上在東吳英文系大三上佳瑾的浪漫時期

英國文學時的一段話,希望日後這段話可以繼續陪伴我完成夢想。

One equal temper of heroic hearts,

Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will

To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

(From Ulysses by Tennyson, 1842:68–70)

陳冠妤 謹誌於臺灣師大

106 年 8 月 5 日

ii 摘要

本文研究旨在探討英國詩人、劇作家、評論家、及哲學家艾略特(T. S. Eliot)的文學

理論在教育中的教師圖像藴義,其中其文學理論包含文學批評及社會批評。全文先從

18 世紀詩人思想及當時的歷史背景切入,以了解艾略特所乘載的傳統,進而分析艾略

特生處的 19 世紀末至 20 世紀中的動盪年代所帶給文學世界的衝擊及影響。接著,將艾

略特文學批評中對於詩人理想圖像的概念帶進教師圖像,將教育與文學做跨學科的結合,

試圖藉由文學理論找出教師圖像的創新樣貌。最後,本研究總結艾略特的文學批評對於

教師圖像的啟示作為教師專業發展的新參照,歸結如下四點:

一、 教師即詩人,意指教師得以在其學生心中創造出永恆且深刻的理想,且其學生

將帶著此理想繼續流傳至下一代。

二、 教師即詩人,意指教師如同詩人,能使用極簡的文字,帶來極深刻的影響。

三、 教師即詩人,意指教師對於學生的教學就如同詩人之於其讀者的啟發,將在人

生每一不同階段產生不同的意義與價值。

四、 教師即詩人,意指教師能開拓學生視野,帶領其至更高境界的世界,正如詩人

能帶領讀者領略真理,昇華生命。

關鍵字:艾略特、教師圖像、教師即詩人、文學批評

iii

Abstract

This study attempts to trace the image of the teacher reflected in the corpus of T. S.

Eliot’s . Known primarily for his poetry, Eliot also generated a great number of critical essays discussing not only literature but also education. With the introduction to and historical background in the 18th century, this study assesses the impact and influence from Eliot on literature and society in the 20th century. And through the lens of

Eliot’s literary criticism, we try to “overlap” the image of ideal and the image of teacher by means of comparing the two fields—literature and education—and thereby arrive at a novel image of teacher.

The findings of this study are as follows: (a) teacher as poet is able to create poetic images that are timeless and exert a deep influence on students who in turn have their own impact on others; (b) teacher as poet is able to fix a particular emotion in the right and minimum number of words, just as a poet’s poetry does for its readers; (c) teacher as poet performs a lifelong task, which is to help students to increase their understanding at every stage of their maturing; and lastly, (d) teacher as poet is to teach the lesson of breadth of emotional range with his words, to make students see and hear more than they could ever see without his help.

Keywords: T. S. Eliot, Image of Teacher, Teacher as Poet, Literary Criticism

iv

Contents

Acknowledgement (Chinese) ...... i

Abstract (Chinese) ...... iii

Abstract (English) ...... vi

Content...... v

Figures...... vii

I. Introduction...... 1

A. Research Background...... 1

B. Research Objectives...... 13

C. Research Structure...... 14

II. Life and Works of T. S. Eliot...... 17

A. Life...... 17

B. Historical Background...... 20

C. Other Works...... 22

III. T. S. Eliot’s Criticism...... 29

A. What Is a Critic? ...... 29

B. What Is Criticism? ...... 32

C. Why Criticism? ...... 35

IV. Educational Implications of T. S. Eliot’s Literary Criticism ...... 38

A. Poet as Teacher...... 38

B. Education as Poetry...... 40

V. Teacher as Poet ...... 45

A. Belief of Teacher as Poet...... 45

v

B. Features of Teacher as Poet...... 50

C. Influences of Teacher as Poet...... 61

VI. Conclusion...... 67

References (English)...... 71

References (Chinese)...... 76

vi Figure

Figure. 1 Research Structure...... 13

vii

Chapter One

Introduction

Research Background

Teachers as educators and practitioners and in elementary and secondary schools have been subjected to education reforms since the 1990s in Taiwan. Because of the reforms, teachers are destined to come out of the so-called ivory tower, which has restricted teachers’ views and teaching practices for a considerable amount of time. They have faced a series of social and environmental changes, including the Reform of Grade 1-9 Curriculum, the gap between policies and practices (Huang, 2004), the application of non-corporal punishment in schools, the amendment of laws pertaining to teachers’ retirement, and the diminishing of the half-life of , which results in teachers’ maladjustment to students’ needs and social changes (Huang, 2007; Tang, 2004). These changes result in confusion on the part of senior teachers as well as current teachers about their own role definition and self-belief the in educational field. Teacher have also experienced panic owing to the rapid changes to which they cannot apply what they learned. In fact, teachers become so empty and aimless that they have doubts about their self-image as teachers (Chen, 2009).

Based on this information, how can teachers educate and turn students into independent and outstanding individuals if the teachers themselves harbor doubts about their own vocation and value? In consideration of the aimlessness toward the self-image of current teachers, this essay explores T. S. Eliot’s literary criticism and finding out the ideal poets of

Eliot’s; therefore, it has further implications for the image of teachers. In the following sections, I will explain why and how I select literary works to address the implications regarding the issue of image of teacher.

1

The Possibility of Inter-Disciplinary Communication. In 1958, a major crisis occurred in the field of comparative literature. Scholars argued about the meaning of comparative and the particularities of its development in the following decades. As Wellek

(1963) pointed out in his article “The Crisis of Comparative Literature,” one of the serious issues associated with comparative literature is “not [being] able to establish a distinct subject matter.” With numerous clichés in the contemporary comparative literature, Wellek believed that the why this literary field would face the decline is that the scholars did not accept the fact that this academic area ought to be complacent no more but to examine what to be changed next. H. H. H. Remark provided this ambitious definition of comparative literature:

. . .the study of literature beyond the confines of one particular country, and the study of the

relationships between literature on the other hand and the other area of knowledge and belief,

such as , philosophy, history, the social science, the science, religion, etc., on the other hand.

(Stallknecht & Frenz, 1961)

Moreover, in the structuralist approach to texts, there is a movement away from the interpretation of the individual work and a parallel drive toward understanding the larger abstract structures that contain them (Barry, 2008:39). According to Saussure, the signifier is interpreted as the material form and the signified is regarded as the mental concept. In A

Course in General Linguistics, Saussure stated that “language is a system of signs that express ideas, and is therefore comparable to a system of writing, the alphabet of deaf-mutes, military signals, etc.” (de Saussure et al., 1965:16). Words and languages are the typical signifiers that we human use to present the signified. According to Barry (2008:42), “For

Saussure, language constitutes our world, it doesn’t just record it or label it. Meaning is

2 always attributed to the object or idea by the human mind, and constructed by and expressed through language: it is not already contained within the thing.”

As languages turn into signs, there is no need for concern about the signs blurring the concept that we try to infer. In other words, the signified of works, such as Plato’s Republic or Rousseau’s Émile, would not merely be the works that are exclusive to either the education field or literature.

As long as the concept behind languages is approachable, there is the opportunity to explore something new within different subjects. Since we are familiar with the possibility of inter-disciplinary communication, I would use my proficiency in education and literature to the best advantage. Later, I would focus on the education-related issue of image of teacher in order to explore its use for the educational field and to discover more possible materials from literary works.

Education and Literature: Image of Teacher. Humans typically learn through imitation and acquire experience from learning. Moreover, models are readily available for imitation purpose. Empiricists believe that knowledge comes only or primarily from sensory experience; if one is able to make good use of his or her senses, he or she will attain knowledge. Teachers in terms of social roles are typical role models setting up good deeds, and the images that teachers bring out would turn these abstract thoughts into concrete images. Before addressing the issue of image of teacher, it is important to define the terms role and image.

The word role originates from French word role, meaning “parts played by a person in life,” as well as “roll (of paper) on which an actor's part is written.”1 In the late-20th century, this term was applied to the social psychology field with the following meaning: a “function

1 Edited and revised from http://www.etymonline.com

3 performed characteristically by someone.”2 Derived from theater, the word role suggests the outer surface of one person,; society typically assigns such an appearance, similar to the way a director assigns a role to an actor. In role theory, everyone has socially defined categories to act out based on his or her daily life or routines, such as with the identity of “teacher”, which involves social duties, social expectations, and social norms, and this is how such a role is defined. This sociological concept deeply influences the way people see a teacher—a teacher’s self-identity and dignity are violated because of the role he or she has. In this essay,

I aim to explore the inside of a teacher’s views and feelings, i.e. what her or his identity consists of, instead of the outside of the teacher, i.e. which form his or her physical appearance/presence. Therefore, I focus on image as the topic of this essay.

Image, compared with role, is visible and can be depicted; instead of being defined by social norms and behavior, an image is formed and emerges in a person’s mind, in spite of the same scene that two individuals see. The ability to imagine is a free will that acts at one's own discretion. On account of free will, the image that comes to one’s mind when he sees the world depends on his experiences, as well as on his maturity and sensitivity. Every individual’s differences may influence the image one person has in mind, and this is quite a clear differentiation between role and image because roles are defined according to individuals’ social behaviors, yet images create room for people to interpret and explain.

Teacher is a role for a person to play in the society; nevertheless, it is possible that there are many images of a teacher based on different individuals’ interpretations of educators. In accordance with the possible and further explanations regarding teachers’ images, I would like to explore a new image that teachers could learn and apply.

Various studies have explored teachers’ images (Larson, 1979; Du, 2001; Lin, 2004;

Colannino, 2017). For instance, Simpson, Jackson and Aycock (2005:9) stated the following:

2 Ibid.

4

[Richard Peters believed] that the teacher is a guide who indicates the young into forms of

knowledge and that we should guide students so that they can join the ranks of those who

are on the inside of reading, writing, and calculating as well as of thinking in terms of

history, , mathematics, , biology, religion, literature, chemistry, politics,

government, and physics. John Holt reminded us of similarities between the teacher and

the travel agent who helps students plan their educational journeys...Maxine Greene

compared the teacher to a stranger who sees newness and wonders in learning... These

images carefully examined, frequently help us understand in part what teaching is, not just

what teaching like.

In the literature field, numerous have been depicted as models of teachers.

Some are teachers and writers themselves, such as Robert Frost and , and others are praised because of their contributions to literature as well as to society, such as

Keats and Shelley, and it is a kind of combination with education and literature. As to the interpretation of image of teacher, Berman’s (1999) article, entitled “Teacher as Poet,” is similar to the image I would like to find in Eliot’s literary criticism. However, some opinions and views of the image(s) of teachers differ from mine. Therefore, prior to my discussion of

Eliot, I will provide an overview of Berman’s perspective.

In his article, Berman (1999) claimed that poets and teachers are alike because they both “deal with worlds of self and other, may have profound impacts upon those with whom they share time and space, have the power to transform, and have the potential for rich inner journeys” (p. 18). He identified five qualities of the poet and the teacher: (a) giving voice to

5 the unspoken, (b) befriending mystery, (c) connecting heart/mind conversations, (d) bearing witness, and (e) delighting in surprise.

First, according to Berman, a poet primarily deals with questions and searches for answers that convey his or her innermost feelings and thoughts (p. 18). As for teachers,

Berman described them as those whose “intimate contact with the hearts and minds of others needs to be intimate with themselves and their own inner resources” (p. 19) Second, in consideration of Sarton’s quotation, “open the door to mystery,” Berman claimed that poets revel in mystery, and he also stated the following:

...Teacher as poet yearns for the shaping and recreating of the inner self of themselves

and students as together they move through the sacred spaces both of themselves and the

classrooms in which they dwell. Through attention to the mystery of living, heart and

mind are connected. (p.19)

With the connection between teaching and poetry, mystery becomes an agent that brings teachers and students to the holy ground (p. 20). Third, as Berman noted, “when heart/ mind/ imagination/spirit are treated as a whole, teaching becomes poetic” (p. 20). With the reliance on outside authority, teachers are not able to have greater trust in themselves. As long as the process of “trusting” is performed, this process of connecting the heart and the mind would be similar to the process of composing. Fourth, in regard to the act of witnessing, teacher as poet could witness the wrongdoing and possibility simultaneously, comparable to the witness of poetry that poets set; therefore, “when teachers are poets, they may be the initiators of great things for themselves, those whom they teach, and the world” (p. 21).

Finally, Berman believed that “teachers may see what others see and what they do not see,”

6 for they always search for “otherwiseness” (p. 21), which helps teachers acquire the ability of giving hope and dream to their students. As Berman explained, “Life is not just a series of events but rather a sequence of surprises” (p. 22). His perspective relates to teaching, which involves action and surprises when teachers have the connections to their own lives and those of their students.

In consideration of the five qualities above, Berman noted that with the concept of teacher as poet, educators are able to “look at insights from those persons who value feelings as well as mind, the inner landscape as well as the outer, introverted as well as extroverted perspectives” (p. 22). After all, educators often lack this particular ability.

With Berman’s statements above, we can see part of the relationship between the teacher and the poet; however, it seems that there are misinterpretations about poets.

According to Berman, a teacher is much like a “communicator;” however, a poet generally speaks to his readers using one-way communication. For instance, a reader can be regarded as a receiver who reads poetry. Moreover, a poet directs more attention to his own expressions when composing, which makes poet a “speaker” instead of a communicator, as

Berman claimed. Additionally, to Berman, poets are to poetry what teachers are to teaching, which is the relationship he tries to connect. However, the relationship, either the similarity or the contrast, between poetry and education is in the article, for we can barely compare poetry to teaching. Poetry is the product of the creation and expression of a poet; a poem is generated in and derives from a poet’s mind. On the other hand, teaching is an activity that a teacher practices. Perhaps teaching could be seen as the creation of a teacher, yet compared with a poet’s creation, teaching significantly differs Most importantly, when considering the five qualities, the image of a poet cannot be seen in teachers, since creativity comes across as something teachers would or should do rather than as something poets and teachers share.

7

As I mentioned in the previous section, the idea of an image pertains to the creation and interpretation that an individual develops in his or her mind. If it is as what Berman suggested, the relationship between teachers and poets concerns their shared duties, and I think this is quite far from the expectations we have for poets and teachers. Different from how Berman deals with the issue of the image of teachers, I seek to distinguish the features and characteristics of poets and to incorporate these features in further research and contribute to a better understanding of the image of teachers. To me, there are images of teachers in students’ minds, just as there are various images of poets in readers’ minds because of some specific and significant features; meanwhile, some features of poets could be shared with teachers. Consequently, I aim to evaluate the image of teachers in relation to readers’ perspectives of poets’ features.

What is a Teacher? The definition of teacher has differed throughout history.

According to Pullias and Young (1977), a teacher is a teacher, a counselor, a guide, an emancipator, a model, an inspirer, and also a researcher, a designer, a facer of reality, and, most importantly, a learner. Based on Pullias and Young's definition, a teacher is as a whole person who is able to deal with the problem he has in education. Hare discussed the relationship between teaching and learning in “T. S. Eliot and Educational Aims”:

I believe, that teaching as an activity cannot be categorized or defined without a reference

to the concept of learning, for the meaning of the former is tied up with the latter in as

much as teaching is an activity the aim of which is to produce learning (whatever that may

be) in someone. (Hare, 1970)

8

With the involvement of the two activities of teaching and learning, it is obvious that there are two subjects required—teachers and students.

I take [teaching] to be an intentional activity, meaning by that, that one cannot teach

unintentionally, though I cannot argue for this here. Furthermore it is polymers concept—

that is to say, there are many different things one or another of which can in certain count

as teaching, yet none of which in other circumstances necessarily counts as teaching.

Though the activity can take many forms, the common feature is to be found in the aim of

producing learning. (Hare, 1970)

The two quotes above indicate a significant point of view of the relationship. A critic is to criticism what a teacher is to education; they are deemed to be in pairs no matter what, since neither can fully implement without the other. Specifically, without a need for education, there would not be a need for teachers. Likewise, a poet is to poetry what a teacher is to education. However, for the disposition, the expressions, or the feelings of a poet, a poem would not be referred to as poetry if it did not convey the of its creator.

Eliot, who was an author, an editor, a critic, a poet, and even a teacher, discussed these roles in his writing, with a role model in mind. For instance, Eliot focused on many poets and viewed Dante as the greatest poet, since Dante enabled Eliot to become acquainted with the epic Divine Comedy. However, when discussing a particular poet or critic, Eliot did not mention anything about a teacher’s features or the characteristics of a poet or a critic. In spite of a clear passage about his attitude toward the education system (Eliot, 1965), Eliot did not include a statement about the image of teachers. For this research project, I would like

9 investigate Eliot’s prose, particularly those related to criticism, and determine Eliot’s the image of teachers. Moreover, I will discuss the concept of “Teacher as Poet.”

What is a Poet? In Lamarque’s (2008) The Philosophy of Literature, he mentioned that the role of an author in a work could be the source of meaning (p. 85). Here, I would place author in the same position as poet, for they play the same role when we talk about the process of creating a work of literature. If we see writing as the process of creating, it is in the same condition that poets, novelists, or any other authors have themselves into the works and put all the feelings into words. Therefore, there is “authority” that we need to consider when we place authors, or poets, in such an important place. According to Lamarque, it is a vexed and persistent question in literary criticism, for the disagreement with the over-exaggerated authority of an author in his or her work is still ongoing due to many concerns, especially the intentions. The intentions behind an author's work are elusive entities, for “sometimes they are simply manifested in the words the author has chosen; sometimes they seem to make no appearance in the work and have to be dug out from independent sources; sometimes they do not seem to matter at all, as when authors are pleasantly surprised at imaginative readings of their own works by perceptive critics” (p. 85).

With this contention, most critics would consider this as a conflict of different concepts.

Poets who express romantic concepts when they write regard literature as a vehicle or personal expression; as for those with the modernity concept, the “autonomy” makes them see literature solely as a pure linguistic artifact. Romantic concepts are the beliefs or thoughts that poets in Romantic period possessed. The aspects of Romantic aims and achievements

(Abrams, 1993:127-129) are as follows:

1. The prevailing attitude favored innovation as against traditionalism in the materials,

forms, and style of literature

10

2. The spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings

3. Inviting the reader to identify the protagonist with the poets themselves, like Lord

Byron’s Childe Harold (1812-1818)

4. Consisting in an endeavor beyond finite human possibility

On the other hand, according to Abrams (1993) in Norton Anthology of English Literature vol. 2, “For much of the twentieth century, scholars singled out five people—Wordsworth,

Coleridge, Byron, Percy Shelly, and Keats, adding Blake belatedly to make a sixth—and constructed notions of a unified on the basis of their works” (Abrams, 1993).

Throughout Eliot’s literary criticism, we can find that most of these poets are discussed instead of other contemporary poets in Eliot’s time. Meanwhile, if we put the Romantic concepts motioned above and those poets that Eliot criticized together, we can see there is no conflict in his criticism—the conflict Lamarque sought to establish between modernity and

Romanticism.

When the relationship between poets and poetry is discussed, it is always the creator-and-creation binding. As Mizener (1962), an English and literary critic, said, “Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from personality... But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape these things.” For those Romantic poets, it is apt to put themselves with the works, regardless of human society; therefore, it is valid to see the poetry as his or her double. In Lyrical Ballads, the English poet

Wordsworth (1802) referred to some qualities that a poet would have:

...more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness, who has a greater knowledge of

human nature, and a more comprehensive soul...; a man pleased with his own passions and

volitions, and who rejoices more than other men in the spirit of life that is in him;

11

delighting to contemplate similar volitions and passions as manifested in the goings-on of

the Universe, and habitually impelled to create them where he does not find them.3

In the time period before Wordsworth, especially in the eighteenth century, the poets would have image in memory, but to Wordsworth, those who can use their feelings and dispositions to affect their readers have the quality of poets. The difference between a poet and a man, according to Wordsworth, is the ability to express oneself; only if one conveys his feelings and emotions explicitly could he create real work—i.e., a work that affects its readers.

Here we can make a brief summary about poets. What poets do is to affect their readers, and, with the poets’ feelings, poetry could be seen as a vehicle of expression for its creators.

Therefore, every word, meter, rhythm, and metaphor represents the creator—the poet. There are beliefs and faith in his or her creations, and the creations themselves carry the disposition, affecting those who contact them, read them, and feel them. The vision that appears in my mind when putting these two persons together is, amazingly, the image of the teacher. We can see that there are similarities between poets and teachers; as a result, in this research, I would like to focus on the features of teachers and on the images of the teacher based on

Eliot’s literary criticism.

T. S. Eliot as a Critic. T. S. Eliot is a famous from the late-19th century to the mid-20th century. Alive during World War I and II, Eliot was well known for The Waste Land

(1922), in which he conveys the hopelessness and anxiety of the broken European civilization during the discouraging period. Actually, before The Waste Land, which won him the Nobel

Prize for Literature, Eliot had been well known in field of criticism. In his youth, Eliot was

3 Wordsworth, W., Preface to Lyrical Ballads, in Abrams, M. H. (2006). The Norton anthology of English literature: V. 2 (8th ed.). New York, NY: W.W. Norton, c2006-., p.262-273

12 used to being alone on account of a physical illness, and because of the solitude, he found himself in literature. It is classic literature that had a tremendous influence on his life, and it contributed to his meticulous writing of literary criticism.

In addition to of literature, Eliot also critiqued poets, such as Milton,

Coleridge, and Dante. In his writing, Eliot criticized the works of poets, but he also took their backgrounds, personalities, and other characteristics into consideration during his critiques.

For instance, in Eliot’s “The Frontier of Criticism,” he mentioned that a work could not entirely represent or comprehensively interpret the author, for what makes someone an author is the whole of his works (Eliot, 1957). Eliot was unquestionably an exceptional writer during his life, not only because of his incredible publications but also due to his explicit perspectives and attitude toward literature. After all, he has more expectations and hope regarding the traditional literature conventions, which we can find in his literary works.

Likewise, here, as a critic and a poet, I believe Eliot needs to be analyzed thoroughly if we are to achieve a better understanding of his criticism this critic and his criticism. Talented and accomplished, Eliot wrote pieces about many fields; however, due to the limitations of this study, I would focus on his literary criticism, including his criticism of poets and literature

(for a further explanation, see Chapter 3), and the extended issues Eliot discussed.

Research Objectives

My research aims to focus on both education and literature; with this purpose in mind, there are four objectives I want to achieve in this research. First, I choose T. S. Eliot’s criticism as my prime research subject, and in order to attain a thorough understanding of this subject prior to analyzing his criticism, I would like to include a brief introduction about him.

After discussing Eliot’s life, I will then focus on the influence of this critic’s criticism. In

13 particular, I will explain what criticism is and further address my selection of Eliot’s criticism.

Next, I would distinguish the education-related implications from Eliot’s literary criticism from his criticism on poets, poetry, and some . Based on these educational implications, I will then present a definition of the image of the teacher, which I will refer to as “Teacher as Poet.” Lastly, I would like to make this image visualized, meaning that I would like to apply this result to the contemporary education field and offer guidance to teachers in terms of how they can implement teaching and educational activities using the

'teacher as poet' concept. The objectives of this research are as follows:

1. To explore Eliot’s life and the influence of his criticism

2. To identify the educational implication from Eliot’s criticism

3. To define Teacher as Poet

4. To apply Teacher as Poet to the practice of education

Research Structure

In order to achieve the four objectives mentioned above in the first chapter, this research would consist of fives individual chapters, and details are as followings:

Chapter 1 Introduction. In the beginning of this chapter, I would like to try to bring up the issue of being a “teacher” and a “poet”, which I found connection of teacher’s image between these two features when reading T. S. Eliot’s literary criticism. This chapter consists of my Research Background, Research Objectives, and the Structure of this essay.

Chapter 2 T. S. Eliot. For this chapter, I would like to have a brief introduction about T.

S. Eliot, who is not only a great poet but also an impressive critic that give impactful criticism on poets and literature. Before proceeding doing research, it is of necessity to have

14 knowledge about this critic with three sections: Life, Historical Background of Eliot, and

Eliot’s Thoughts and Belief.

Chapter 3 T. S. Eliot's Criticism. Eliot’s criticism would be the base of this research essay, which means most of the argument would be raised and proved based on Eliot’s criticism upon poets, literature works, and social criticism. With this aim, the three questions are to be discussed and answered in this chapter: What is a Critic?, What is Criticism?, and

Why is Criticism?

Chapter 4 Educational Implication of Literary Criticism. In this chapter I would like to prove that there are connections between literature and education, and I raise two issues to be discussed, which are Poet as Teacher and Education as Poetry, with Eliot’s criticism, trying to apply literary criticism to educational field.

Chapter 5 Teacher as Poet. With the findings from the last chapter, I would like to conclude the result of this essay with the term Teacher as Poet as the image of teacher by providing three discussions: Belief of Teacher as Poet, Features of Teacher as Poet, and

Influences of Teacher as Poet.

Chapter 6 Conclusion. For the last part of this essay, I would give a conclusion of this research result and how this result could be the further implication on education, being applied by teachers and being applied to the current education field.

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Figure 1. Research Structure

Research Background

Research Introduction Objectives

Research Structure

Life

Historical T. S. Eliot Background

Educational Thoughts

Eliot's What is a Critic? Literary Criticism T. S. Eliot’s What is and Its Criticism Criticism? Implications on the Images of Why is Teachers Criticism?

Poet as Teacher Educational Implication of Literary Criticism Education as Poetry

Belief of Teacher as Poet

Features of Teacher as Poet Teacher as Poet

Influence of Teacher as Poet Conclusion

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Chapter Two

Life and Works of T. S. Eliot

I am an Anglo-Catholic in religion, a classicist in literature, and a royalist in politics.

—T. S. Eliot

T. S. Eliot, a major twentieth-century poet, has had a significance and an influence far beyond his own time. Not only do his works continue to inform contemporary literature, but his critical insights still have great impact on people in our own time. In this chapter, I introduce Eliot and explore his thought and beliefs.

Life

Thomas Stearns Eliot was born on 26 September, 1888, in St Louis, the city that looks

East and West and North and South across the North America continent. The youngest of

Henry Ware Eliot’s seven children, he enrolled in Harvard in 1906, when he was 18. The

President of Harvard at the time, Charles William Eliot, was a cousin of his grandfather. He took his bachelor’s degree in 1909, his master’s the following year. In 1911, Eliot returned to

Harvard from Paris to concentrated not on poetry, but on philosophy, in search for roots, for the source of ultimate meaning (Tamplin, 1988:21).

In 1915, Eliot married his first wife, Vivienne Haigh-Wood (1888-1947), an ebullient but insecure and persistently ill woman, despite his family’s disapproval. “[I]f Vivien was neurotic to the point of helplessness and often ill, [and] near to death,” observes one of his biographers, “Eliot seemed to be blight her vivacity by a fastidious nervousness and neurotic exhaustion of his own.” (Tamplin, 1988:23-25) Denied the chance of being a freelance writer

17 by the duties of taking care of his sick wife, Eliot went to work at Lloyds Bank in 1917. “The difficulty for the poet,” he wrote in 1919, “is that public success is built upon surrendering private utterances—the veiled interior meanings of the poems” and, for the poet, revelation is always accessible, yet he may “frustrate its recognition by advancing a theory of the artist’s impersonality, poetry as ‘an escape from personality’.”4 In 1922, his intelligence and unremitting work as a critic and poet led him to found The Criterion5, of which he served as editor from 1922 until 1939 and the first issue of which featured his poem, The Waste Land6.

(Tamplin, 1988)

Eliot received the Nobel Prize winner for Literature in 1948, for “his outstanding, pioneer contribution to present-day poetry” (Frenz, 1969). Afterwards, he was “for a decade or more the undisputed literary dictator of London” (Kenner, 1962). Living in England during

World War I, Eliot witnessed first-hand the collapse of civilization, and the poem The Waste

Land, which captured the state of culture and society after the war. “The long, fragmented structure of The Waste Land contained so many technical innovations that ideas of what poetry was and how it worked seemed fundamentally changed.” (Levine et al., 2012) the

Romanticism of the late nineteenth century, with its emphasis on emotion and individualism and glorification of the past and of nature, withered in the face of the recurring wars of the early twentieth century, and was replaced by doubt and insecurity. Modernism, as a literary movement, represents the breakdown of traditional society, which had seemed so firmly established before the war, and it is the philosophy first recognized and developed in Eliot’s

1917 poem, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.”

4 “I am suggesting in a way, that for Eliot the true escape, the true impersonality, was business, in banking and later, more congenially, in publishing. It was as much shelter as deviation from his calling as poet, which was the utmost rigour.” (Tamplin, 1988) Eliot in the reality has so many roles to play, yet the only role he could make him more like a man is “poet”. 5 The Criterion was a British literary magazine published from October 1922 to January 1939. 6 A long poem by T. S. Eliot, and it is widely regarded as one of the most important poems of the 20th century and a central work of modernist poetry.

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[Modernism] involves deliberate and radical break with some of the traditional bases...[and]

its thinkers...[question] the certainties that had supported traditional modes of social

organization, religion, and morality and also traditional ways of conceiving the human

self...The year 1922 was signalized by the simultaneous appearance of such monuments of

modernist innovation as James Joyce’s Ulysses [and] T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land

[because] the catastrophe of the war has shaken faith in the continuity of Western

civilization and raised doubts about the adequacy of traditional literary modes. (Abrams,

2011:167)

During the war, the modernist poets expressed their uncertainties about society in their works, but the modernist movement was soon challenged by a counter-movement that came to be labelled “post-modernism,” as observed by , a significant critic and philosopher of the twentieth century. According to his essay, “The Death of the Author,” we do not deal with the creator (“author”) of a work once the work is created, for thereafter the life of the work belongs to the reader, interpreting the work himself instead of consulting the author. In other words, it is impossible for us to find “Eliot” by reading Eliot’s works, that is to say, it is impossible to know and to reach Eliot’s intentions through our reading. The first publication of The Waste Land in 1922, in The Criterion and The Dial, was the edition with no footnotes, and this gave critics and readers the chance to “extend” the poem, to communicate with the poem itself. The subsequent republication of the poem in a book, however, added footnotes to the complex texture of the poem. With the footnotes, this poem was explicitly explained and clarified by Eliot, the author himself and, to Postmodernists, this was seen as the author cutting in and interrupting the relationship between the work and its

19 readers, depriving them of the experience of guessing and thinking. On the other hand, it was a chance for those readers to know the poet’s real thoughts.

In 1927, Eliot adopted the established religion of England, the country in which he had lived since 1914. His 17th-century English ancestor, Andrew Eliot, had become a puritan;

Eliot’s grandfather, on the other hand, had left Massachusetts as a missionary for the

Unitarian Church. As one of his literary biographers observes:

The colours of this background, remotely Puritan and proximately Unitarian, never left

him...For both elements of his religious heritage indicate points of view —

disposition—that survive his conversion into the ampler communion of the Church of

England. Religious questions preoccupied Eliot during most of his life...and some of the

effects...produced both in his poetry and his criticism. (Tamplin, 1988, p. 35)

For the following years, Eliot dedicated himself to poetry and criticism, and in October 1964 he collapsed, paralyzed down the left side, and went into a coma. He died at home on 4

January 1965.

Historical Background

“The war7, supposedly fought to save European civilization, had been [the] most brutal and destructive in Western history.” (Levine et al., 2012:1417) In the first half of the twentieth century, many violent wars took place, especially World War I and World War II, and these events gave rise to the literary movement of Modernism. The Waste Land, was one of the key literary works of the period, and both the title of this poem and the view of modern civilization it offered seemed, to many, to capture precisely the state of culture and society

7 World War I, 1914-1918.

20 after World War I. (Levine et al., 2012) On account of the destruction brought by that devastating war, the life of the people then was totally torn apart, both physically and psychologically, and this situation is depicted in Eliot’s poem through fragments and spaces that differ from the rigorous structure of traditional poetry. Wyndham Lewis once said that “it was, after all, a new civilization that I—and a few other people—was making the blueprints for... Then the war came, and that ended chapter one of my career as a writer and artist with an unceremonious abruptness.” (Krockel, 2011)

The impact of war struck most people who were living their ordinary and orderly life, including Eliot; yet writers then “were not threatened by shellfire, but by a society fixated upon war. They were helpless to participate in events which were remote from them, but so was the soldier helpless while caught up in these events.” (Krockel, 2011:9) Writers such as

Eliot might not have had the chance to see the battle field in reality, for composing was a way for them to be kept from the bombardment, remaining uninjured bodies; nevertheless, according to Krockel, the trauma of war acutely impacted them in spite of being physically unharmed, for “trauma theory can be used to measure the impact of the destruction of the symbolic order by which people make sense of their lives.” (Krockel, 2011:23) People like

Eliot, who see order and convention as essential elements of life, are the first ones to sense the disorder brought about by war; some faced their life in disarray, and some might have to face the break-down in belief system, living with doubts and unsteadiness.

Eliot, as one of those who suffered from war trauma, had his recovery by finding a larger scheme within which to interpret personal experience; by doing so, he began it with the appeal to “Tradition” in the cross-referencing of The Waste Land. (Krockel, 2011:22) In his

1919 essay, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” Eliot mentions that anyone who would continue to be a poet beyond his twenty-fifth year requires the historical sense, yet, ironically,

21 such historical sense is so vague and shattered that hardly could the writers then and later distinguish it. For the first year of the war, when Eliot was writing the poem The Waste Land, he was “strained to find meaning between private and historical experience, although he managed to compose the first fragments of what would become The Waste Land, the testament of his ‘historical sense’.” (Krockel, 2011:44) The Waste Land is a long poem written in a form that Eliot invented to imitate and exploit the fragmentary world of modern times. This is typified in the line, “These fragments I have shored against my ruins,” presenting the image of despair and lost hope to the reader. With uncertainty and melancholy,

Eliot tried to identify the concept of “tradition” which almost collapsed during his time.

Finished one year after the war, “Tradition and the Individual Talent” suggested that

the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his

bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within

it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and

composes a simultaneous order. This historical sense, which is a sense of the timeless as

well as of the temporal and of the timeless and of the temporal together, is what makes a

writer traditional. And it is at the same time what makes a writer most acutely conscious of

his place in time, of his contemporaneity. (Eliot, 1951:14)

As a consequence, the vision of the timelessness would be the point for us to discuss the poets’ image which plays such an important role even if it was the hard time when there seemed to be no tradition and convention left during the wartime.

Other Works

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Culture. Eliot as a cultured man shares many of his thoughts about the concept of

“culture” in his Notes Towards the Definition of Culture. Written in 1948, the book marks a turning point in culture, the culture that people used to believe in. People who suffered post-war, especially twofold, from World War I and World War II, like Eliot, have deep impressions of the consequences of war. Never had they seen such a mass breakdown, not only economic but also psychological. The well-established traditions, the entire civilization, that Europe had built over the course of thousands of years were smashed so easily by a mere four-years-long war. The edifice that Europeans were so proud of became worthless ruins after the two wars. The frustration Eliot expressed in the line from The Waste Land quoted above (“These fragments I have shored against my ruins”) conveys this sense of deep depression and hopelessness toward not only the past but also the future. Notes, finished between the two wars, took Eliot five years to write and, like the aforementioned verse, both presents and represents the doubts people entertained during that period.

In its six chapters, the book Notes analyzes the word “culture” in an orderly fashion.

Instead of summarizing the first five chapters, here I will try to elaborate on what Eliot concludes in the final chapter, titled “Notes on Education and Culture: and Conclusion.”

Mentioning the word “education” several times in the previous chapters, he juxtaposes education and culture “when it comes to an individual, a group or a class, or a whole society”

(Eliot, 1948). As mentioned above, the emptiness in people’s minds after a severe war brings them misery when finding out that there dwelt neither belief nor faith in the world; if the so-called culture is so unreliable, Eliot’s purpose in writing this book is to try to prove the meaning of culture, the function of culture; if the so-called culture is reliable, what Eliot would seek to do is to clarify how to demonstrate it to the next generation, telling them how to preserve the precious human culture.

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Eliot clarifies the definition of “education” in his time, which is far different from the old definition that was used in the sixteenth century. Time after time, the purpose of education, to sum up, is either about “what people believe to have been the unconscious purpose, giving their own meaning to the history,” or about “what may not have been the real purpose directing development in the future.” After presenting some then-current definitions of the purpose of education, such as to transmit the culture, a full democracy (by Mr. Dent), a libertarian conception of democracy (by Mr. Read), training the sort of men and women the age needs (by Dr. Happold), Eliot gives his answer, which is also the answer we approve of most today, that is, for “happiness.”

William Godwin once said that, “The true object of education…is the generation of happiness” (Eliot, 1949:174). If happiness is the aim of education, making people happy would be the activity which takes place when educating. Eliot states that those who are educated are “happier than the uneducated,” not only by virtue of the uneducated class’s lack of complete education but also for the different education brought about by the class division.

In spite of the eagerness for education, however, Eliot is also concerned that “too much education, like too little education, can produce unhappiness.”

In the second chapter of Notes, “The Class and the Elite,” Eliot stands firm in claiming the necessity of the class division and the significance of the existence of the so-called elites.

Based on such a conception, he proposes his ideal education, the education that should consist of the organization of society. “The ideal of an educational system which would automatically sort out everyone according to his native capacities is unattainable in practice;” he claims, “and if we made it our chief aim, would disorganise society and debase education.”

Therefore, Eliot claims that education should help to preserve the class division and to select the elites despite the inherent inequality of opportunity in such a scheme.

24

Among all his notes on education and culture, Eliot regards equal opportunity as “the most influential” of all “dogmas” (p. 106). To reach such ideal, Eliot, unlike other educators, proclaims that the dissolution of the institution of the family is essential, for the blood-bound relationship and the influence of parents upon their children bring no advantages but depression. “Whenever the school assumes another responsibility hitherto left to parents, we might do better to admit that we have arrived at a stage of civilization at which parents cannot be expected to train their children properly.” It would be irrelevant whether a family has a means of educating its child or not, for what counts more to Eliot is the next stage of civilization, the benefits for a whole society.

One of the consequences of the post-war period was the modern phenomenon of the

“half-educated”—the phenomenon that “people had the education necessary for the function they were called upon to perform” (Eliot, 1948). That is to say, within a limited system of instruction, education could be seen as a “process by which the community attempts to pass on to all its members its culture, including the standards by which it would have them to live”

(Eliot, 1948). The epigraph of this book, displayed on the title page, “DEFINITION: 1. The setting of bounds; limitation (rare) 1483” is quite ironic, for such a word confines itself in its elaboration: “The more education arrogates to itself the responsibility, the more systematically will betray culture.” (Eliot, 1948) A 1937 Oxford Conference report, The

Churches Survey Their Task, concludes that if we see culture as a final, there would be no way to educate the young; on the contrary, as long as we see it as a development, the minds of the young people are able to be trained to not only receive the culture but also improve upon the culture. Culture itself has neither ends nor final objectives in human civilization, for once there are people, there are developments, there are cultures. Because culture itself

25 dwells with development, there are no bounds when giving culture definition, there are no bounds when practicing education with culture.

Education. In his Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (1948), Eliot envisioned education as an implement of culture. Questioned by fellow critics, Eliot wrote “Can

Education Be Defined?” to elaborate on his thoughts about education. At the beginning of the article, Eliot asserts that “education is a subject on which we all feel that we have something to say.” (Eliot, 1965:61) Believing as he did that most of us are educated, he therefore held that education is something we all have a right to complain about or comment upon.

Indeed, every single person has his own definition of a word. In order to discuss education, Eliot tries to define this term according to the Oxford English Dictionary before explaining his aims on education. He claimed that

[the] word education follows a pretty straight course.... It is first applied to the teaching of

the very young.... It then proceeds to the training of young persons with reference to the

station they are to occupy in life.... It proceeds next to the ‘systematic instruction,

schooling or training given to the young in preparation for the work of life’; also ‘the

whole course of scholastic instruction which a person has received’: that is to say, the

word develops along with schools or colleges; but it still has frequently a professional

connection.... Finally, it becomes ‘culture, or development of powers, formation of

character. As contrasted with the imparting of mere knowledge or skill.’ (Eliot, 1965, pp.

67-68)

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Without looking back through the development of the word education but sticking to the definition in Eliot’s age, people in his time might not have seen the meaning and aims of education mentioned above as a question, for they all were living under the same social structure; yet Eliot believed that education should have distinct ends.

Here Eliot adopted three ends of education suggested by C. E. M. Joad, one of which is to equip [a person] to play his parts as a citizen of a democracy. (Joad, 1945) To Eliot, the essence of democracy is not merely the formation of government but the belief of a society, the expression of the public, and the standards of private lives. And there are still the secondary purposes of education. (Eliot, 1965:72) In a democratic society, with limitations and danger, “education may come to be interpreted as educational adaption to environment”

(p. 73), and what will happen next would probably be someone that finds himself being adapted by the democracy; nevertheless, what one should do is to “be educated to criticize his own democracy, to measure it against what democracy should be, and to recognize the difference between what is proper and workable in one democracy and ... in another.” (p. 73)

Eliot thinks that we should not define the term education, as when seeing a machine, we would ask “What is it for?” and then “How does it do it?” That is to say, in terms of education, we ought to ask “What is education for?” first, and next “What is Man?”, and then

“What is Man for?” “Man” with a capital M refers to every human being on earth—humanity—which means that the definition of education is universal to every single human being. That is to say, when we are trying to define the word “education,” there is no such destined meaning for this word on account of a different time, a different space, or a different individual who experiences and interprets it. Only with the living of language can the definition of education be reinterpreted and revised. (p. 76)

27

In Notes Towards the Definition of Culture, Eliot reveals the truth that it is impossible to define the word “culture” in a few words, and so too with the word “education.” The way we define education is ultimately based on our expectations of education itself. Thus, following

Eliot’s point of view, if we want to find out what the true education is, we ought not use the modern definition to criticize his thought, but rather put ourselves in Eliot’s shoes, examining his statements and giving our best interpretation of his ideas accordingly.

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Chapter Three

T. S. Eliot’s Criticism

The merit of an author who can pass through the dolorous gates and write in the

“citta dolente” among the unstill gibberings of “fellow reviewers,” “fellow employees,”

doddering geezers doing notes on sixty volumes a week, etc. AND still enrich formal

discussion of heterogeneous writers with paragraphs as clear, and deep, as incisive and

as subtle as the delicate incision of a great surgeon, IS A POSITIVE MERIT, and it is a

merit whereto Eliot almost ALONE in our time could lay any valid or sustainable claim.

(Pound, 1937)

Eliot dedicated his life to writing, including poetry and criticism. Among his literary works, the major concerns of his criticism of literature and poetry are clear. According to

Tamplin (1988:104), “One important theme is the relationship between an individual artist and a tradition which can be derived from the past.” The artist Tamplin addresses here follows Eliot's use of the word author, which is the creator of works. According to Mizener

(1962), Eliot is able to dominate the “pattern of feelings that has its pattern of objects and events,” and “if the writer could set down the pattern of objects in exactly the right relations, without irrelevances or distortions, they will evoke in the reader the pattern of feelings.” In all of Eliot's works, he comes across as an effective critic who is concerned with the past, present, and future. Here I would like to discuss the concept of a critic first in order to determine how to view Eliot as such.

What Is a Critic?

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With the etymology and its origin, the word critic comes from the Greek κριτικός

(kritikós), meaning “able to discern,” and its derivative word κριτής (krités), meaning a person who offers reasoned judgment or analysis, value judgment, interpretation or observation8. Contemporary critics have the same functions as those in ancient times. By offering professional comments and judgments about literature, critics bring out the consciousness that readers and, in particular, authors may not be aware of during their reading or composing of works. In line with the philosophical perspectives of phenomenology, human consciousness is experienced independently from prior supposition, regardless of whether these suppositions come from philosophy or from common sense

(Abrams, 2011:289). Moreover, Geneva critics, from the Geneva school9, often apply the term phenomenological criticism, and these critics typically do the following:

[They] regard each work of literature as a fictive world which is created out of the

Lebenswelt 10 of its author and embodies the author’s entirely unique mode of

conscious . . . Their undertaking to read a work so as to experience the mode of

consciousness of its author, and then to reproject this consciousness in their own critical

writings, underlies the frequent application to the Geneva School of the term critics of

consciousness and the description of their critical aim as “consciousness of the

consciousness of author.” (Abrams, 1993:257)

8 Twain, M., Charles, & criticism, potential (2016). Critic. In Wikipedia. Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critic 9 The critics of "Geneva School" (Geneva critics) used the phenomenological method to attempt to analyze works of literature as representations of deep structures of an author's consciousness and his or her relationship to the real world. 10 (Chiefly in the philosophy of Edmund Husserl) The sum total of all immediate phenomena which constitute the world of an individual or of a corporate life; life-world.

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Though Roland Barthes11 did not consider the relationship between a work and its author in his “The Death of the Author12,” the Geneva critics would attempt to discover the impacts and influences from authors in works. By doing so, it is possible to unveil what is between the lines and behind the texts. If we compare a critic to a teacher, there is an important similarity in terms of their functions toward their targets. To Hare (1970), “A critic is a man making a contribution to the world of learning;” it is the contribution that language is likely to enshroud the truth.

As Eliot (1975) mentioned, “[T]he critic whom I am most grateful is the one who can make me look at something I have never looked at before, or looked at only with eyes clouded with prejudice.” Additionally, Hare (1970) commented that Margaret MacDonald13

“finds something logically puzzling in the way that a critic can bring us to see what we had not seen.” Usually readers, or even the authors, might not find out the hidden consciousness if they only have the visual languages when reading; therefore, there are always important messages lost among words. Besides, Hare (1970:47) commented that “the critic is concerned with the enjoyment of art: his criticism only counts as criticism if it can lead to a heightened appreciation of art.” Consequently, when speaking of a critic’s contribution, a critic's addressing of those thoughts in the texts is significant.

Eliot, as a critic, wished to bring out those essential messages in works, drawing what came across to him as an important line of demarcation between the essays of a generation and the appreciation of individual authors, for they are what Eliot wanted to retain for the future readers (Eliot, 1965). However, it is important to consider Eliot’s limitations in this

11 Barthes, Roland (1915-980), French essayist and social and literary critic whose writings on semiotics 12 “Death of the Author” (1967) is an essay by the French literary critic Roland Barthes that was first published in the American journal Aspen. The essay later appeared in an anthology of his essays, Image-Music-Text (1977), a book that also included “From Work To Text”. It argues against incorporating the intentions and biographical context of an author in an interpretation of text; writing and creator are unrelated. 13 Margaret MacDonald (9 April 1907 – 7 January 1956) was a British analytic philosopher.

31 case, meaning that he might not be able to cover all the phases of knowledge. Of course, human beings are limited, and so was Eliot. As Frank Kermode has argued, Eliot’s concept is not tenable as a description of the 17th century but is “the projection onto an historical scale of a developed Romantic-Symbolist view of the image” (Kermode, 1975).

We must consider his criticism not as a body of doctrine, a philosophical system, but as

the record of a man thinking. Eliot belongs, despite his poetic modernity, in the old school

of the impressionistic gentleman critic that he was so hard on when he was a young man;

his criticism is expressive, not impersonal. (Webster, 1966)

Webster expressed a more positive attitude toward Eliot’s contribution, namely his criticism, for he is one of the modern critics who is “along the path toward David Hume’s ‘true judges’”

(Lamarque, 2008:135). Interestingly, the modernity of Eliot's poetry contrasts with his beliefs that brought about Bantock's reference to Eliot as a cultured man.

Again, if we assess that criticism is one critic’s contribution to his readers, the extent to which criticism influences its readers determines how we see a critic. As Eliot (1965) noted,

“I think [critiques] have been useful in their time. They have been accepted, they have been rejected, they may soon go out of fashion completely: but they have served their turn as stimuli to the critical thinking of others.” Once a critique is worth reading and capable of arousing a sense of awareness on the part of its readers, the critic completes his mission. In the following section, I will further discuss criticism.

What Is Criticism?

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When it comes to criticism, there are various definitions with many dimensions. In this essay, based on Eliot’s works and other critics’ publications, here I would especially focus on literary criticism. According to Abrams (1993:39), “[Literary] Criticism is the overall term for studies concerned with defining, classifying, analyzing, interpreting, and evaluating works of literature.” In Western literature, we can recognize Aristotle’s Poetics the first systematic work of literary criticism, and this work did start the path of criticism writing, playing a central role in shaping the theory and production of literature. This handbook of

Greek dramatic theories, it contains valuable information about the organizations, methods, and purposes of tragedy. In Poetic, Aristotle's offering of a definition of tragedy14 not only shows us how the Greeks themselves reacted to their theater, which involved criticism, but also dominates the composition of tragedy throughout the history of Western Europe.

Pound15 (1937) regarded criticism as an essential element when reading literature:

any man should have been able to get past such obstacle and to print paragraphs of literary

criticism that will last as long as there are any students of English poetry concerned with

just opinion and assessment of its value, is not only reason for tribute and compliment, but

is an inalienable certificate of the native and persistent vigor and acuteness of an author’s

perception.

Greatly differing from reviews, critiques require more technical comprehension written by experts instead of anyone who merely wants to write something. Involving technical aspects,

14 “...Thus, Tragedy is an imitation of an action that is serious, complete, and processing magnitude; in embellished language, each kind of which is used separately in the different parts; in the mode of action and not narrated; and effecting through pity and fear [what we call] the catharsis of such emotions. By ‘embellished language’ I mean language having rhythm and melody, and by, ‘separately in different parts’ I mean that some parts of a play are carried on solely in metrical speech while others again are sung.” 15 Ezra Weston Loomis Pound was an expatriate American poet and critic, and a major figure in the early modernist movement.

33 critiques present a more objective point of view in a work, and this provides the acuteness of an author’s perception.

With technical terms and a specific writing style, criticism highlights the value of a work as well as the emotions and perspectives of an author, which is actually not an easy matter to untrained readers. Here comes one question: should we standardize criticism so that there is possibility for readers to follow and get the so-called acuteness of an author’s perception? As Hare (1970:47) stated, “Criticism is dead when it becomes stereotyped.” As mentioned above, the function of criticism is to make literary works more sensible as well as approachable for their readers. For Hare, with different works and different readers, the stereotypical criticism would not meet the needs of its readers, for nothing is discoverable in the criticism; such criticism could not inspire anyone. Standardized criticism is unquestionably ineffective if there is a need for people to have the ability to comprehend what a critique tells him or her. Instead, we should teach them the following:

If [a student] isn't capable of absorbing the criticism, this is no reflection on the criticism.

Perhaps he can be brought to appreciate it, and perhaps even now others do appreciate it.

That criticism has didactic aspects and that the most important of these is to bring us to see

something in a new way. But a work of criticism is not bad if we fail to see something in

this way, for the failure may lie in ourselves. (Hare, 1970:47)

It is acceptable for a reader to partake in criticism when reading literature, but Hare in this case sought to convey that it would function in a false way once readers became reliant on criticism instead of enjoying the literature itself. Again, we have to go back to the very beginning where we talked about the definition and function of criticism. Only if criticism

34 leads to a heightened appreciation of art could it count. Therefore, the way that criticism evokes such emotions and senses does matter.

Eliot’s criticism, like that of Dr. Johnson, is valuable not because of the subject, and not

because what he says is right or wrong, but because we can experience in his writings a

first-class mind in action, and can learn one possible response to literature and life.

(Webster, 1966)

Eliot’s criticism not only deals with the work itself but it also tends to form a connection between works and readers, associating texts with life. Similar to what critics do, teachers contribute to students’ living experiences through their teaching. As Hare (1970) stated, “It may take a lesser man to get me to see what Leavis or Eliot has enabled us to see. This man is the lesser critic, but perhaps a better teacher.” If a critic is the one who enables his readers to see, criticism plays a significant role due to making the unseen seen.

Having discussed my selection of Eliot and having explored the meaning of literary criticism, I will now focus more on why I selected criticism among Eliot’s various works.

Why Criticism?

Based on the reading of all of Eliot’s works, one can discover how gifted of a writer he was. As a teacher, a poet, a playwright, and a critic, Eliot contributed to many fields, from school to theater and from culture to literature. He also published works in different genres.

Among all of his works, I aim to focus on his criticism to investigate how it relates to the education field.

35

Eliot is considered as one of the pioneers of modernism due to his compositions, such as “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and The Waste Land. Moreover, because the theory that these publications include involves deliberate and radical breaks with some of the

Western traditional bases without the consistent thoughts of the poet (Abrams, 2006), it is difficult for readers to receive the correct and explicit messages from the poet through his poetry. The main purpose of this research is to determine the possible image of teachers through Eliot’s literary works; nonetheless, with the idea of modernism, the works do not provide much of an opportunity for readers to accurately assess Eliot’s thoughts and suggestions. In other words, if I discussed Eliot’s thoughts to explore the implications on his image of the teacher, it would be problematic that I have his poetry or dramas as my materials. Readers’ authority of the interpretation of literature is so powerful that the author of the work is “dead”, which is the theory Roland Barthes suggested; therefore, taking Eliot’s poetry or drama as the research materials would be a difficult, or rather inappropriate if my aim is to discover Eliot's ideas concerning literary works.

In addition to poetry and drama, most of the works of Eliot’s are criticism. Eliot had critiqued many topics, such as social criticism (e.g., Notes Towards the Definition of Culture), educational criticism (e.g., “The Aims of Education”), and literature criticism (e.g.,

“Shakespeare”, “Keats”, etc.). In Eliot’s criticism, it is obvious that Eliot exposes himself in his words, directly expressing what he thinks and how he interacts with society, and this would be an advantage for readers to seek Eliot in his works. In other words, with the objectives I would like to achieve in this research, using literary criticism as a source is the best option for the following researching and exploration of Eliot. Accordingly, I will focus on some of Eliot’s criticism pieces and essays as the materials for this research paper.

36

Showing great enthusiasm for literature and culture since his childhood, Eliot started writing in a young age and refined his writing further when he was a teenager. According to

Abrams (2006), “As a critic Eliot worked out in this reading of older literature what he needed as a poet to hold and to admire.” He criticized not only numerous classic works, such as Milton’s Paradise Lost and Shakespeare’s Hamlet, but also poets from different time periods, such as Dante and Ezra Pound. Western literary criticism is unapproachable for students in Taiwan if there is no connection with the literature. Even so, criticism is still not a common genre for those who are majoring in literature. Literary criticism, which is the art or practice of judging and commenting on the qualities and features of literary works16, is the work that measures the value of literature, transmits the meaning of literature, and provides different aspects and visions for readers to read and comprehend. Therefore, in the following chapter, I will focus on Eliot's written perspectives on education—namely, his vision.

16 From Oxford English Dictionary.

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Chapter Four

Educational Implications of T. S. Eliot’s Literary Criticism

Poets as Teachers

In his essay, “What Is a Classic?” (Eliot, 1957), T. S. Eliot proclaims Dante’s The

Divine Comedy the primary “classic” of European literary history. If The Divine Comedy is the work he praises the most, it stands to reason that Dante himself would possess personal characteristics that Eliot would praise the most. In fact, when we take a closer look at all of

Eliot’s literary work, it is obvious that Eliot sees Dante as the greatest poet in history. In

Nash’s The Educated Men, Bantock calls Eliot “The Cultured Man.” If Eliot similarly regards

Dante as “The Poet,” can Dante also be considered “The Educated Man” in the same archetypal sense? In the essay, “What Dante Means to Me”17, Eliot claims

[that], in fact, the business of the poet was to make poetry out of the unexplored resources

of the unpoetical; that the poet, in fact, was committed by his profession to turn the

unpoetical into poetry. A great poet can give a young poet everything that he has to give

him, in a few lines. (p. 126)

It is obvious what Dante meant to Eliot, and the relationship between the two poets is just like that between teacher and student, even though the one is 600 years older than the other. What’s more, we can see how influential this teacher is to his student, for Dante brings the unseen world to Eliot with his poetry. If a teacher is able to bring his student to “the holy ground,” we can surely call him a teacher; if a teacher can influence his student and bring his students “the good,” it is surely worthwhile being a teacher.

17 A talk given at the Italian Institute, London, on July 4th, 1950.

38

The “holy ground” alludes to an image in the novel by D. H Lawrence: “She was on holy ground. She wanted all the students to have a high pure spirit; she wanted them to say not only the red, genuine things; she wanted their faces to be still and luminous as the nuns’ and the monks’ faces.”18 This concept of “holy ground” was adopted by R. S. Peters in his

1932 book, Ethic and Education. According to Peters, a teacher needs to assist his students to explore “the holy ground,” that is, the process of formation of thoughts and awareness, and as long as a teacher is devoted to exploring the “holy ground” with all his skill, perseverance, and enthusiasm, the final flower of education will bloom (Peters, 1967). Applying this concept to Eliot’s experience, it seems to me that Eliot tried to explore this same “holy ground” with the help of his own “teacher,” Alighieri Dante. The shadow of the teacher is seen in the soul of his student:

Twenty years after writing ‘The Waste Land’, I wrote, in Little Gidding, a passage which

is intended to be the nearest equivalent to a canto of the Inferno or the Purgatorio, in

style as well as content, that I could achieve. The intention, of course, was the same with

my allusion to Dante in ‘The Waste Land’. (Eliot, 1965:128)

With masterful literary technique, Eliot brings the master alive with his words. He tried to translate Dante’s poetry from Italian to English, but “every word has to be ‘functional’, the slightest vagueness or imprecision is immediately noticeable.” (p. 129) Once a student turns into a teacher, bearing his experiences and impressions of his own teacher, he tries to implement those successful and practical methods that his teacher had used to him.

Nevertheless, because of the inevitable differences in time and place, it is impossible to

18 From The Rainbow (1915) by D. H. Lawrence.

39 implement the same methods without some change, however slight. For example, language use. What Dante teaches Eliot through The Divine Comedy is that:

A poet should be the servant of his language, rather than the master of it...Dante seems to

me to have a place in Italian literature, which, in this respect, only Shakespeare has in ours;

that is, they give body to the soul of language, conforming themselves...to what they

divined to be its possibilities. (p. 133)

Hence, only if a poet is the great servant of his language could he be the great master of it, and this realization deeply influences Eliot. Eliot is not merely a reader of The Divine

Comedy, for at the same time he is the student of Dante, despite the 600-year gap between them. This is a permutation of the conventional teacher-student relationship, one built on the reading of literature rather than on direct teaching. Though Eliot thinks a poet’s job is purely one of composing (Eliot, 1933), here we can see, through the prism of his own experience, that a poet, besides writing to his contemporaries, may also be a teacher who guides future generations and instructs them with his poetry—and his personality.

Education as Poetry

If we say poetry is all a poet has for his life, we could also say that education could be all a teacher has for his whole life as well. When readers are absorbed in good poetry (here I mention “good” is because Eliot thinks “bad poetry” does harm to its readers), the poetry enables its readers to see the poet, his life, the history of his society, indeed the world. Poetry is like a vehicle between a poet and his reader, for a good poem consists of experiences of the

40 poet and his time, and these are the experiences distilled into the poetic materials. And this process of formation of a poet’s creation is analogous to what a teacher produces—education.

Experiences are the educational materials, which enrich a teacher’s creation, and with the materials in education, students are able to see and feel what their teacher has experienced and felt before. (Eliot, 1933:126) However, what a reader or a student receives from a poet or a teacher through their experience is not the point; the point is for one to transform and internalize the experiences of those who had these experiences before his own time. And this is why both poetry and education are valued. Based on the relation which I am trying to draw with the above statement, I propose that we see education as poetry.

It is undeniable that people read poetry for pleasure (Eliot, 1957), either the pleasure of emotional satisfaction or the pleasure of mental fulfillment. Poetry may correspond with one’s state of mind and that is because, with the explicit and accurate language a poet uses, one receives more than he expected, not just pleasure:

Beyond any specific intention which poetry may have, …, there is always the

communication of some new experience, or some fresh understanding of the familiar, or

the expression of something we have experienced but have no words for, which enlarges

our consciousness or refines our sensibility. (Eliot, 1957:18)

I think this is the most interesting and most important aspect of literary reading. Readers usually already have an expectation of a poem before reading it, and this expectation is ultimately based on the reader’s own experiences; however, reading is also a reformulation of a reader’s mind via poetic materials, and the reformulation after a reader’s reading is the most

41 precious production in this process. Here, if we replace poetry with education, it is with amazement that we see that the “producing” process of education is very like the “producing” process of poetry reading. Students, before receiving education, inevitably expect to gain some specific emotions from a teacher’s teaching, be it pleasure or a sense of belonging. But, as a poet does to his poetry, so a teacher does to his experiences—which are his educational materials—in his teaching, in his pedagogic philosophy, in his very utterances and gestures.

Thus, the result of the integration of educational materials with a student’s own experiences can be as startling as the result of reading.

Though experiences in either poetry or education are able to be sensed and perceived by its receiver, the conveyance of emotions from a work of poetry, according to Eliot, is irreplaceable, for every work of art has “a local and racial character: but certainly the difficulties of appreciation in these arts, for a foreigner, are much less.” (Eliot, 1957) Poetry has its regionalization, based on the language the poet uses and/or the language the nation speaks, and the emotions that poets place into their poetry may be confined by the language of one’s national history. As Eliot himself observed, “no art is more stubbornly national than poetry.” (Eliot, 1957) Nevertheless, there is no such kind of strong nationalism in education.

We all see poetry and education as the magnificent creation of the artist and the teacher, respectively. But, if we look back to the purpose of these creations, we can see that the purpose of poetry is to convey the poet’s own emotions to whoever reads it, while the purpose of education is to convey the teacher’s emotions to the specific recipient, namely the student. The emotions of a teacher contain not only what he expects of his students, but also his own expectations of himself. Through teaching, a teacher can evoke in his students sympathy, sorrow, or happiness, which he tries to provoke in order to help his students gain a

42 clearer understanding of the world; such emotions can derive either history of the teacher’s experiences or from the teacher’s own experiences, and as with the poet who

…knows better what his poems ‘mean’ than can anyone else; he may know the history of

their composition, the material which has gone in and come out in an unrecognizable form,

and he knows what he was trying to do and what he was meaning to mean. But what a

poem means is as much what it means to others as what it means to the author; and indeed,

in the course of time a poet may become merely a reader in respect to his own works,

forgetting his original meaning—or without forgetting, merely changing. (Eliot, 1933:130)

The purpose of education, then, is not merely to transmit exact information to a student, but the essence of that information, via the emotion that enables a student to take action to bring about a better effect in the real world. One’s sympathy may be aroused after he hears about the misery of African famine, and then he may stop wasting food; one’s sorrow may be aroused when he learns of the massacre of the Jew, and then he may start to think more deeply about the present and the future. This is the similarity between a reader and a student: that we expect both of them to extend their influence in the world around them after reading or after being educated.

Most people have had one or more significant teachers who have had great influence on them, and this is just like what poets are to their readers, for Eliot thinks that everyone needs to have his own poetry, “not simply for those who enjoy poetry but because it actually makes a difference to the society as a whole”. (Eliot, 1957) This is what education does to every student who is influenced by his teachers, and this outcome of education is, like the outcome of poetry, able to make the world better.

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I have made two assertions about the relationship between poet and teacher, between poetry and education, with the result that it is now possible to discuss education and literary criticism together. Thus, I would like to sum up and conclude with a simile—The Teacher as

Poet.

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Chapter Five

Teacher as Poet

It is difficult always to be a creative artist. I think, however, that we should

get on more rapidly if we realized that, if education is going to live up to its

profession, it must be seen as a work of art which requires the same qualities of

personal enthusiasm and imagination as are required by the musician, painter or

artist. Each of these artists needs a technique which is more or less mechanical,

but in the degree to which he loses his personal vision to become subordinate to

the more formal rules of the technique he falls below the level and grade of the

artist. He becomes reduced again to the level of the artisan who follows the blue

prints, drawing and plans that are made by other people. (Dewey, 1988)

There are many imaginative metaphors and similes to compare to a teacher based on a teacher’s characteristics, behaviors, qualities, or mission, and these images such as “Teacher as Gardener”, “Teacher as Artist” and “Teacher as Navigator”19 help us have a better understanding and appreciation of teachers. Here, I would like to propose a new idea for a teacher’s image, an image based on literary criticism, and it is called “Teacher as Poet.” The following discussion supports my statement about “Teacher as Poet” in accordance with

Eliot’s literary criticism and my own analysis.

Belief of Teacher as Poet

19 Simpson, D. J., Jackson, M. J. B., & Aycock, J. C. (2005). John Dewey And The Art Of Teaching: Toward Reflective And Imaginative Practice

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In the Greco-Roman world, the poets had the same religion toward their literature. In the ancient times of Greece and Italy, people believed in gods, who controlled human life and fate, and poets would invoke inspiration or anything they needed to complete their work by praying to the Muses20, who were so divine and blessed that poets placed their faith in these immortals who were able to help with their epics. Just like a Christian has his prayer to God, poets have their invocations21 in the beginning of the epic to ask for luck and blessings.

Before discussing teachers and muses, an important question should be raised here: do teachers need muses? The poets then called for Muses on account of their religion and faith, but teachers nowadays do not necessarily have the corresponding spiritual beliefs. Because of globalization and cultural diversity, compared with ancient Roman times, more than one religion is practiced in one nation, and it is impossible for all the teachers to pray to the same muses or even God. However, Muses provide spiritual support to poets when they are writing, and I think teachers do need such spiritual support, regardless of the religions we have today, when they face problems or get frustrated with teaching. This relationship between muse and poet is applied by Dante and Eliot. In Dante’s The Divine Comedy, Dante the poet portrays himself as a pilgrim and makes Virgil a guide in his poetry, which shows Dante’s affections for Virgil the poet who guides him from the underworld to the gate of heaven, overcoming all the obstacles and depression Dante faced in reality. Virgil is, no doubt, the spiritual support to Dante though they are two people who had never met or seen each other and lived in

20 In Greek mythology, the nine muses are goddesses of various arts such as music, dance, and poetry. They inspire musicians and writers to strive to reach greater creative and heights. 21 An invocation begins the epic poem and serves as a prologue to the events to come. A prayer or address is made to one of the nine muses of Greco-Roman mythology. The poet asks for the inspiration, skill, knowledge, or the right emotion to finish a poem worthy of his subject matter. For example, in the prologue of Odyssey, “Speak, Immortal One, / And tell the tale once more in our time.” Homer asks for inspiration and a blessing for the retelling of the epic.

46 different times. Similarly, Eliot as a 20th century poet also shows great admiration for Dante who is from a different era and portrays him as the greatest poet ever.

Eliot mentions that he had borrowed lines from The Divine Comedy by Dante, “in the attempt to reproduce, or rather to arouse in the reader’s mind the memory, of some Dantesque scene, and thus establish a relationship between the medieval inferno and modern life” (Eliot,

1965). Though his intention was to imitate, he confessed himself to be unable to completely imitate Dante’s words in his poetry owing to the differences between the languages of his and

Dante’s time. In spite of the difficulty of imitation, it is of necessity for Eliot to transmit the spirit of Dante because

…that the important debt to Dante does not lie in a poet’s borrowings, or adaptations from

Dante, nor is it one of those debts which are incurred only at a particular stage in another

poet’s development. Nor is it found in those passages in which one has taken him as a

model. The important debt does not occur in relation to the number of places in one’s

writings to which a critic can point a finger, and say, here and there he wrote something

which he could not have written unless he had had Dante in mind. (Eliot, 1965:132)

The debt here is to express a feeling of gratitude for the favor to Dante, whom Eliot sees as his spiritual support when composing poetry, and this gratitude is like one’s love to his parents, the love which is so expressive and meaningful that its influence is revealed in descendants’ works.

The next question to ask is, if there is a possibility for a teacher to have muses: who are they? First of all, it is essential to separate “liberal arts” from “works of arts”. Liberal arts, subjects or skills considered essential for a free man, discuss the contents of education,

47 whereas a work of art itself is a contribution of human civilization, and I think this is the major difference when discussing the two “arts”. Nowadays, there are many issues and terms concerning arts of education or educational aesthetics, although education was not seen as aesthetics until Pestalozzi (1746-1827) had a series of ideas on educational goals based on human instincts with intuitional instruction22. With the appreciation towards education, we could have a different expectation from education, seeing it more than just a subject or a teaching process. And, therefore, with the appreciation towards education, it seems that there is a muse, or other influences, blessing this art, the muse who plays the crucial part in a teacher’s mind when practicing teaching. The conception of the muse in most Chinese people and Taiwanese students’ mind would probably be Confucius23, who is one of the Saints in

Chinese traditional culture and thought. Confucius would be brought up when it comes to the spiritual support of a teacher because he himself as a teacher is the role model for a teacher to imitate, and his influence has lasted for over 3000 years after his death. Nonetheless, I would not say that Confucius is an adequate representation of a muse to a teacher, for what Chinese and Taiwanese teachers follow is the system of his philosophical and ethical teachings,

Confucianism24. In The Analects of Confucius, for instance, there are sentences and dialogues

Confucius had with his students, and every word he spoke contains significant meanings to whomever seeks his advice, but still, what we follow is his philosophy, not the characteristics or features Confucius has.

22 “At a subsequent period, when Pestalozzi pursued the subject of education to a more advanced age, and when he penetrated more deeply into the mysteries of human nature, he spoke likewise of mental, moral, and religious intuition; that is to say, of a perception of the understanding, the moral feelings, and the religious faculties of man; which is distinct from all the information derived from outward sources, inasmuch as it rests altogether on internal consciousness.” (Simpkin et al, 1835) 23 Confucius (551 BC – 479 BC) is a Chinese teacher whose philosophy has influenced Chinese culture, politics and education for centuries. 24 The philosophy of Confucius which emphasizing personal and governmental morality, correctness of social relationships, justice and sincerity.

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If we take a look at Eliot’s identification with Dante as his muse, I think a muse would be the one who brings him the most courage and inspires him the most either in his teaching career or during his pupillage. As I have discussed before, Eliot sees Dante as his mentor of not only his writing but also his life. Eliot is loyal to his nation (the UK) and to his language, so he is inspired by a pioneer who was able to produce great works with his faith even though he was in the doldrums. It seems that Eliot lived a better life than Dante, at least he did not have to endure being expelled by his beloved nation and having no chance of being entombed in his hometown, and, therefore, Dante’s strong will towards his country and his nation would be the reason why Eliot admires him so much. Dante’s image as a teacher is so vivid from his The Divine Comedy that Eliot is able to see him clearly and sense his every emotion in the poetry.

In accordance with the discussion above, the possible answer to the question of who the muses are to a teacher is quite clear now. If there are muses to a teacher, they would probably be those teachers who had great influences on them in the past. When being in a state of depression or frustration, whether Virgil to Dante or Dante to Eliot is the redeemer to his descendant, the redeemer is the one who illuminates the path for his students, guiding him to the light; as the consequence of this relationship, Virgil and Dante are the muses to Dante and Eliot, blessing and bestowing gifts to inspire the students’ poetry and life. The muses in

Greco-Roman times are religious models to poets, and here, just like what Virgil is to Dante, the muses to teachers are the spiritual support for them when they are practicing educational affairs.

The influential predecessors of a teacher are able to lead the younger generations to overcome obstacles they face in their teaching career, inspiring the younger generations’ pedagogies and educational philosophies when educating. And as Shelly (1792-1822)

49 mentioned, “the influence of Dante, where it is really powerful, is a cumulative influence: that is, the older you grow, the stronger the domination becomes.” (Eliot, 1965)

So far I have discussed two questions based on the beliefs a teacher would have; firstly, it is possible for a teacher to have influential models in a teacher’s mind; secondly, if the muses of a teacher are the seniors of the young generations who are influenced by these elder teachers, the seniors would show the youngers what the virtue of a teacher really is and then the younger generations will dedicate into the teaching career just like what their teachers did for them.

Here I would like to raise my third question. Anyone undertaking a modern education certainly encounters more than 10 teachers over his 12-year academic period, but every teacher has his own teaching method and educational philosophy, so how could a young teacher identify who the muse is to him when he himself is a teacher? These muses are originally teachers, and because of their significant influences on their students, they become the muses of the younger generations who make them their model and spiritual support. Back to the literature field, this same process of choosing a muse is experienced by a young poet who has his elder poets who have great influences on him, and it seems that there are similarities between these poets, who are called “good poets” and “great poets” by Eliot in his criticism. In other words, those who are deemed as muses of teachers are also teacher as poet as well, for they are the ones who have great impacts on their students. For the following passage, I would like to talk about the features of good poets according to Eliot’s literary criticism, and to apply these features to the muses of the teacher, here, namely, teacher as poet.

Features of Teacher as Poet

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If we see a teacher as the one who merely teaches information or conveys knowledge to his student, he is just an actor who performs and acts, as the line in Shakespeare’s play goes,

“All the world's a stage, / And all the men and women merely players”25. The line elaborates on a person’s role in society, but it would be far from what we expect from a teacher, for teachers should not just be actors who have scripts with instructions to tell them what to perform on the stage; instead, there is something more that a teacher should do than just perform. Therefore, elaborated from Eliot’s criticism on poets, the following are the four key features that a poetic teacher should possess.

Seeing objects which at first sight appear to have little bearing upon education. At school, teachers are usually bound to teach the selective materials required by the government, and usually these materials are presented with references in textbooks; although this kind of convenience saves preparation time for teachers, it actually discourages thoughts and ideas that one teacher ought to have for his teaching. I am not saying the false decision of the selective materials, for it does need the integrative collection of teaching materials to ensure the common knowledge for all students in a country; the limited thoughts I am referring to here are the one-sided messages from reference textbooks by the time teachers prepare for lectures, so that knowledge and information are confined to the available material but it has limited potential. This not only influences the preparation of a teacher but also confines the way he teaches and lectures. As a Chinese saying goes, “A teacher is the one who could propagate the doctrine, impart professional knowledge, and resolve doubts” 26; a teacher could be called a teacher only if he were to explain and solve problems that students

25 From the play As You Like It by Shakespeare in 1623.

26 Original texts in Chinese:「師者,所以傳道授業解惑也。」

51 face; however, if the information which textbooks provide confines a teacher’s thoughts, the doubts may remain unsolved.

During lecturing, usually all a teacher wants to do is to try to convey information to his students from textbooks, whereas a poetic teacher would choose to guide students to the unknown world. Eliot “only affirm[s] . . . that in attempting to win a full understanding of the poetry of a period you are led to the consideration of subjects which at first sight appear to have little bearing upon poetry.” (Eliot, 1933) Students may perceive themselves as being educated, but it would be a tough task for one to perceive what he is to be educate. “When you find Wordsworth as the seer and prophet whose function it is to instruct and edify through pleasure, as if this were something he had found out for himself, you may begin to think that there is something in it, at least for some kinds of poetry” (Eliot, 1933). A poet is a seer who is able to foretell the delight or grief after one’s reading, and so is a teacher. With the education of a poetic teacher, there is the intention to lead students to a sensible sphere which they could not reach unless they have the assistance from a teacher. The assistance here is different from the assistance of the collaboration of sociological theory27; because of a more sensitive world and a more imaginative sense a poet has, a poet is able to, according to

Eliot, sense the objects which readers might not take as poetry material, and therefore with the poetry the poet composes, he could lead his readers to the unseen world with his assistance.

In the process of reaching “the holy ground,” a good teacher is “a guide who helps others to dispense with his service” (Peters, 1967), which means that a good teacher helps his

27 The zone of proximal development, often abbreviated as ZPD, is the difference between what a learner can do without help and what he or she can do with help. It is a concept introduced, yet not fully developed, by

Soviet psychologist Lev Vygotsky (1896–1934).

52 students not to rely on his help. If a poet is able to lead his readers to a higher sphere with his poetry, a poetic teacher may have the same ability of guidance. Although students are not mature and experienced enough to discern the unknown world, a poetic teacher is able to take his students with their imagination to place that are not confined to the reference books, for the holy ground should not only be constructed with mere knowledge but have bridges of imagination teachers build between the sensitive world and students.

Using aesthetic language. From the previous paragraph, we know that a poetic teacher is able to see the teaching materials which at first sight appear to have little bearing upon education, and this is because of his rich imagination. If a teacher is just like a copy machine, duplicating his image into students’ mind, he is not guiding them to the holy ground but shattering the imagination students ought to have. Eliot thinks that “fancy is an activity of the imagination rather than of the intellect, but is necessarily in part an intellectual activity.”

(Eliot, 1948) That is to say, if education is a process of being intellectual, imagination is its essence. But how does a poetic teacher evoke a student’s imagination?

With imagination, a poetic teacher does not read knowledge out loud but makes it the work of elocution—“Fancy is partly verbal; nevertheless, the work of elocution, clothing and adorning in apt, significant and sounding words, is the last thing to be completed” (Eliot,

1933). To a poet, how to compose a poem in words is the very part that readers are apt to capture through the image he tries to draw, for this is how elocution becomes a work. Besides,

“sounding here means what we…should be likely to call ‘musical’: a finding of the words and the order of words expressive of the underlying mood which belongs to the invention”

(Eliot, 1933); if poetry is called a poet’s work of elocution, then a poetic teacher is also able

53 to make his lecturing a work of elocution. Eliot here gives one example to support his idea. In the last scene in King Lear28, the old king presents with his little daughter’s corpse and says:

And my poor fool is hanged.—No, no, no life?

Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life,

And thou no breath at all? Oh, thou'lt come no more,

Never, never, never, never, never.—

Pray you, undo this button. Thank you, sir.

Do you see this? Look on her. Look, her lips.

Look there, look there. O, O, O, O. (dies)

(King Lear by Shakespeare, V.iii.320-26)

The old king’s last words covey to the audience and readers strong resentment about his daughter’s death. With the five repeated words Never, never, never, never, never, the grief of the character expands to the ultimate, and therefore the atmosphere and emotions are strongly contagious to readers. Not many words are needed, for it is only with the exact same word repeated for five times, and a poet is able to transmit the emotion to his readers, leaving them to capture the imagination themselves.

What makes a poet so precious is the way he uses language, for readers may not be attracted by the poet’s appearance or his characteristics but enchanted by the language and words presented on paper. Similarly, if a person is called a poetic teacher, he should be able to affect and imbue his students with his language. This ability, similar to what a poet has,

28 King Lear is one of the four great tragedies of Shakespeare’s. In King Lear we see an old king thrown out of his home by two daughters and treated so badly that he goes mad and dies. Favoring flattery, the old Lear gives hos kingdom to the two evil daughters who flatter him and leaves nothing to the youngest daughter who tells the truth but loves him best.

54 may be instinctive, but according to the point of view of Eliot, such ability of language use is likely to be a result of the transmission and influence from his teacher, which means that it develops from generation to generation. Learning from his teacher and acquiring the ability to use aesthetic language, a poetic teacher would provide knowledge not merely with texts from books or data printed on paper, but he should convey knowledge through verbal expression which resonates with his students, and fires their imagination.

The difference between a common teacher and a poetic teacher on language use is apparent. A common teacher in the educational field would consider the conveyance of knowledge to be the primary and vital objective when practicing education, and in order to meet the needs and expectations of society which emphasizes test grades the most, a common teacher usually ignores the accuracy of language he uses and, what is more, the beauty of his language when teaching. Aesthetics is always forgotten in the educational field, for test-orientation seeks visible and assessable outcomes instead of the fulfillment of the mind and soul. Unlike other common teachers, poet teachers would have more awareness of their language use when practicing education because not only is knowledge important to a student but aesthetics through education is also essential to an individual.

Eliot as a poet who brought “modernism” to the contemporary world suggests the impersonality of poetry, rejecting practically the main part of English poetry in the nineteenth century. In his ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, Eliot explains the idea of impersonality in poetry:

The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality...

Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of

personality, but an escape from personality. (Eliot, 1921:46-47)

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Considering his theory of the impersonality of poetry, Eliot brought attention to the negation of poetic tradition and the general formal characteristics of poetry, and he claimed that readers ought not to rely on a poet’s expressions when reading poetry, for a poet is merely the servant of his language (Péter Egri, 1974); what should be deemed the best is language itself. And therefore, “the poet's personality cannot give value to a work that itself lacks value. Personality can be expressed...but if the work possesses value, the reader's appreciation may be enriched by recognition of personal meaning” (Austin, 1966). In the previous chapter I have discussed and explained the relation between poetry and education, and it is proved that they are comparable in some cases. Therefore, if we apply Eliot’s view of the impersonality of poetry to education, the purpose of educators practicing education would not be to express their own feelings or emotions because it is too personal for students to perceive what is to be learned. Instead, if a teacher could be aware of the language he uses and consider the aesthetics his language possesses, the impersonalization of a poetic teacher’s language would be able to bring more possibilities to his students than dull information from textbooks.

Bringing students images, imagery and imagination.

The more imagination a man possesses, the more he must wonder about the

mysterious essence that is himself; the more he must be aware of his uniqueness; the more

he must torment himself by suspecting that his face reflected in a mirror, or his conscious

behavior with other people, cannot be really himself. (Kirk, 2008:37)

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Kirk suggests that imagination plays an important part in Eliot’s thoughts, which is the significant essence of a poet, even a man. So far, we know that imagination plays an important role in a poetic teacher’s life, but what is imagination? Here Eliot mentions three terms to explain this unique essence of poets: image, imagination, and imagery.

I should say that the mind of any poet would be magnetized in its own way, to select

automatically, in his reading (from picture papers and cheap novels, indeed, as well as

serious books, and least likely from works of an abstract nature, though even these are

aliment for some poetic minds) the material— an image, a phrase, a word— which may

be of use to him later. And this selection probably runs through the whole of his sensitive

life.” (Eliot, 1933)

A poet is able to search the materials he needs for his composition from his memories, and it is, according to Eliot, exclusive to poets to store reminiscences. People do store memories too, but why poets are different from ordinary people is that they live a sensitive life of which every single tiny fragment of images is a significant part.

A poetic teacher collects images not for composing poetry but to put them into teaching and education as long as one could lead or live a sensitive life, and therefore his teaching materials would not be limited to resources from textbooks or reference books. A more life-close material is more convincible and connected to a student’s life, just as a reader enjoys poetry which he could picture from his daily life.

If it is images that construct a poetic teacher’s sensitive life, how do these images work during his teaching?

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Why, for all of us, out of all that we have heard, seen, felt, in a life time, do certain

images recur, charged with emotion, rather than others? The song of the bird, the leap of

one fish, at a particular place and time, the scent of one flower, an old woman on a

German mountain path, six ruffians seen through an open window playing cards at night

at a small French railway junction where there was a water-mill: such memories may

have symbolic value, but of what we cannot tell, for they come to represent the depth of

feeling into which we cannot peer. (Eliot, 1933:154)

How and why a poet chooses certain images for his poetry is on account of the symbolic

value or meaning to him, which is the imagery of an image. Memories and emotions are so

exclusive and private that only the possessor could see the recollections and feel the

sentiment; therefore, with these elements represented in a poet’s mind, the imagery becomes

visible by means of a poet’s visually descriptive and figurative language, and it is the

language that enables its readers to sense what a poet senses.

If a poetic teacher is sensitive to the images from his memories, he will discover the

imagery could become teaching material. Different from images of memory, a poetic

teacher’s imagery becomes the essence of his teaching material, for once one’s memory turns

into the teaching material imbued with the imagery with hidden value a poetic teacher tries to

convey to his students that the imagery is worthwhile. Although, according to Eliot, the

imagery contained is so deep that one is only able to take a peek at the meaning, which is to

say that the imagery of a poetic teacher is unable to be fully seen; this is why memories are

exclusive and personal. The goal of a poetic teacher is not to pour out his heart during his

teaching but to give a good sense of the world which he is aware of but his students are not.

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In the end, once a student is capable of having a sensitive life as a poet owing to the help of a poetic teacher, he can see the unseen world which he could not reach in the past, and therefore, he could have the imagination like what a poet has.

A man of a polite imagination is led into a great many pleasure that the vulgar are not

capable of receiving. He can converse with a picture, and find an agreeable companion in

a statue. He meets with a secret refreshment in a description and often finds a greater

satisfaction in the prospect of fields and meadows, than another does in the possession.

(Eliot, 1933:60)

A poetic teacher has the ability of generating imagination because he himself lives a sensitive life, and if his student were able to generate imagination as he does, it could to the completion of a poetic teacher who brings the unseen world to his student, and this is the holy ground where all teachers should lead their students.

Bearing social values throughout the life. If a poetic teacher’s goal is to lead his students to the holy ground where they are able to have imagination, one may say that the achievement of this goal would be the social value to the teacher. Eliot calls the life of a poet not a career but a mug’s game, for

No honest poet can ever feel quite sure of the permanent value of what he has written: he

may have wasted his time and messed up his life of nothing. All the better, then, if he

could have at least the satisfaction of having a part to play in society as worthy as that of

the music-hall comedian. (Eliot, 1933:154)

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There is more possibility for a player to be praised on the stage than a poet, for the spotlight is always on the center of the stage instead of the backstage, where a poet may spend his whole life composing the very one work presented on the stage. Nevertheless, this is not how we judge a poet, actually, a person.

If we dismiss Wordsworth’s interests and beliefs, just how much, I wonder, remains?

To remain them, or to keep them in mind instead of deliberately extruding them in

preparation for enjoying his poetry, is that not necessary to appreciate how great a poet

Wordsworth really is? (Eliot, 1933:88)

Appreciating a poet, people should not only read his poetry but take “what he is” into consideration, for this is how to appreciate a “person.” Once we can judge one by his interests and beliefs, good and evil, one is more easily to hold his value in a society. In terms of teachers, it is simple for students, parents, schools, or even society to put a value on them; everyone seems to be involved with this career. “Teaching” is an activity which makes teachers the agents and students the patients29, and often this is the activity which a society expects from a teacher; on the contrary, most teachers expect more than others do, expecting more value could be put upon them besides teaching. In terms of poets,

Every poet would like, I fancy, to be able to think that he had some direct social

utility…I do not mean that he should meddle with the tasks of the theologian, the

29 In linguistics, a grammatical agent is a thematic relation that refers to the cause or initiator of an event. The agent is a semantic concept distinct from the subject of a sentence. While the subject is determined syntactically, primarily through word order, the agent is determined through its relationship to the action expressed by the verb.

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preacher, the economist, the sociologist, or anybody else; that he should do anything but

write poetry, poetry not defined in terms of something else. He would like to be

something of a popular entertainer, and be able to think his own thoughts behind a

tragic or a comic mask. He would like to convey the pleasures of poetry, not only to a

larger audience, but to larger groups of people collectively. (Eliot, 1933:154)

If any career has its own mission to be accomplished, a poet should compose poetry, and a teacher should teach. However, is there nothing left except for teaching? “A great poet can give a young poet everything that he has to give him, in a few lines” (Eliot, 1965). A teacher may try his best to convey all the greatest knowledge to his students, whereas a poetic teacher would say the genuine words his students need to hear, so that as a poetic teacher leads his students to the holy ground, they are able to imagine, imagining with their own will.

Influence of Teacher as Poet

At the beginning of his essay “What Dante Means to Me,” Eliot reveals that he “still, after forty years, regards his poetry as the most persistent and deepest influence upon [his] own verse” (p. 125), and it is obvious that the influence from Dante as a teacher is of great importance. I believe that poetry is not the only factor that made Dante a great poet to Eliot, and there must be something more that Eliot sees in him, something that Eliot has correspondence with him. From the author-and-reader-bound relationship developed from

Eliot’s reading of Dante’s poetry, Dante’s image of the poet is presented vividly in Eliot’s mind, yet while we see Dante as the mentor of Eliot, a novel image of Dante is portrayed when we read Eliot’s words. Through this process, the factors elevating the author-and-reader

61 relationship to a teacher-and-student relationship would contribute to the influences of a poetic teacher.

Although the publication of Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”30 is considered the birth of modernism, Eliot still bore the mind of the Victorian Age, which is the age in which people believed the rules, traditions and conventions they followed, and the usage of language is one of the essential criteria that poets would be concerned with. In the previous chapter, I have discussed and explained the abilities of a poetic teacher, and one ability is to use aesthetic language when practicing education. This is the ability that, according to Eliot, is possibly learned and developed from other great poets whose languages are of great aesthetics, and therefore, a young poet is influenced by his language use and then acquires the ability of specify the type of language use he acquires. language use. In Eliot’s

“The Social Function of Poetry” from On Poetry and Poets (1957:22), he mentions that:

[it] is, moreover, through the living authors that the dead remain alive. A poet like

Shakespeare has influenced the English language very deeply, not only by his influence on

his immediate successors. For the greatest poets have aspects which do not come to light at

once; and by experiencing a direct influence on other poets centuries later, they continue to

affect the living language.

Just as Dante’s poetry influences Eliot 31, language always plays an essential role in establishing a connection from generation to generation, for it is one of the symbols of the nation that a people shares. A great poet’s language is much more influential than others

30 “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” was first published in the June 1915 issue of Poetry: A Magazine of Verse at the instigation of Ezra Pound (1885–1972), and was seen as heralding a paradigmatic cultural shift from late 19th-century Romantic verse and Georgian lyrics to Modernism. 31 “I still, after forty years, regard his poetry as the most persistent and deepest influence upon my own verse.” (Eliot, 1965, pp. 125)

62 whose language is to communicate because language for a great poet is to present the images he sees and to inspire the imaginations when a reader reads his poetry. Itis for the same reason that language is essential to a poetic teacher and his students. Though Eliot thinks that poetry could hardly be translated into another language on account of regional and national concerns (Eliot, 1957), the language I would like to discuss here would not be taken into account; the main reason why Eliot is concerned with the translation of poetry is due to the loss of meaning during the transmission, yet it seems that there is no such worry in the language of education. The capital importance of a teacher is to convey knowledge to his students, but how deep and impressive the knowledge could be is a matter of language use.

Eliot as a reader was acutely influenced by Dante’s language of poetry, and therefore readers of Eliot are able to see the shadow of Dante in his poetry as well; likewise, the influence of a poetic teacher could also last for years. Every individual faces different obstacles, lives different lives, and has aims and problems in different stages. As a student encounters one poetic teacher when he is still a pupil, he might not sense or perceive the language of the poetic teacher, yet as a poetic teacher, he has the ability to bring the images, imagery, or even imagination to his students with his language. Such images, imagery, and imagination would be impressed in the student’s mind at the moment he hears it or reads it, and then be stored in his memories until he is in the specific stage of his life. When the student grows older, turning more mature, facing difficulties or problems that he has never confronted before, the images stored in his mind would emerge from his memories, and this imagery would lead him towards the way out, and therefore, imagination would enable him to live out his life with distinctive attitude and inspiration. This is the influence of a poetic teacher’s aesthetic language.

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In addition to the language of a poetic teacher, the belief of a poetic teacher in education could also influence his students. Here I would like to clarify the belief I state in this paragraph. With many different definitions, the word belief could be defined as “a religious conviction” or “something one accepts as true or real, or a firmly held opinion or conviction”; in the first part of this chapter I have discussed and explained the difference between a poet’s belief and a teacher’s belief, which are for religion and regarding muses, respectively. The belief here I would like to talk about is the spirit, the thought, the philosophy, or the will that is inherited from a poetic teacher. Virgil as a great poet who influenced considerably Dante and Eliot uses the term piety to depict this master will:

We use [piety] in two senses: in general, it suggests devout church-going, or at least

church-going with the appearance of devoutness. In another sense, it is always preceded by

the adjective ‘filial’, meaning correct behavior toward a parent. When Virgil speaks, as he

does, of pius Aeneas, we are apt to think of his care of his father, of his devotion to his

father’s memory, and of his touching encounter with his father on his descent into the

nether regions. But the word pietas with Virgil has much wider associations of meaning: it

implies an attitude towards the individual, towards the family, towards region, and towards

the imperial destiny of Rome. (Eliot, 1957:127)

The word piety to Virgil is not merely concerning the belief in religion, it also concerns all the things surrounding one’s life, personally and nationally; it is the piety that makes Virgil a great poet whose will and spirit are inherited by his descendant, Dante. Actually, the Roman

Empire that Virgil depicted, or you can say “imagined”, is “not exactly the same as the

Roman Empire of the legionaries, the pro-consuls and governor, the business men and

64 speculators, the demagogues and generals” in the destiny Aeneas worked out (Eliot,

1957:130). Though the reality Virgil lived in did not match his depiction, it is still worth praising the society presented in Virgil’s writing, for “it was something greater, but something exists because Virgil imagined it” (p. 130), the greater society that Dante enchants.

If there is piety to education, a poetic teacher could affect his students with his loyalty; if there is spirit to education, a poetic teacher could project his own image of ideal education he bears in mind; if there is belief in education, a poetic teacher could influence his students with his strong will and vigorous language.

The belief of a poet is like his philosophy, which is applicable and inheritable as long as his reader recognizes it, accepts it, and implements it. Either the belief or the philosophy could be found in a poet’s works of art, for the thoughts in his works could be deemed part of him, be deemed as the presence of the poet; just as what Eliot comments on Virgil that “in the sense in which a poet is a philosopher (as distinct from the sense in which a great poet may embody a great philosophy in great poetry), Virgil is the greatest philosopher of ancient

Rome” (Eliot, 1957:130). Speaking his own words through his character, Virgil perfectly tells his readers how he thinks of contemporary society and how his philosophy is to be carried out:

Aeneas’ end is only a new beginning; and the whole point of the pilgrimage is something

which will come to pass for future generations. His nearest likeness is Job, but his reward

is not what Job’s was, but is only in the accomplishment of his DESTINY...Destiny like

that of Aeneas does not make the man’s life any easier: it is a very heavy cross to

bear...What then does this destiny, which no Homeric hero shares with Aeneas, mean?

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For Virgil’s conscious mind, and for his contemporary readers, it means the imperium

romanum. This in itself, as Virgil saw it, was a worthy justification of history. (Eliot,

1957:128-29)

Eliot compares Virgil’s Aeneas to Job in the Bible; he brings Job into the discussion because of Eliot’s worship of Christianity, and another reason why Eliot puts these two great persons together is because they both present Virgil’s philosophy, the philosophy that is to be practiced through their quest and destiny. It is destined that the quest must be carried out by someone of greatness, and therefore he would learn from his journey, growing with maturity, and then accomplish the commission with the experiences he gains. In consequence, the model of Aeneas is therefore, in my opinion, adapted to Dante the Pilgrim32 in The Divine

Comedy, and the influence of the philosophy of Virgil is passed on to the next generation, and so forth.

The embodiment of a great poet’s philosophy enables his readers to capture the image he tries to present and the will he tries to deliver; as to education, a teacher would also like to immerse his philosophy in his teaching, practicing education that imbues his spirit and beliefs.

Here, as I have always claimed, such philosophy, will, or spirit, is heritable and applicable.

Once a student accepts a poetic teacher’s philosophy and spirit, and he applies it in his life, this is the embodiment, and this is the ultimate influence from a poetic teacher upon his students.

32 Apart from Dante the Poet, Dante the Pilgrim here stands for the character in the epic.

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Chapter Six

Conclusion

Based in this analysis of the characteristics of poetic teachers, poetic teachers, poetic teachers can have a significant influence and impact when they enable their students to use their imagination and lead them to the holy ground. Therefore, I conclude poetic teachers have four abilities which enable them to liberate the full possibilities in education.

First, a poetic teacher is able to convey a particular emotion in the right and minimum number of words, just as a poet’s poetry does for its readers. Because languages are used to express the thoughts in one’s mind, how to use language and retain the poetic value every poem possesses would be a great task for a poet; in other words, as long as a poetic teacher is willing to express himself, he should be capable of choosing his language which contains not only poetic value but also educational value.

Second, a poetic teacher carries out a lifetime task which is helping students understand better of the knowledge at every stage of maturing. The mission that a poetic teacher carries is to lead his students to the holy ground with their imagination, and this is the imagination that a student could hardly attain without a poetic teacher’s assistance, for there are too many unseen subjects that could evade the student’s awareness. Only with a poetic teacher’s help could those unseen subjects be seen, and only with imagination could one reach the holy ground. Just like a reader reading a poem in his different stages of his life, once one is able to use his own imagination to express himself and the world he sees, he will discover the life stages he goes through implying that there are different tasks for him to accomplish and experience.

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Third, a poetic teacher is to teach the lesson of breadth of emotional range with his words, allowing students see and hear more than they could ever see without his help. A poet would not accompany his reader the whole life, neither does a teacher, for the goal of a poetic teacher is to lead his students to the holy ground, where they are able to use their own imagination to express their emotions; therefore, a poetic teacher is just like a medium, which transfers the essence of education to his students, and this essence enables the students to see a broader world on their own.

Lastly, a poetic teacher is able to create poetic images that are timeless and have a deep influence on students who are to generate new power to impact on others. Dante brings the unseen world to Eliot with his poetry; if a teacher is able to bring his student to the holy ground, we can surely call him a teacher; if a teacher could influence his student and bring his students the good deeds and knowledge, it is worth being a teacher, and this is the teacher who could bring his influence to the next and following generations in the future.

With the abilities a poetic teacher would possess, which are the implication on poetic teacher, I would like to conclude the findings on the image of the teacher with the term

“Teacher as Poet”. A teacher is comparable to a poet, for they both share great learnings and remarkable influences on students and readers. Seeing students as individuals who can experience how education works with their consciousness and know what influence education actually has on them, we can conclude that readers of poetry are those individuals who enjoy the satisfaction from reading poetry and experience the emotions a poet tries to convey to his readers.

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I have insisted rather on the variety of poetry, variety so great that all the kinds seem to

have nothing in common except the rhythm of verse instead of the rhythm of prose: and

that does not tell you much about all poetry. Poetry is of course not to be defined by its

uses. (Eliot, 1933: b 155)

If, according to Eliot, poetry cannot be defined by its uses, neither can education. Education is the transfer of knowledge, education is the implementation of a teacher’s teaching strategies, and education is more than just the relationship between a teacher and his students.

“I think that an interaction between prose and verse, like the interaction between language, is a condition of vitality in literature” (Eliot, 1933).

Here Eliot discusses the possibility of a conversation between the two genres in literature, and this does work as long as we put education here. The conversations and interaction among teacher, students, and knowledge are needed in education, and the conversations and interaction are essential elements when we talk about the definition of education.

In the structure of education, teachers are those who can make the unseen seen, use powerful and influential words to affect his students, and let others have imagination which could guide them to the holy ground. The goals of education vary throughout history because usually the goals in one specific period are determined by the current trends (Eliot, 1957).

Just like the contemporary educational aim is to develop students’ skills to adapt to the technology era, sometimes knowledge is required, sometimes affectation is needed. In spite of the changes and alternations in education from time to time, there are always permanent aims that education necessitates as we mention education, and one of the aims is for teachers

69 to lead students to the unknown world, and therefore, the poet’s image, Teacher as Poet, could bring the students to the holy ground.

Let me quote Eliot’s line here to conclude what Teacher as Poet brings to education.

“The serious advantage to be derived from poetry comes the assurance that poetry gives pleasure, [guiding] us by the hand of action, with a ravishing delight, and incredible sweetness.” (Eliot, 1993)

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