In my long experience of teaching literature I have probably had more failures than successes in working with poetry , individual poems and sometimes poets . However , I will stick my neck out and try to deal rationally with what is at base a subject fraught with emotion.

Some personal stories first as a background , the relevance of which will I hope become apparent later.

In primary school for instance I remember being taught Daffodils by Wordsworth . I need to point out that where , while travelling in Ireland , I actually saw that physical host of golden daffodils , it is something that you would be hard put to find in Australia . What was the point of teaching me something totally irrelevant to my way of life, and moreover suggesting that it was a thing of beauty far beyond the nature of Australia ? The nearest I got to that native beauty was hearing Dorothea Mackellar's My Country . The riproaring Bush Ballads were looked down upon . We got instead something more melancholy , like Shirley's Death the Leveller , great fare for an eleven year old !

I found for myself in a couple of childrens' annuals such poems as Vitae Lampada , The Fighting Temeraire and Drake's Drum , and the odd poem by Masefield , and thus was suitably indoctrinated into the Australian cultural cringe before the Empire's magnificence. There were no Jindyworobaks to adulterate it . Thank goodness for Shakespeare in my early High School years.

The real breakthrough for me , although I did not realise it at the time , came in my Fourth Year. Our lady English teacher asked which poem we would like to deal with from our set anthology. There was a teacher in the school called Mr Khan , so a couple of the more boisterous lads demanded that we read Kubla Khan .

I had no idea what it meant , but it took me and shook me to the core . It was not for years that I came to the realisation that it was a poem about poetry . Its influence stayed with me , and though I dealt with Australian poets ( once again very much under the influence of their English predecessors ) for my last High School examinations , the underlying effect remained even in my University years.

To digress for a moment to my second story . Years later still , lecturing in literature at a Teachers' College , I met up with an old acquaintance who had left the college scene to become an inspector of schools . He told me of a school where he had been inspecting , and of a primary class that was totally enthusiastic about poems and poetry , albeit of children's verse standard , not like what I had been taught. However , they would write , quote , talk about poetry for as long as he wished . The teacher was happy for them to do so.

My friend had to return the next year , and saw the same group of children who had advanced once class and had a different teacher . After sitting through two days of lessons , my friend asked whether there would be a poetry lesson , to be told :Oh these children don't like poetry .

Draw your own conclusion.

I think it is time that I put forward some of my own views on what makes poetry . This is a formidable task , and many a critic has stumbled over it. Thus I beg forbearance for what are essentially purely personal views .

First , let us look at the process of poetry writing .

Suppose a person is inspired to write a poem about a particular object . I use the word object here in its widest possible application : an actual thing or person ; an abstract emotion ; a rational idea to be explored. Whatever , let us accept that there is an object.

No two people ever see the same object . Ask me to imagine a tree and I immediately think of the tree I wrote of in Maternal Grandfather . You , the reader have never seen it , and so you would imagine your own tree .

The observer takes that observed object into his own mind -- and there it is mingled with the thousands of other ideas , beliefs , preconceptions that exist there. ( this is the Livingstone Lowes idea of the deep well of the subconscious , where disparate objects are often inextricably linked together).

So , the object becomes subjective to the poet . Then the poet objectifies it once more in a poem , obviously modified by the subconscious.

So now we have an object external , even , to the poet himself , which the reader takes into his own mind , where once again it goes through the process of being made subjective , and linked to the reader's own thousands of internal relationships.

Diagrammatically thus: Object --> subjectified by the poet --> made object --> subjectified by the reader .

The process can be taken further if we try to explain our version of the poem .

It is no wonder that a poem can affect different people in so many different ways , and can have so many different meanings .

Again , it is no wonder that so many teachers of poetry , rather than trying to elicit any form of meaning from the material , resort in despair to syllable counting for the sake of what they mistakenly refer to as rhythm when they mean metre, identifying figures of speech and counting those instead of looking to see what they mean , worrying out the mechanics rather than the soul of the work .

For many years I have explored with students the Dylan Thomas poem A Refusal To Mourn The Death By Fire Of A Child In London. Never once in those explorations have the students failed to come up with a new aspect , because there are so many layers of meaning to be teased out . They enlightened me as much as, hopefully , I enlightened them .

Yet, paradoxically , here I can best recommend the poem by Archibald MacLeish :Ars Poetica

Briefly now :

For me the poetry lies basically in the image presented ( See T.E Hulme , the Imagist poet, for five prime examples ).

If the images are strung coherently together to form an argument , all to the good but sometimes a melange can be a better thing still .

If the argument contributes to the illumination of man's being , best of all .

That leaves us with structure .

If the thought can be fitted into a traditional structure , that's fine . Some poems gain strength from it.

Sometimes that structure can be deliberately shattered , and there is no reason why not if it serves the poet's purpose .

A caveat here . The use of structure or its shattering should be deliberate and skilful, as there is nothing worse to my mind than jarring rhymes and broken metres.

Rhythm I will say only this about -- it involves the cadence of the lines , and can be strict , loose , conversational , come what may . It is best described by Sitwell when she said Rhythm is melody stripped of its pitch , and it is best to remember that our rhythms differ very much from person to person.

The teaching of poetry ?

If you are a good teacher there are a multitude of ways that people can be persuaded to appreciate poetry , even write it themselves . But teaching is a very interpersonal thing .

There are no rules for this . Every teacher will find his / her own way , but I personally believe that the teacher's enthusiasm is a major contributing factor .