The various kinds of knowledge that were formerly common among the relatively small sections of the populace who were literate at all, have declined. What makes this such an important point to recognize is that, because these kinds of knowledge – of classical literature, the Bible, the more obvious technicalities of poetry – were once common to most educated people, they were common also to most writers. If modern readers lack them – and, even more importantly, if they are unaware of lacking them – they are likely to be reading their predecessors inaccurately. If Wordsworth were to watch a modern TV programme, it is likely that he would misunderstand it in all sorts of ways through lack of familiarity with the conventions that inform it. Similarly, if modern readers are unfamiliar with the conventions governing the use of metre, rhyme, sound-effects and verse-form, for example, they would be likely, in all sorts of subtle ways, to misconstrue a poem by Wordsworth. Modern children don’t have to study the conventions of TV in order to internalize them. TV is so near the centre of contemporary Western culture that early exposure to it means its conventions are assimilated for the most part unconsciously. To a lesser extent this would have been true of the way that the educated minority used to assimilate literary conventions. But literature is no longer at the centre of our culture, and a majority of Westerners now enjoy some form of higher education. So, in order to understand literary conventions, it is now necessary to study them.
Yet the problem of our being unfamiliar with the conventions of poetry is the more acute because it is insufficiently recognized. The dominant literary forms are currently for the most part in prose: newspaper articles, screen-plays and novels. Familiarity with reading prose can tend to corroborate the assumption that literacy and literary competence are the same and that no further specialized knowledge is needed for reading poems. But, in the first place, the more sophisticated forms of prose are no less informed by convention for its conventions being inconspicuous; and secondly, poetic conventions are both more conspicuous and more hazardous to ignore than prose ones.
A factor which has been influential in confirming the habit of indifference to poetic conventions is the laissez-faire teaching practices widely advocated in the 1960s. Though the pro-democratic motives of such practices were often admirable, the effect of them has been to reduce the reading of poetry, even when done in a classroom, to vague, subjective and historically reckless ‘appreciation’. Too often, practical criticism is understood as an opportunity to emote freely in the presence of a text. Good reading should, ultimately, be a process in which relevant forms of technical and historical knowledge are called on for the most part unconsciously. But in our era it is unlikely to begin that way. We need first to learn how to read. Reading with appreciation is the result of this process, rather than its starting-point. And the main element in learning to read is what has, since the 1920s, been called ‘practical criticism’.
