Polytropy

Suppose you are reading a book of poetry; it could be the one published anonymously, in 1798, as Lyrical Ballads, With a Few Other Poems. You have somehow accepted that the book is worth reading. Do you care about any of the following?

1. What is or is not on the title page.
2. What is in the Advertisement that precedes the poems themselves.
3. What order the poems were printed in.
4. What meter or rhyme scheme they have.
5. What was happening in the world in the year of publication.

You may care. You should not feel that you ought to care, if you are reading the poems in school.

That is the thesis of this post. I have learned that it may not be accepted.

I would seem to be defending the practice that I learned as an undergraduate at St John’s College. However, most of that defense will come in a later post. I drafted it earlier, but then it seemed as if there was a lot more to say, or acknowledge, or recognize. That more is here.

Even before college, I understood the purpose of English class as to help you find a writer you liked to read. My teacher Paul Piazza told me this, in tenth-grade English. I reported that in “Donne’s Undertaking,” during the first spring of the Pandemic, in 2020.

Reading for pleasure is not a matter of trying to second-guess an author – unless perhaps you have been subject to perverse training.

In 2017, in “The Private, Unskilled One,” I was writing about Elif Batuman’s novel The Idiot (2017). From “Practical Cat: How T. S. Eliot became T. S. Eliot” (The New Yorker, September 12, 2011), I quoted English professor Louis Menand on how, at least according to English professors, people believe that poems and stories have hidden symbolic meanings that must be be puzzled out. Some professors tried to change that belief. I. A. Richards and others at Cambridge, along with some Americans, all inspired by T. S. Eliot – they “created the modern English department,” According to Menand:

Almost everything in Eliot’s early criticism, except his aversion to methods and theories (“There is no method except to be very intelligent,” as he disarmingly put it), met the situation of literary academics.

1. Eliot attacked the confusion of literature with other kinds of writing.
2. He formulated terms, like “objective correlative,” that looked like precision tools for critical analysis. (Eliot himself never used the term again.)
3. He insisted that works of literature be judged on literary grounds, and he separated literature from biography and intellectual history.
4. He argued for the principle that the most important thing you need to know in order to read a poem is other poems – a principle that Leonard Woolf, in a review of “The Sacred Wood,” identified as “back to Aristotle.”
5. Eliot helped to reëstablish the autonomy of literature. That was modernism’s other great project, and it is also what literature professors needed in order to make English an academic discipline.

The serial numbers are mine. Points 1, 3, and 5 would seem to support my thesis. Menand seems to set out point 2 ironically (as he does Eliot’s “aversion to methods and theories”). Point 4 is fine, as long as it does not prevent you from developing your own opinions, regardless of what else you have or have not read; presumably your opinions will be subject to revision as you read more.

Last summer, in “Prairie Life,” I compared what I was reading in Robert Pirsig and Wendell Berry, while bringing in R. G. Collingwood on how maybe it was a pointless exercise. Trying to compare a bunch of poems may inhibit you from getting to know one of them in particular.

Without sourcing them, and running them all together, Menand quotes four of Eliot’s

dicta from which tall forests of academic criticism would one day grow.

Two of those sentences are from respective essays in The Sacred Wood (1920, available from Project Gutenberg). I downloaded those essays in the aughts, probably from Bartleby, perhaps in order to see how much they were reflected by Collingwood in The Principles of Art (1938).

Here, sourced, are the “dicta” Menand quotes:

1. From “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” in The Sacred Wood:

   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.

2. From “The Metaphyical Poets” (published in 1921 as a review of Metaphysical Lyrics and Poems of the Seventeenth Century: Donne to Butler, edited by Herbert J. C. Grierson; the quote is found in the Wikipedia article “Dissociation of sensibility”):

   A thought to Donne was an experience; it modified his sensibility.

3. From “Hamlet and His Problems” in The Sacred Wood:

   The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an “objective correlative”; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.

   Menand omits without notice the clause, “which shall be the formula of that particular emotion.”

4. From “In Memory of Henry James”:

   He had a mind so fine that no idea could violate it.

Without making a thorough review, I note a passage in “Tradition” that seems to bear on (or bear up) my thesis:

Honest criticism and sensitive appreciation is directed not upon the poet but upon the poetry. If we attend to the confused cries of the newspaper critics and the susurrus of popular repetition that follows, we shall hear the names of poets in great numbers; if we seek not Blue-book knowledge but the enjoyment of poetry, and ask for a poem, we shall seldom find it.

I thought “Blue-book knowledge” might be what you repeat back to your teachers on exams; however, if we are to believe Virginia Magazine (February 25, 2013), which is currently a source for the Wikipedia article “Blue book exam,”

Blue exam books originated at Butler University [in Indianapolis] in the late 1920s. First printed by Lesh Paper Co., they were given blue covers because Butler’s colors are blue and white.

On the web, you can buy “vintage” blue books that were manufactured by the Lesh Paper Company. However, the OED definition of “Blue book” is:

“A book bound in blue; now spec. one of the official reports of Parliament and the Privy Council, which are issued in a dark blue paper cover.

The last illustrative quotation is from 1881 and reads,

History … is the great Blue-book of the stateman.

There is a second definition, quoted from Bartlett’s Dictionary of Americanisms:

b. U.S. ‘A printed book containing the names of all persons holding office under the government of the United States, with their place of birth, amount of salary, etc.’

Eliot’s “blue-book knowledge” may be, in a word, information. That is something that teachers may want you to have.

If I had to ask my teacher, it must not have been obvious to me what English class was for. The class also taught writing, and this was not generally a pleasure.

I have been reading that other people don’t read anymore; and yet it seems as if a lot of people are writing, on platforms such as Substack. I have not seen an attempt at an explanation of this.

In “Tests” (September 1, 2025), I looked at an article by James Marriott whose thesis was its headline: “Men need to see that novels aren’t for losers” (July 31, 2024). I can agree with that, if indeed men don’t see it currently. Near the end of “The dawn of the post-literate society” (September 19, 2025), Marriott says,

The big tech companies like to see themselves as invested in spreading knowledge and curiosity. In fact in order to survive they must promote stupidity. The tech oligarchs have just as much of a stake in the ignorance of the population as the most reactionary feudal autocrat. Dumb rage and partisan thinking keep us glued to our phones.

That sounds right too. Marriott himself has got rid of his “smartphone,” as I recall from a video discussion, “Is this the Disenlightenment?” (UnHerd, August 27, 2025). Maybe I’m ahead of him there: the only mobile that I have ever had was perhaps considered “smart” when I got it in 2011, but now it is only a “feature phone,” and even features that it used to have (such as access to maps) don’t work anymore.

Marriott reviews some history, but nothing about Prussia, although I have been reading also about how contemporary educational practice comes from there. This reading may have started with John Taylor Gatto, “Against School” (Harper’s, September 2003; bullets mine, serial numbers in original):

Throughout most of American history, kids generally didn’t go to high school, yet the unschooled rose to be

• admirals, like Farragut;
• inventors, like Edison;
• captains of industry, like Carnegie and Rockefeller;
• writers, like Melville and Twain and Conrad; and even
• scholars, like Margaret Mead …

Mass schooling of a compulsory nature really got its teeth into the United States between 1905 and 1915, though it was conceived of much earlier and pushed for throughout most of the nineteenth century. The reason given for this enormous upheaval of family life and cultural traditions was, roughly speaking, threefold:

1. To make good people.
2. To make good citizens.
3. To make each person his or her personal best.

I would interject my suspicion regarding attempts to make anybody into anything but free. Perhaps then I am not quite among the “most of us” that Gatto goes on to mention:

These goals are still trotted out today on a regular basis, and most of us accept them in one form or another as a decent definition of public education’s mission, however short schools actually fall in achieving them. But we are dead wrong … Our educational system really is Prussian in origin, and that really is cause for concern.

The odd fact of a Prussian provenance for our schools pops up again and again once you know to look for it …

… compulsory schooling on this continent was intended to be just what it had been for Prussia in the 1820s: a fifth column into the burgeoning democratic movement that threatened to give the peasants and the proletarians a voice at the bargaining table … Divide children

• by subject,
• by age-grading,
• by constant rankings on tests, and
• by many other more subtle means,

and it was unlikely that the ignorant mass of mankind, separated in childhood, would ever re-integrate into a dangerous whole.

There was a later essay in Harper’s that I read earlier, “Abolish High School” (April 2015); here, Rebecca Solnit doesn’t mention Prussia, but she addresses the bad effects of dividing children by age:

When you are a teenager, your peers judge you by exacting and narrow criteria. But those going through the same life experiences at the same time often have little to teach one another about life. Most of us are safer in our youth in mixed-age groups, and the more time we spend outside our age cohort, the broader our sense of self …

… A large majority of hate crimes and gang rapes are committed by groups of boys and young men, and studies suggest that the perpetrators are more concerned with impressing one another and conforming to their group’s codes than with actual hatred toward outsiders.

This does get me wondering how things could have been different in my own life. However, there were a number of older youths and adults, in the gang that I hung out with at home, and I wouldn’t say now that any of them had good lessons to teach about life, except in the sense that all knowledge of one’s fellow human beings may be beneficial. I may have been saved by attending private school in another city, away from the neighborhood gang (though living among my classmates could have created its own problems).

Noah McCormack talks about Prussia in “We Used to Read Things in This Country” (The Baffler, October 27, 2025 – apparently McCormack is the publisher of the magazine):

… the English were falling behind the rising Prussian state in formal, required education – one of the reasons Germany overtook industrial pioneer England in the Second Industrial Revolution was that it focused on more knowledge-intensive production, like electricity generation and chemicals. But what really shifted the tide was Germany’s crushing of France in the 1870 Franco-Prussian War, where better-educated Prussia beat the larger but less educated French army.

McCormack also reports,

Modernist literature, as John Carey explained in The Intellectuals & The Masses: Pride and Prejudice Among the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880–1939, was created as a form of elite expression that would be impenetrable to the newly literate masses.

If the intention was that James Joyce and T. S. Eliot would be impenetrable, then I’m not sure why McCormack should say immediately, as if reporting an objection,

The masses would not read the classic literature and intellectual works of nonfiction that cultural elites of capitalist society wanted them to read.

In any case, it seems as if Prussian ways can help you win wars. Given the increasingly martial tendencies of the American regime, I wonder whether its members want a population educated to the Prussian standard.

I don’t really know, but I imagine part of the Prussian standard would be an ability to write reports to one’s superiors in a bureaucracy. If schools are trying to develop that ability, John Warner is not interested:

The fundamental mistake of how writing is framed in school contexts is to suggest that the goal of writing is to capture a correct or at least “approved” answer on the page.

That’s from “The Limits of AI Research for Real Writers” (November 2, 2025), which follows up on “Choose Common Sense Over Conventional Wisdom” (October 19, 2025). According to this earlier essay it is

• conventional wisdom that freshmen must write research papers;
• common sense that they need not;

for,

the freshman research paper was ill-conceived from the get-go, a byproduct working backwards from what we imagine academics do and trying to create a simulation that might work for undergraduates. This activity, this experience, was not evaluated for its pedagogical purpose or its appropriateness. It simply appeared, and despite our common sense screaming that it is not the right thing to do for the benefit of student learning and development, it became, and to a large degree remains, ubiquitous.

Perhaps it ought to be stipulated that both conventional wisdom and common sense can be wrong.

Common sense is a problem: this is the theme of an essay that came up in my last post, “Craft and Craftiness.” By the account of Joseph Heath in “Populism fast and slow” (October 20, 2025), if populism is the view that politics should express the will of the people, this doesn’t explain why the left has not been able to use it lately (I don’t know whether the 2025 New York mayoral election is a counterexample).

A clue to the solution can be found in a further specification that is often made, with respect to this definition, which is that the “general will” of the people is not for any old thing, but takes the specific form of what is called “common sense.” The crucial feature of common sense, as Frank Luntz helpfully observed, is that it “doesn’t requires any fancy theories; it is self-evidently correct.”

The problem with common sense is,

many of the intuitive responses that we have to social situations, which were appropriate in small-scale societies, are completely inappropriate in large-scale societies.

For example,

There is a well-known bug in our pattern-detection system that causes us to vastly overestimate the effectiveness of punishment … regression to the mean dictates that punishment will more often be followed by better behaviour and reward by worse behaviour … Many “common sense” ideas about incentivization (like “spare the rod, spoil the child”) are a direct result of this illusion.

Heath makes sense here, although I have a couple of issues, such as I took up last year in “Motivated Reasoning in the Cyropaedia of Xenophon”:

1. A “bug in our pattern-detection system” would seem to represent a failure of design. According to Heath,

   We have inherited a million-year old primate brain, the product of evolution.

   Strictly speaking, evolution has no “product.” The absence of a designer is inherent to the theory.

2. Social scientists presume to know how their subjects ought to think. Heath would seem to assume that parents beat their children for the good of the children. That’s not so, by the plausible account of J. Daniel Sawyer in “Kinky Families, Under God: The Context and Legacy of James Dobson” (September 2, 2025):

   While Benjamin Spock’s devotees bickered with other secular schools of thought on the proper balance of harshness and gentleness in parenting, these schools all built and centered their arguments around what effect the tactics and strategies would have on the developing child, how they might properly equip the child to be an adult …

   The parenting manuals of the reactionary right in the latter half of the 20th century all had a curious commonality:

   They weren’t about children.

   Dobson, Gothard, Ezzo, and a half-dozen other bestsellers in the space were concerned with the experience of parents.

   Was the parent getting the respect they deserved from their peers?

   Was the parent doing good in God’s eyes? …

   I rejoice then to have been given to parents who read Spock, rather than Dobson. According to Sawyer,

   The very act of having a child involves taking on a job, the end-goal of which is to no longer be needed … if you don’t like that – if, instead, you want to be front-of-mind in your child’s world, always, then you do have an option: do a shitty job.

   My parents would seem to have understood this, at least implicitly.

If you rely on common sense, you may well be astonished by the outcome of such research as Heath describes:

people who actually study behavioural change, by keeping records, tracking performance, and analyzing the relation to reward/punishment, wind up developing beliefs that contradict common sense. This is true not just of social scientists, but even animal trainers. They all tend to agree that reward is at least as effective as punishment, and in some cases more so.

Perhaps even the researchers could think more deeply about what punishment is: should it not be something good for the transgressor? I took this up in December, 2018, in “Antitheses.” I’ll add here what I noted in the “Motivated Reasoning …” post, that Xenophon starts out the Cyropaedia by distinguishing animals from humans. Herds of animals readily obey their keepers, but humans do not – at least not usually.

The difficulty of ruling humans, at least in a democracy, is Heath’s theme too:

Democratic political systems are fairly responsive to public opinion, but they are still systems of elite rule, and so there are specific issues on which the people genuinely have not been listened to, no matter how angry or upset they got. This creates an incentive to do an end-run around elites … What is noteworthy about populists is that they do not champion all of the interests of the people, but instead focus on the specific issues where there is the greatest divergence between common sense and elite opinion …

I’m all for testing conventional wisdom against common sense, as John Warner proposes, not only with regard to writing:

The other bit of conventional wisdom that I want to challenge with some common sense is the notion that “AI is inevitable” …

Again, that’s in “Choose Common Sense Over Conventional Wisdom,” published two weeks before “The Limits of AI Research for Real Writers,” where Warner reports,

I would tell students that their work was meant to be part of an ongoing, never-ending “academic conversation” and therefore the goal was not to deliver something that has some kind of definitive answer, but to instead take sufficient care to produce writing that continues the conversation and induces someone else to respond. This was largely a foreign idea to them, as it was to me until I started to embrace it for myself in my teaching.

When you don’t understand this, then you think you can do research by means of AI programs – which however are like animals that obey, but with no notion why:

They are syntax fetching machines, a big, high-tech Labrador that will eagerly bring things of potential utility to us for inspection, but which should ultimately not be trusted as to the value of those things to our own thinking and writing until we think about them for ourselves.

I don’t know what AI would do, if asked to write something like this post, which may seem to jump around like a hyperactive poodle. However, the post is a reflection of my own thought, based on things that come my way. I do not start with a thesis and then seek corroborating evidence. At least, I do not seek it in such a way that a computer could take my place. I search the evidence of my own memory.

If reading should be for pleasure, still, we have to learn what can give pleasure. That would be the purpose of assigned reading in English class. The same goes for writing. I can object to some things that happened to me as a child, and Rebecca Solnit, for one, provokes me to wonder whether I should object to more things that happened; still, I’m not sure I can object to any specific writing assignments that I had in school, even though some of them, at least, were agony, and practically all of them were about producing what a teacher wanted.

In sixth grade, I would try to have fun on the weekend, perhaps by skateboarding with a friend, even as I had a composition due Monday. How far into Sunday evening could I delay getting to work?

In eighth grade, for political geography, I had a term paper due next day, and I wished it could be any other assignment. Long sets of exercises, in French, not to mention mathematics – they would be fine, since the end would always be in sight. With writing, there was always more I could do.

On the occasion that I am thinking of, I may have been writing about Lenin. Having expected to cover his whole life, I stopped summarizing my sources after the success of the October Revolution. I was tired, and my paper had reached the minimum acceptable length.

I cannot say I wish I could have avoided these experiences. There would seem to be value in learning to do unpleasant things. People who never do it may suffer later. At least, I have felt sorry for such people.

My last post, “Craft and Craftiness,” was mainly on the Philoctetes of Sophocles. I could have talked about a lack of fortitude in the title character. He is told by Neoptolemus (lines 1316–21, in the translation of David Grene),

The fortunes that the Gods give to us men
we must bear under necessity.
But men that cling wilfully to their sufferings
as you do, no one may forgive nor pity.
Your anger has made a savage of you …

Philoctetes needs to get over himself, suppress his resentment of Odysseus and the sons of Atreus, join the rest of the Greeks at Troy, get treatment for his wound, and strike the winning blow against the city. At least, such seems to be the message of Sophocles, who was apparently almost ninety when the play was first performed.

Living alone in the woods for three days without food sounds unpleasant, but it was encouraged by the National Outdoor Leadership School, according to a friend in college. When she went through the NOLS program, even a really skinny boy (such as I was) managed to keep the fast.

In sixth-grade world religions class, when we made a field trip to the local mosque, we were told that observing the Ramadan fast made you more sympathetic with a hungry beggar on the street.

Now people need the discipline of not looking at their mobiles. At least, some people do, again according to Noah McCormack in “We Used to Read Things in This Country”:

Of the American elite who see continuing value in literate thought, they are, for the most part, happy to create a society where a small “cognitive elite” dominate the rest … rich people send their kids to private schools where no electronic devices are allowed, as Mary Harrington recently explained in the New York Times … the Great Firewall of China will be a long-term benefit to that country … China is not a utopia, but its citizens have a brighter future than ours, and they will be able to read about it, thanks to a sociopolitical system that still sees literacy as necessary and retains primacy over private capital.

I was not from a rich family, at least not (as far as I know) in comparison with a lot of the other families that sent their boys to St Albans School. One of those boys boasted of his family’s Olympic-size swimming pool. He was known for being stupid; still, the school was perhaps indeed designed to create a cognitive elite who read for pleasure. I don’t think other citizens should be discouraged from seeking that pleasure.