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
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
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
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.
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