~ODERN
LITERATURE
19
as a result of the poem; it urges us to fix our minds on what is
going on inside the poem. For me this polemical tendency has
been of the greatest usefulness, for it has corrected my
inclina~
tion to pay attention chiefly to what the poet
wants.
For two or
three years I directed my efforts toward dealing with the matter
of the course chiefly as structures of words, in a formal way with
due attention paid to the literal difficulty which marked so many
of the works. But it went against the grain. It went against my
personal grain. It went against the grain of the classroom situa–
tion, for formal analysis is best carried on by question-and–
answer, which needs small groups, and the registration for the
course in modern literature in any college is sure to be large. And
it went against the grain of the authors themselves-structures of
words they may indeed have created, but these structures were
not pyramids or triumphal arches, they were manifestly ' con–
trived not to
be
static and commemorative but mobile and ag–
gressive, and one does not describe a quinquireme or a howitzer
or a tank without estimating how much
damage
it can do.
Eventually I had to decide that there was only one way to
give the course, which was to give it without strategies and with–
out conscious caution. It was not honorable, neither to the stu–
dents nor to the authors, to conceal or disguise my relation to
the literature, my commitment to it, my fear of it, my ambiva–
lence toward it. The literature had to be dealt with in the terms
it announced for itself. As for the students, I have never given
assent to the modern saw about "teaching students, not subjects"
-I have always thought
it
right to teach subjects, believing that
if
one gives
his
first loyalty to the subject, the student is best in–
structed. So I resolved to give the course with no considerations
in mind except my own interests. And since my own interests
lead me to see literary situations as cultural situations, and cul–
tural situations as great elaborate fights about moral issues, and
moral issues as having something to do with gratuitously chosen
images of personal being, and images of personal being as having
something to do with literary style, I felt free to begin with what
