Poetry, the education of the imagination, and the American South

The second semester has just begun, which means my firstyear literature classes are starting their foray into the world of poetry. And when I teach poetry, I usually begin by assigning a short essay by Billy Collins, "The Companionship of a Poem," copies of which I give out on the very first day of class. Collins, a former poet laureate of the United States, is also a teacher, and in his essay he tries to connect the teaching of poetry to the larger goals of a liberal education. In the third paragraph of his essay he writes,

I came to realize [after teaching poetry for years] that to study poetry was to replicate the way we learn and think. When we read a poem, we enter the consciousness of another. It requires that we loosen some of our fixed notions in order to accommodate another point of view — which is a model of the kind of intellectual openness and conceptual sympathy that a liberal education seeks to encourage.

To accommodate another point of view; intellectual openness and conceptual sympathy. This passage (and the rest of the piece) strikes me as a brief and excellent justification for the study of poetry, and literature in general, in school. To study literature is to learn to imagine the life of the other. When discussing the essay in my classes two days ago, I made the connection between the study of poetry and the study of fiction, something we did in the first semester. When we read a story written by someone different from us — someone from another time, place, or culture — we learn to accommodate that person's humanity in our own. We broaden our hearts to allow that person, no matter how different in outlook of perspective, a place in them. This, I think, is what Collins refers to as "intellectual openness" and "conceptual sympathy," and fostering these values and habits of mind and heart in students is an essential part of a liberal education. We're not in the business merely of preparing kids for jobs.

This particular passage came to me again as I read this disturbing news article in the New York Times. A reporter, Adam Nossiter, takes a look at the poor showing of Barack Obama in the American South and draws the conclusion that the region may have lost its centrality to American politics. He also asks why it swung so heavily in McCain's favor. In his fifth paragraph Nossiter writes,

Southern counties that voted more heavily Republican this year than in 2004 tended to be poorer, less educated and whiter, a statistical analysis by The New York Times shows. Mr. Obama won in only 44 counties in the Appalachian belt, a stretch of 410 counties that runs from New York to Mississippi. Many of those counties, rural and isolated, have been less exposed to the diversity, educational achievement and economic progress experienced by more prosperous areas.

Obama won in only 1 of 10 of these counties, and the ones that voted more heavily Republican this time around than four years ago "tended to be poorer, less educated and whiter." These places are on the whole "less exposed to the diversity, educational achievement and economic progress experienced by more prosperous areas." We might say that, in the words of Billy Collins, the people in these places are lacking in "intellectual openness" and "intellectual sympathy." In simpler terms, these folks had a hard time accepting the idea that a black man would make a good president.

The article continues:

In Arkansas, which had among the nation’s largest concentration of counties increasing their support for the Republican candidate over the 2004 vote, “there’s a clear indication that racial conservatism was a component of that shift away from the Democrat,” said Jay Barth, a political scientist in the state.

Race was a strong subtext in post-election conversations across the socioeconomic spectrum here in Vernon, the small, struggling seat of Lamar County on the Mississippi border.

One white woman said she feared that blacks would now become more “aggressive,” while another volunteered that she was bothered by the idea of a black man “over me” in the White House.

Mr. McCain won 76 percent of the county’s vote, about five percentage points more than Mr. Bush did, because “a lot more people came out, hoping to keep Obama out,” Joey Franks, a construction worker, said in the parking lot of the Shop and Save. . . .

Don Dollar, the administrative assistant at City Hall, said bitterly that anyone not upset with Mr. Obama’s victory should seek religious forgiveness.

“This is a community that’s supposed to be filled with a bunch of Christian folks,” he said. “If they’re not disappointed, they need to be at the altar.”

No surprise that racism goes hand in hand with religious bigotry, the arrogance that comes with the certainty that one is on God's side. It is the illusion of a startling clarity spawned by moral blindness.

Such blindness is what an education of the imagination seeks to combat. The report above reminds us how important the struggle is, and what hangs in the balance.