Training and Development Agency Research Website

T.S. Eliot
Her Majesty's Inspectorate: 'Teaching Poetry in the Secondary School'
Seamus Heaney
Tom Paulin
Roland Barthes
Theo van Leeuwen
Hayhoe and Parker
Ruth Padel
Sandy Brownjohn
Archibald Macleish
Sue Dymoke
James Fenton
Ruth Finnegan
Walter Ong
Roger Hewitt

T.S. Eliot
Eliot's essays Auditory Imagination (1933) and The Music of Poetry (1942) are of supreme relevance to this project. For Eliot, the auditory imagination means 'the feeling for syllable and rhythm, penetrating far below the conscious levels of thought and feeling, invigorating every word...' In a sense this statement defines the area which is the field for this study -we are trying somehow to get at those areas 'below' consciousness, understand them a little better and consider them in relation to the context of pupils' lives outside the classroom.

Of the 'music of poetry' Eliot is more specific - it is not 'something which exists apart from the meaning' expressed in the semantics of words: 'the music of a word is, so to speak, at a point of intersection: it arises from its relation first to the words immediately preceding and following it, and indefinitely to the rest of its context; and from another relation, that of its immediate meaning in that context to all other meanings which it has had in other contexts, to its greater or less wealth of association'

It has a connection with 'the common speech of the time', in fact Eliot goes as far as to state that 'most poetry, in modern times, is meant to be spoken'. In this sense a poet crafts poems with the material to hand, an idea expressed in slightly different terms in the work of van Leeuwen. This notion of the poet as 'maker' with sounds as material, as clay, is most deftly described thus: '...we do not want the poet merely to reproduce exactly the conventional idiom of himself, his family, his friends, and his particular district: but what he finds there is the material out of which he must make his poetry. He must, like the sculptor, be faithful to the medium in which he works; it is out of sounds that he has heard that he must make his melody and harmony'.

Eliot also describes the way in which the play of sounds in a poem can come to have meaning: 'a musical poem is a poem which has a musical pattern of sound and a musical pattern of secondary meanings of the words which compose it, and that these two patterns are indissoluble and one... and if you object that it is only pure sound, apart from the sense, to which the adjective 'musical' can be rightly applied, I can only reaffirm my previous assertion that the sound of a poem is as much an abstraction from the poem as is the sense...'

For us, this final quotation prefigures much of the more recent work so central to this research project, making links between poetry and other media. We have done little more than extend Eliot's suggestion in the context of theories of modality and modern media technology:

'I think that a poet may gain much from the study of music... I believe that the properties in which music concerns the poet most nearly, are the sense of rhythm and the sense of structure... a poem may tend to realize itself first as a particular rhythm before it reaches expression in words, and that this rhythm may bring to birth the idea and the image...'

T.S. Eliot Selected Prose (1953) Penguin, Harmondsworth

Her Majesty's Inspectorate: 'Teaching Poetry in the Secondary School'
This 1988 pamphlet contains in its first paragraph this description of poetry and its role relative to human experience: 'Poetry embodies delight in expression, stretched between thought, feeling and form. As we become aware of the 'true soundings' of poetry so we become aware of what we ourselves might do with language'. We are also interested in the remarks concerning the place of poetry in English teaching: 'to help us to restore to pupils a sense of exuberance and vitality in the acquisition of language and in the power and savour of words'. These intimations of the significance of sound to the appeal and potential of poetry are considered explicitly in the section 'Developing the auditory imagination', after the famous essay by T.S.Eliot. Accordingly, the pamphlet suggests that 'it is essential for pupils to be given the opportunities to hear the words as a pattern of articulate sounds, to read with the ear as well as the eye and to recognise that rhythmic effects are only part of a number of other subtle and elusive aspects of poetic language... Pupils best exercise the auditory imagination by regular reading and listening to whole poems read aloud'. These approaches 'can make children aware of the wide range of emotional possibilities each word possesses according to its context, its speaker, its association or its history'. The final sentence cites Heaney: 'words entering the echo chamber of your head'.

HMI (1987), Teaching Poetry in the Secondary School, HMSO:London

Seamus Heaney
Heaney's comments on the importance of sound in poetry were expressed most recently in his Guardian article 'Bags of Enlightenment'. Here he outlined a rationale for teaching poetry ('we teach it for the now of perception and for the then of reflection') and described the thinking behind his two anthologies edited with Ted Hughes, The Rattle Bag (1982) and The School Bag (1997). Throughout he uses a vocabulary committed to sound: they sought a 'bundle of work that rang true to our older ears', hoped it would be 'pleasurably audible to younger ones', 'poetry that was indeed soul music'. The key quotation for us is this: 'We proceeded in the faith that the aural and oral pleasures of poetry, the satisfactions of recognition and repetition, constitute an experience of rightness that can make the whole physical and psychic system feel more in tune with itself. We implicitly believed that a first exposure to poetry, the early schooling in it, should offer this kind of rightness, since it constitutes one of the primary justifications of the art'. In The Redress of Poetry (p192, 1995), Heaney described himself as 'intent upon treating poetry as an answer given in terms of metre and syntax, of tone and musical trueness.'

Heaney, S. (2003) 'Bags of Enlightenment', The Guardian, Saturday 25 October.
Heaney, S. (1995) The Redress of Poetry, Faber: London

Other work we found relevant: Heaney, S. (1988) 'Sounding Auden' (p109-128) in The Government of the Tongue, Faber: London
Heaney, S. (1999) Introduction ( especially xxvi - xxx) to Beowulf, Faber: London

Tom Paulin
The Faber Book of Vernacular Verse (1990) edited by Paulin, comprises a wealth of material suited to classroom use, as much, say, as The Rattlebag, though it may not have been collected with the same audience in mind. Of particular interest is Paulin's introduction, which provides an exploration of the term 'vernacular' leading to a definition beyond the 'use of dialect words or regional accents' towards what at turns he terms 'a gestural tactile language... the intoxication of speech, its variety and crack and hilarity'. Through a series of examples (Twain's Huckleberry Finn, Hopkins, Rossetti, Walcott, Clare, Frost and Hughes), Paulin identifies 'self-delighting speech', 'visionary actuality', an oral community where 'vernacular imagination distrusts print in the way that most of us dislike legal documents, and - citing Robert Frost - 'sentence sounds', gathered 'by the ear from the vernacular'. Ultimately he provides a more engaging version of something like Barthes' grain of voice.

Paulin concludes the introduction with the observation that 'many of the voices that speak here are disaffected and powerless', voices that recognize the power of polished speech in the public world. Perhaps as teachers we may also see this as the voice of the curriculum: 'it seeks to flatten out and obliterate all the varieties of spoken English and to substitute one accent for all the others.' Implicit in all this is cause to consider how poetry can be addressed as speech and sound in the classroom.

Paulin, T. (1990) The Faber Book of Vernacular Verse, Faber: London

Roland Barthes
The Barthes work that struck us as most relevant to this project was 'The Grain of the Voice', an essay collected in Image Music Text. Here Barthes first describes the paucity of language for interpreting the semiotic mode of music, for which it generally resorts to the use of adjectives: 'this music is this, the execution is that'. He progresses to consider how we might consider singing voices, or more specifically 'the encounter between a language and a voice... the grain, a dual production of language and music'. He attempts to consider what might be signified in the grain of the voice, before and beyond the meaning of the words uttered or their form. When he writes of 'a signifying play having nothing to do with communication, representation (of feelings), expression...', of melody working at the 'voluptuousness of [language's] sound signifiers, of its letters', we wonder if this might help us in understanding pupil responses to poetry read aloud, by the teacher, themselves, or heard on tape - the significance of this individual grain of voice in our understanding of a text uttered or performed in class. Is there a dimension of poetic experience in the classroom that we have not yet adequately addressed?

Barthes, R. (197 ) Image Music Text, Fontana Press: London

Theo van Leeuwen
Of great help in considering the real possibilities of poetry as sound in the English curriculum is Theo van Leeuwen's Speech, Music, Sound (1999), a comprehensive study of the meaning potential of sound across diverse media. Crucially, van Leeuwen provides frameworks which could offer a means of paralleling the cognitive and affective demands of poetry with those of our pupils' multimodal experiences beyond school, also recognising what to date has been a neglect of sound:

'Language as studied by many linguists and taught in the education system has neglected the emotive side of language, the music of language, or, at best, banished it to the margins.' (p143)

The understanding of the mode of sound adumbrated in his work indicates a need to get to grips with the 'stuff' of sound, sound as material - considering it almost as if it were as tangible as clay. His study of the sounds of speech reflects on how the combinations of phonemes in words and syllables come to have meaning. The suggestion that phonemes can mean in themselves within relative systems has also been explored by Reuven Tsur (1992), for instance in his commentary on the perceived 'metallicness' of the voiced consonants /b/, /d/ and /g/. Vowels and consonants have the potential to suggest proximity, distance, freedom, release, fluency, perfection - each having different potential in different contexts. Their connotations relate to the physical act of utterance, what happens in the aperture of the mouth, the way we block or open airstreams.

Van Leeuwen, T. (1999) Speech, Music, Sound

Hayhoe and Parker
Published in 1988, 'Words Large as Apples' provides a comprehensive discussion of approaches to poetry teaching in the English classroom, with chapters covering dimensions such as 'Reading poetry - quietly', 'Drama' and 'Poetry and the Visual'. For us the chapter 'The sense of sound' is of most interest, where sound is considered as crucial to 'the way the writer wants us to perceive the world' and to 'the way he or she wishes to guide our attention'. The authors acknowledge an oral tradition founded in playground chants and 'a more ephemeral sub-culture' enjoyed by older pupils where sound is also important. They also discuss effects of sound, offer activity ideas, and explore links with music. Another chapter includes consideration of resourcing ('Poetry around the place: sounds', p14-23), while the chapter 'Talk' investigates poetry in performance.

Hayhoe, M. and Parker,S. (1988) Words Large as Apples, Cambridge University Press: Cambridge.

Ruth Padel
Padel's '52 Ways of Looking at a Poem' collects a year's worth of Independent articles in one place, each a tidy consideration of a particular contemporary poem in around 1500 words. She pays considerable attention to the bearing sounds have on interpretation of meaning. The most obviously pertinent 'quick glance' part of the book's introduction for us is the one headed 'How a poem hangs together: the partnership of sound and sense': 'In my newspaper discussions, I did not use many technical terms but talked mainly about echoes and sound-relationships. For that's really where it's at. What makes 'a poem' is not rhyme itself, but hanging together... the sound becomes the meaning while it expresses it. A good poem is a love affair of sound and sense'.

Padel, R. (2002) 52 Ways of Looking at a Poem, or How Reading Poetry Can Change Your Life. London: Chatto and Windus.

Sandy Brownjohn
Though it is mainly concerned with the writing of poetry, Brownjohn's work still emphasises the importance of an enjoyment and appreciation of sound in classroom experiences of poetry. In To Rhyme or Not to Rhyme?'s introduction the central and first part of her 'credo' is that 'it is the pure love of the sound of words that is important' - 'this enjoyment of, and playing with, language is essential if one is ever going to use words to good effect'. Accordingly, the first stages in Brownjohn's suggested poetry-teaching scheme are these:

1) That children need to be allowed to rediscover, or be given the opportunity to use, a love of playing with language just for its own sake; and
2) That they need plenty of practice in manipulating words so that they can feel in control of them, rather than allowing words to take control.

Brownjohn provides details of several activities that allow pupils to play and gain confidence with the sound of words. These provide the foundation for later, increasingly paper and print oriented activities.

Brownjohn, S. (1994) To Rhyme or Not to Rhyme? Hodder and Stoughton: London

Archibald Macleash
Discussing the 'Means to Meaning' in poetry in general terms, Macleish also explores 'The Shape of Meaning' with direct reference to Dickinson, Yeats, Rimbaud and Keats. In the former section, the chapter concerning 'Words as Sounds' is of most relevance to us. The crux of Macleish's discussion here draws on Mallarme's interest in 'words themselves' - what Macleish paraphrases as 'words as sensuous events': 'what it comes down to is the proposition that it is exclusively in the relationships of words as sounds that the poem exists'. He asks 'how many words are there in which the sound of the word signifies?', arriving at the conclusion that 'the sounds of words are obviously not the plastic material of the art of poetry', though 'the meaning of the sounds are also present cannot help but play a part' in the meaning of a poem as a whole.

Macleish, A. (1960) Poetry and Experience, Penguin: Harmondsworth

Sue Dymoke
Though the focus of Drafting and Assessing Poetry (2003) is highly specific, Dymoke stresses the importance of attention to sound when writing poetry. Class work for pupils in pairs or groups is suggested in which children read aloud to each other as part of the drafting process (p49), sometimes with the help of conference cards (p52) which might pose questions such as 'When you read your draft aloud are there lines which sound different from the rest?' and 'What's the rhythm of your poem like?'. Elsewhere, for example in ICT-based sequencing exercises (p116), Dymoke remarks on the need to encourage pupils 'to read lines aloud, to tap out rhythms', concluding that 'the computer room should not be a silent space'.

Dymoke's earlier article (2002) concerning the impact of examination exigencies of pupil responses to poetry implies that the presentation of poetry in print form, granted status by the weight of examination, is demotivating to pupils and potentially limiting to their conception of what poetry might be, causing them to associate it with solitude and silence, at the expense of other pleasures it might afford.

Dymoke, S. (2003) Drafting and Assessing Poetry PCP: London
Dymoke,S. (2002) The Deadening Hand of the Exam: the impact of the NEAB anthology on poetry teaching at GCSE, Changing English, Vol. 9, No.1, pp85-92

James Fenton
In his recent An Introduction to English Poetry (2002), Fenton stresses the importance of sound in the English tradition: 'poetry carries its history within it, and it is oral in origin'. The book's chapters consider metre and rhyme, various forms, syllabics and song, though sound is not the only area of focus - there is also a chapter on 'Writing for the Eye'. An interesting starting point for us is the second chapter, 'Where Music and Poetry Divide', which casually, anecdotally explores differing attitudes to the treatment of poetry as sound, crafted for performance rather than the page. Fenton outlines the 'traditional means' by which poets emphasise language, including 'raising the voice in order to be heard above the crowd; raising the voice in order to demonstrate its beauty and power; chanting the words; reciting the words rhythmically; punctuating the units of speech (what will become the lines of the poem) with rhymes; setting the words to tunes; setting the words to tunes and singing them in unison, as in a drinking song'. He concludes the chapter with the suggestion that any poet's merit depends on whether they 'deserve to be heard'.

Fenton, J. (2002) An Introduction to English Poetry, Penguin/Viking:London

Ruth Finnegan
Ruth Finnegan's book Oral Traditions and the Verbal Arts (1992) allows us to locate this study in a broader context, and helps us ask questions about our own assumptions about the nature of oral texts in classroom contexts. As an anthropological study, it delineates key terms related to oral texts and details theoretical perspectives. Furthermore, it offers guidance on observing and analysing performance, considering the nature of 'texts in process'. It usefully adumbrates the potential difficulties of recording oral 'performance events', and considers related issues of equipment to be used, context and permissions. Finnegan's vast experience and wide frame of reference offer an insightful and often practical counterpoint to the other influences for the project, which tend to derive more from lines of literary study than research into the very nature of oral or verbal arts.

Finnegan's anthology Oral Poetry (1978) is also relevant, providing example poems from diverse cultures - a useful collection for classroom study, with brief commentaries about each cultural tradition included. Sadly out of print at the moment.

Finnegan,R. (ed) (1978) Oral Poetry Penguin: Harmondsworth
Finnegan,R. (1992) Oral Traditions and the Verbal Arts Routledge: London

Walter Ong
Like the work of Finnegan, Ong's (1982) shapes an extend context for the project, prompting us to consider the relationship between oral language and cognition. For Ong, the world of sound is 'the natural habitat of language' (p8). He contends 'it would seem inescapably obvious that language is an oral phenomenon' and wonders 'why the scholarly world had to reawaken to the oral character of language' (p6). It is helpful for us to acknowledge his concept of 'the secondary orality of present day high-technology culture, in which a new orality is sustained by telephone, radio, television and other electronic devices that depend for their existence and functioning on writing and print' (p11) - secondary because it is impossible to imagine a world of 'primary orality', a situation before writing existed. His chapter 'Some pschodynamics of orality' is of special interest, its relevance apparent in sub-headings such as 'Sounded word as power and action' and 'oral memorization'.

Ong, W. (1982) Orality and Literacy, Methuen: London

Roger Hewitt
Roger Hewitt's recent paper asks 'Is there a case for considering talk as part of the oral heritage and as a performance skill?' (2003). He identifies an En1 programme of study 'far too constrained in comparison with reading and writing' and calls for 'developmental research' on the potential for incorporating oral literature in the English National Curriculum. He deems the listening practices described in the curriculum 'severely limited', believing that 'the established discourse of Speaking and Listening constitutes a 'restricted code' of terms, cramping what is possible and deflecting energies away from other areas of activity that may be additionally fruitful'. Arguing for more attention to 'expressive orality', he makes a case for study of oral literature which would cover texts as diverse as The Iliad, The Odyssey, Beowulf, rap, Robert Skelton and the American Blues. The breadth of material suggested is not so different from that considered by van Leeuwen, and similarities are stronger still when he suggests the curriculum could include study of 'the nature of oral composition, the establishment of a community of oral performers wittingly and unwittingly generating, exchanging and transforming formulae, and of the interplay between written and oral composition'.

Hewitt, R. (2003) Is there a case for considering talk as part of the oral heritage and as a performance skill? pp 19-25, New perspectives on spoken English in the classroom (2003) London:QCA