When a thought has found words

Poetry is the forgotten child of literature. Few people read it for pleasure. In Western high schools, poetry is seldom taught because it is considered to be out of date and have little to do with the life of today’s students.

However, compared with the situation in the West, poetry is still an important part of the curriculum (课程) in China. Recently, the Ministry of Education has increased the number of ancient Chinese poems for students to memorize and recite, from 14 to 72. Why is it important to learn poems?

First of all, poetry is a necessary part of learning traditional Chinese culture. It is a path to understanding your history and your society. It is also the key to understanding the thoughts and feelings that are common to everyone but that we may be unable to express, the joy of Li Bai dancing with the moon, for example. Everyone has feelings of joy, love, loneliness, sadness and even anger, and a good poem can put those feelings into words and bring us self-understanding.

Poems can also express beauty. In a few short lines, even something common can become beautiful. Here is a poem called Fog by Carl Sandberg: The fog comes/on silent haunches (弓腰) /and then moves on. Yes, a fog does move smoothly, silently and like a cat, and Sandberg catches that feeling and image, and makes it beautiful.

Of course, to really enjoy poetry, it has to be read aloud. After all, a poem is really just a song without music. Most ancient poems, like Homer’s Epics (《荷马史诗》) and China’s Book of Songs, were spoken for hundreds of years before they were written.

The American poet Robert Frost said, “Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.” You are lucky that you now have seventy-two poems to learn!

7 . Looking for a new poetry book to read? I’ve got you! We’re going to explore some of my favorite poetry collections, which range from the traditional all the way to the totally experimental. And though they differ in terms of tone and subject matter, they’ve got all we call “good parts”.

Night Sky with Exit Wounds by Ocean Vuong

It is the first poetry collection from Ocean Vuong. Vuong’s style is well-suited to the heavy subjects he pursues, particularly when he reflects on the loss of his father and his experiences as a wartime refugee. There’s a certain wonderful quality to his writing.

Lunch Poems by Frank O’Hara

If you like a conversational style, Lunch Poems might be the poetry book for you. Personal, funny, and easy, the collection perfectly shows the casual voice of Frank O’Hara, an outstanding figure of the New School Movement in late 1950s’ New York. As the name suggests, most of the poems were written during his lunch break at work, bringing a realistic image by the writing.

100 Selected Poems by E.E. Cummings

It’s a shame that more people don’t take EE Cummings seriously. Yes, his poetry is sometimes experimental. Unconcerned with “rules”, Cummings tried to capture emotion in its own form.

The Complete Poems by Elizabeth Bishop

In my opinion, any kind of fantastic poetry books must include Elizabeth Bishop. Highly skilled and highly influential, Bishop was one of the most powerful voices of the 20th century. She mostly worked within traditional forms, but the forms led to surprising effects, mixing classic styles with modern ones.

9 . No poem should ever be discussed or “analyzed”, until it has been read aloud by someone, teacher or student. Better still, perhaps, is the practice of reading it twice, once at the beginning of the discussion and once at the end, so the sound of the poem is the last thing one hears of it.

All discussions of poetry are, in fact, preparations for reading it aloud, and the reading of the poem is, finally, the most telling “interpretation” of it, suggesting tone, rhythm, and meaning all at once. Hearing a poet read the work in his or her own voice, on records or on film, is obviously a special reward. But even those aids to teaching cannot replace the student and teacher reading it or, best of all, reciting it.

I have come to think, in fact, that time spent reading a poem aloud is much more important than “analyzing” it, if there isn’t time for both. I think one of our goals as teachers of English is to have students love poetry. Poetry is “a criticism of life” “a heightening of life, enjoyment with others”. It is “an approach to the truth of feeling”, and it “can save your life”. It also deserves a place in the teaching of language and literature more central than it presently occupies.

I am not saying that every English teacher must teach poetry. Those who don’t like it should not be forced to put that dislike on anyone else. But those who do teach poetry must keep in mind a few things about its essential nature, about its sound as well as its sense, and they must make room in the classroom for hearing poetry as well as thinking about it.

The Book of Songs is the     1    (early) collection of Chinese poetry. It consists of 305 poems dating     2     the early years of the Western Zhou Dynasty to the middle stage of the Spring and Autumn Period. Nowadays, Confucius is generally believed to be the     3     (edit) of the book.

The Book of Songs is rich in content,     4     (reflect) love and labor, war and slavery, custom and marriage, ancestor worship and special events. It is a mirror of social life.

All the poems included in The Book of Songs fall into three sections—poems     5     come from villages belong to Feng; the poems       6     (write) to persuade or praise the rulers belong to Ya; those used at religious ceremonies belong to Song. Ya and Song are flowery and serious in language，    7     Feng is relatively inspiring and full of passion.

The opening poem of The Book of Songs, Cooing and Wooing (《关雎》), is about love, which     8     (read) ：

By riverside are cooing

A pair of turtledoves;

A good young man is wooing

A fair maiden he loves.

Through these lines, the poet expresses the man’s longing for       9     girl and his hope that one day he can win the girl’s heart.

As the beginning of ancient Chinese poetry, The Book of Songs enables people to have a better understanding of Chinese civilization. Moreover, it is also       10     (frequent) quoted in other Chinese texts and has always been referred to as moral truths and lessons.