ABSTRACT
If poetry can survive fifty years of mass education it can survive anything. It has been misrepresented, maligned, misnamed, misunderstood and deliberately mislaid; its anaemic double discovered on calendars and coo’d over by maiden ladies with cups of tea. Poetry is a force released in activity. That is how an educationalist and a poet see it. It is rarely how critics and academics see it. They see it as a series of poems; correspondingly it is as a ‘Collection of Poems’ that it is taught. Basic educational truths are frequently overlooked in our teaching of the Arts, and no art suffers more from this than poetry. Literature without poetry is the neatest mathematical expression of it; but this does not mean merely literature at large without the poetic in form. It means a lack of awareness of the poetic in substance; an experiencing of great literature without the means of its greatness.
