Comment by ghc
22 days ago
The lecture is fine, but a good English teacher in high school will cover the same interpretation as part of a unit about reading deeply, a skill that poetry demands. Whether or not a high school student is ready for it is another discussion.
The true brilliance of the poem is how deep the interpretations can go, something Murphy only hints at. An undergraduate poetry class would go into significantly more depth about the poem's construction and how it's designed to exploit our innate biases in reading.
I watched the full lecture, did an MFA in creative writing, was an English major at an ivy, and have seen countless well known authors speak and discuss literature. This dismissal of the lecture is ridiculous. It is of an extremely high and uncommon quality.
At first I was aghast at this response to what I thought was not a dismissal but a measured evaluation of the lecture, but upon reflection, we always need to check our privilege.
It's absolutely true that my high school English teacher gave a similar lecture about Frost, and that the curriculum included such points about Frost, but that teacher did have a PhD and left to become an English professor at Oxford.
And it's absolutely true that undergraduate poetry classes can include deeper lectures about poetry construction, but I studied poetry under renowned poets Billy Collins and Thomas Lux, as well as several visiting poet laureates.
And yes, I've been exposed outside of school to many poetry lectures at places like Sarah Lawrence, but my uncle was a Pulitzer Prize winner, my step-father was a well-published poet, and my mother was an English professor and author who studied under Dick Allen and John Barth on her way to receiving America's most prestigious graduate fiction writing degree at Johns Hopkins. I was always traveling to poetry readings and lectures as long as I can remember.
I can't speak to your experience, only mine, but perhaps I've had an uncommon opportunity to spend my early life immersed in the poetry community, and don't have much in common with the average English major.