[Shaun J. Russell]

I'm inclined to agree with Susan. When I teach poetry (as I'm doing this semester), I always have the students read the poems before I provide context. We start class with me providing a bit of info about the author, about the historical context, perhaps what a standard "take" is of the poem...but never before they've had the chance to read it on their own and form initial impressions. Likewise, I encourage them to try to avoid the notes made by the editors in the anthology, because they're often subjective, and often suggest absolute meanings for elements that should be interpretive. My scholarship engages heavily with authorial intention (and publisher intention etc.), but I'm a firm believer in reader-response in how poems should initially be approached.

In short, when we really sit down to study a poem in depth (e.g. truly at length), bringing in all possible avenues to aid interpretation is fine. But at the outset, the poem should stand or fall on its own, as Susan said. Prefaces only serve to color the initial reading experience, often to the poem's detriment.

[Roger Slater]

If the poem is meant to be published, it generally needs to be able to stand on its own, so my preference would be to give the readers a chance to see and react to the poem without commentary from the poet. Once the thread is underway, however, there's plenty of time for the poet to supply additional information or to engage in a discussion.

[James Brancheau]

I agree with the above- Roger, Shaun, Susan. I would add though, as Roger hints towards, this is a workshop, so nothing wrong with spilling the beans, or a few beans, after it's been up a while and comments have accumulated. Especially if the poet needs to straighten some things out. Sometimes I think there's a reluctance to do that. If this is your end game, maybe that makes sense...

[Roger Slater]

I also like what Shaun said about telling his students not to read the notes.

When I was in school, it seems that every great poem we were given to read had numerous footnotes on every page, along with glossary terms along the right-hand margin, and I dutifully read each one. The result? "Reading" a poem became a slog and an intellectual chore. I never did make it through Paradise Lost and many other great poems.

A few years later, I was given a volume of Paradise Lost printed on beautiful paper, with beautifully produced Blake illustrations generously sprinkled throughout, but not a single footnote. The book became a page turner for me, one of the most enjoyable reading experiences of my life, from the first line to the last. While there were undoubtedly many words I didn't know, and classical references that flew over my head, not chasing down the meaning of every last syllable freed me to thoroughly enjoy the story and the poetry. There was plenty of time when I was done to wonder about the scholarly stuff.

The general point is that ideally you want the reader to focus on the poem itself, and the more side information you give, the more you try to direct the reader's attention before they have read the poem, the less likely they are to actually enjoy it.

[Shaun J. Russell]

James: That's a fair point about the workshop environment. I suppose I wasn't thinking of "preface" quite that way, but I'm okay with someone asking for "targeted" advice -- if they're happy with the content but want criticism on the meter etc. I still think any excessive contextualization is anathema to the point of reading a poem, however, unless the poem will indeed be published / sent out with that extra information (a la Coleridge's revised "Ancient Mariner" text).


And Roger...yes! I actually have the same edition of Paradise Lost you mention (I think) -- I've collected a few different editions over the years, and if it's same one I think you're referring to, I bought it precisely because it was so beautifully rendered. It's a true folio, which you don't see very often in modern editions. I was fortunate enough to first read Paradise Lost in Merritt Hughes's edition of Milton's works. It does have footnotes, but they're tiny and really don't interfere with the main text. It was great as a student, because I could easily read it without eye-skip, but could also squint at the footnotes if I found something particularly confusing. I legitimately love Paradise Lost, and it broke my heart a little to have to cut a 400-line section of it from my syllabus last week when I realized my students were having a hard enough time with short poems, and probably couldn't handle peak Milton. (It's an intro / survey course, meaning students from a blend of majors. Had they all been English majors, I would have kept it).

Incidentally, thinking back to my earlier post, this will likely be the last time I use Norton anthologies in my literature classes. They certainly have their uses, but I'm realizing that the editorial interpolations are far too intrusive for me. When I saw that they literally changed two words of a Shakespeare Sonnet (as in, made up something out of thin air as "editorial conjecture") because the original words are "probably" a printing error...well, that made up my mind, for what I hope are obvious reasons.