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reviewer’s opinion that verses could help the collective feel a sort of “anima-
tive, impulsive sympathy” with the nation.
We can see Arnold’s increasing frustration with the unmet pedagogic po-
tential of English literature and especially poetry in his reports into the
1880s—frustration in no small part generated because of his public position
as the poet-critic who would replace the nation’s religion with its “unconscious
poetry.” In his now famous statement from the introduction to another school
text, Thomas Ward’s 1881 multivolume The English Poets, Arnold writes, “the
future of poetry is immense, because in poetry, where it is worthy of its high
destinies, our race, as time goes on, will find an ever surer and surer stay.”^21 In
his 1878 General Report, three years earlier, Arnold makes a case for the for-
mative power of memorizing poetry and argues against those who find it
out-of-date:
Learning by heart is often called, disparagingly, learning by rote and is
treated as an old fashioned, unintelligent exercise, and a waste of time.
It is an exercise to which I attach great value, and it tends, I am glad to
say, to become general in the schools of my district, partly because the
teachers know that I am in strong favor of it. Poetry is almost always
taken for this exercise, not prose; and when so little is done in the way of
learning by heart, poetry should certainly have the preference. . . . [I]n
almost all inspected schools, in my district at any rate, the whole upper
part of the school would each year learn by heart from one to three
hundred lines of good poetry. . . . The advantages of this to me seem in-
disputable. If we consider it, the bulk of the secular instruction given in
our elementary schools has nothing of that formative character which
in education is demanded. . . . But good poetry is formative; it has, too,
the precious power of acting by itself and in a way managed by nature,
not through the instrumentality of that somewhat terrible character,
the scientific educator. I believe that even the rhythm and diction of
good poetry are capable of exercising some formal effect, even though
the sense be imperfectly understood. . . . [A]n effort should be made for
this one exercise, to fix the standard high. Gray’s Eleg y and extracts from
Shakespeare should be chosen in preference to the poetry of Scott and
Mrs. Hemans, and very much of the poetry in our present school read-
ing books should be entirely rejected.^22Just as Davis’s Irish ballad was held up for derision, the works of popular Scot-
tish poet Walter Scott and popular “poetess” Felicia Hemans, though they
proliferated in “Standard” readers^23 do not measure up to Arnold’s high stan-
dard for the kind of poetry that “exercise[s] some formal effect” through
“rhythm and diction.” Shakespeare and Gray might be too difficult, but the
rhythm will act on its own “even though the sense be imperfectly understood.”