"Do you know who I am?"

An amusing post over on Volatile Rune about unwittingly coming across T S Eliot's Gerontion without realising who it's by and judging it 'better than average'... (The blog's well worth a regular read too, btw).

It reminds me of the fantastic book Practical Criticism by I A Richards (yes, I've got rather old-school tastes sometimes), in which he recounts his experience of giving a variety of poems to his Cambridge undergraduates without saying who they were by. Some were by 'great names', others by far 'lesser' figures. The results were intriguing and didn't generally fit with the recieved opinion about which were 'better'.

There are many conclusions which could be drawn from the experiment. I'm sure many would say that it shows that 'The Canon' is a load of bunkum. But I'd be inclined to suggest that it shows (as with Volatile Rune's experience) that we often read poetry in a way that's not equipped to recognise all of the depth, subtlety and context of the poem. And that's ok. Perhaps we note which are worth a reread, and that's when we start to sift the wheat from the corn (having already sifted out the chaff). After all, 'better than average' isn't a wrong description of Eliot's poetry.