PJ (00:01.794)
Hello and welcome to Chasing Leviathan. I'm your host PJ Weary and I'm here today with Adam Walker, YouTube creator of close reading poetry. Adam, wonderful to have you on today.
Adam Walker (00:11.758)
Hey PJ, thanks so much for having me on the show.
PJ (00:14.864)
So tell me a little bit why this channel, I know that you're going through your PhD right now at Harvard and you started this channel where you give lectures on poetry and you do lots of very close reading of poetry. It's part of what drew me to you. We had a good laugh earlier about talking about the Internet's attention span and how strange it is to have for me hour-long conversations about things that people have to pay really close attention to and for you,
very long, close readings of poetry followed by lectures. What inspired you and what do you see as the purpose for what you're doing?
Adam Walker (00:55.022)
Yeah, it's a really good question, VJ. It's funny the way it started a few years ago. I realized that people were going to YouTube to find information on literature and close readings. And it was mostly, I think, high school students looking for help with homework. But I a lot there, where it's actually a lot of public readers, non-academic readers, I should say, who just love literature and want to find
others who love literature as well and learn about ways of appreciating it and talking about it and enjoying it. And there's something about, you know, there's the question, so I wanted to provide something useful, something that would bring poetry alive. There's the question of using essays and there's some beautiful close readers out there, academics and non-academics who write some really great analyses of poems. But there's something
that can be left out of that. You get the sense that it could be a very dry analysis, is that the assumption that you can only understand a poem by picking it apart. And, know, Wordsworth has that poem where he says, with the meddling intellect we murder to dissect. And there was some balance I wanted to achieve with this analytical style, but also really the passion and the emotion that comes from reading.
poetry, especially lyric poetry. So I started out reading short poems and just closely reading those and then developed into longer lectures, which really, as you suggested in the question, is not high algorithm like YouTube. And it's not, but there are people who are really looking for...
PJ (02:42.854)
Ha ha ha ha.
Adam Walker (02:53.278)
what is the academy saying about this book? How do I read a novel or how do I read a poem? And people are really interested in literary history. They're interested in what makes poetry so exciting. And there's something in the video that kind of gives the more human presence to it, where it's not just an analytical essay in language. It's kind of an engagement.
with it, a wholehearted engagement. And I think that's something that for a time was really missing in the academy. It's missing online. There's a lot of naivete, or it feels naivete, naive, I should say, to emote over literature, but really that's what it's there for. And I wanted that to come through. That's one of the aspects of enjoying poetry, is not really being able to point out the metaphors and the different kinds of puns and a rhetorical.
figures, but it's actually, you know, all in the service of understanding how language works on us. It brings us into a wider sphere of community and it actually teaches us a lot about ourselves. And so I wanted to bring kind of a more human element to the analysis of poetry.
PJ (04:12.173)
You mentioned a little bit about...
PJ (04:17.292)
You had already these close readers kind of out there finding other people and that you felt drawn to them as well. What role does community play in literature and is there anything specific about YouTube that you find with that community of literature?
Adam Walker (04:34.69)
Ooh, that's really interesting. So first off on... Yeah, yeah. And it's a great question, PJ, because there is this thing called, I realized when I got into this booktube and there's book talk and bookstagram and all of these different social media ways of talking about books and people taking pictures of like putting little flags on the books and doing the annotations that they're like...
PJ (04:38.584)
Well, it's a two-part question. Yeah.
Adam Walker (05:02.904)
There's a whole culture around reading on social media that I find just actually inspiring and it's really nice to see other people, many of whom are not academics, are professionals, are professors, but are just sharing a love of literature. I think that there's just something so great about that, especially in a time when a lot of American universities are devaluing the humanities to see it flourishing so organically on all of these different media.
And so I was drawn to that aspect. There certainly is a community on YouTube in the comments among creators of the videos, the video makers, content makers. But it's tough because you get folks making comments and I try to respond to almost all, if I can, the comments of my videos because that's where people tend to ask questions and...
offer criticisms and, and really engaged with the material. But I found that what was really helpful was leading these, these online events where instead of me delivering a lecture to a camera, they're actually there and they're, they're chatting at the beginning. I'm getting to know them. I deliver the lecture.
We come together afterwards for questions and answers and people compare notes and experiences on literature. think that there's something, know, literature really invites community. It resists isolation or study in isolation and it's something that can be excruciatingly lonely about studying literature in isolation. And I've done it before. There's something so enriching about hearing what other people, how other people are experiencing the written word.
what they see that I am blind to. And when we pool all of our observations together and make interpretive judgments on the poem and understand a little bit about how it moves us in different ways, we actually begin to see that literature is really made to exist in these communal contexts. And in a lot of times, most of the literature today is
Adam Walker (07:25.242)
or over the years has all been produced in community. It was meant to be read aloud, much of it, or to be read from the page, aloud to others. And it was meant to be discussed. And I think that that's something that's great about the online community and the study of poetry.
PJ (07:46.592)
And I think that's an interesting distinction there even between like you're the close reading poetry channel. You're talking about poetry that is a distinctive distinction from the novel, right? Like the novel is not meant, I would say there's still a communal aspect to novels, but it's not the same as poetry, which really is, I I'm sure there's a poet who has written just for the page. There's a poet who's done just about everything.
Adam Walker (08:08.566)
Interesting.
PJ (08:15.734)
But for the most part, poets read to be read aloud. so that's a, I think an important distinction there. Am I on the right track with that or?
Adam Walker (08:20.066)
Yes.
Adam Walker (08:28.386)
I absolutely think so. think there's, at least when the novel was emerging in the 18th century, at the end of the 17th century, you see communities of readers who usually privately read to themselves and then came together to discuss. You had the circulating libraries, you all throughout England. But for poetry, especially lyric poetry, there's this oral dimension. You can't separate it from the sound.
And that's what I hear you say, and that's exactly right. You actually have to read it aloud and to get the rhythms, to get the textures of the consonants and the verbs, like, and the vowels, I should say. And all of it just really enriches the experience and actually facilitates the understanding. I've had students where I've assigned poems, they come back to class having read them, don't understand it.
They say, let's spend some time reading them out loud. We'll go around the room, read it three times, and it clicks when they hear it. And there's something, there's this beautiful harmony, I think, between sound and sense in a lyric poem. So yeah, you're on the right track there. Absolutely, PJ.
PJ (09:40.088)
So you mentioned this a little bit too about this analysis and passion. And obviously, I mean, you're getting your PhD in this. like you believe in intellect, you believe in analysis, but you're talking about the importance of passion. When you come to a poem.
There are a myriad of lenses now that people talk about, a myriad types of hermeneutics. What kinds of lenses and hermeneutics do you generally rely on? I know that each poem is gonna probably require different types of lenses, but what do you generally find yourself drawn to? What are you using when you're lecturing, when you're reading?
Adam Walker (10:11.775)
Mmm.
Adam Walker (10:20.974)
Yeah, it's a good question. A number of theories and criticisms that you can apply to poetry these days, and all of them are really good, some better than others depending on what you're reading. But my go-to has been...
I have my issues with new criticism, which is the formalism. But that's been my critical method largely for the way I do lectures. I think you should start the lecture with the poem and bring in the background and historical information as you go along, but hug close to the contours of the text and allow that to shape the form of the lecture itself.
That's been my practice, is very kind of close reading. And of course, close reading is very much wider than new criticism. New criticism, by the way, I'm sure you know, PJ, but it really came out of the 20th century American and British schools of criticism. And it was great. It really showed attention to the text and said, let's look at what the poem is doing and nothing else. I think that that...
Orthodoxy was a little restricting in terms of including biographical and historical and religious dimensions. So I'd say that that's probably my favorite method and the one that you can see in almost every single one of my videos. Now, personally, yeah, please.
PJ (11:51.992)
Forgive me real quick. Are we talking about like T.S. Eliot?
Adam Walker (11:56.63)
Yeah, TS Eliot's a good one. I.A. Richards, F.R. Leavis. yeah, Clamph Brooks. Huge one, Robert Penn Warren. Yeah, yeah.
PJ (12:09.89)
I read, shoot, I read a book by T.S. Eliot, I think it's called The Metaphysical Poets.
Adam Walker (12:15.662)
great essay.
PJ (12:17.93)
Okay, maybe it was it was the whole book. So maybe they had those a collection of essays. Anyways, I'm just trying to orient myself. Please continue. You were gonna you're gonna say something else.
Adam Walker (12:25.088)
Mm-hmm. Well, it's funny, T.S. Eliot was critical of the new critical school as well. He called them the School of Lemon Squeezers because they tried to press the meaning out of a poem. And you just can't do that. A lot of poems resist this. And I just delivered a lecture on Emily Dickinson where I said, you cannot do that to these poems. Actually, they don't yield to that kind of inquiry, at least very easily.
PJ (12:34.807)
haha
Adam Walker (12:54.306)
But the New Critics did do a lot with Emily Dickinson in the mid-20th century. A lot of good things too, but I think a good way into Dickinson is through the emotion and through the heart and through impressions. But yeah, my critical method that I'm trying to develop or that I did develop in my dissertation, I just defended last month, so I have the PhD now. Yeah, thank you.
PJ (13:20.664)
Congratulations.
Adam Walker (13:23.198)
And the project was developing a way to really develop a critical vocabulary by which we can talk about the spiritual dimensions of the lyric poem. Helen Vindler has this beautiful quotation where she says that poetry should not be examined as embodiments of ideas, but as enactments of mobile consciousness. And if we think about
a spiritual state as a mode of consciousness and how that's encoded formally through the rhythm, through the enjambment, through the rhyme, through the structure, through the frustration of expectation. All of that informs what the poem's doing and how it's enacting the spiritual experience. Christina Rosetti does this beautifully, by the way. So does Hopkins. I mean, he's probably the poet to do this with verse in his own way and push this forward.
But there's not really a critical vocabulary for this. And I think it's because, as I mentioned, is this, people find it a little naive to emote or to even talk about spiritual aspects of poetry or of literature. Although that's changed greatly in the past 10 years. So my work in the book I'm currently working on, which deals with the romantics and the spiritual impulse of their poetry,
blends close reading with this understanding of how the poem is actually encoding a spiritual insight, spiritual awareness, and even spiritual emotions and experiences. yeah, New Criticism has kind of been with me for a while.
PJ (15:09.918)
I think you're about to speak on some of the other criticisms before I interrupted you asking about Elliott. So again, I apologize for...
Adam Walker (15:16.222)
don't, no, no, no, no, you're fine. I don't remember what that was. I might've said that, you know, yeah, there are great ways. And I've relied on different methods, including historicism, know, new historicism, deconstruction is fine on certain things, all kinds of gender and sexuality modes of inquiry, depending on what poems you're looking at.
Marx's criticism can be helpful, know, depending on what you're looking at as well. So I think now the attitude in the the academy is, I think quite rightly at this point, all of these are part of a toolbox that you can use and that you should use on some poets because they invite that sort of inquiry. So yeah, there's so much out there, so many great ways of reading and almost all of those methods use close reading.
I think that's what I was going to say actually. That close reading is actually a tool that can be used by many theories and criticisms. It tends to be the case that formalism and new criticism use it probably to better ends or in more sophisticated ways. the close reading is kind of central to many practices, many different theories.
PJ (16:40.426)
I think this goes along with what I've heard you say on your channel that if literature is to really to be literature, it has to pay respect to its own medium. You have to pay attention to the language. I think there is in certain quarters a desire to flatten literature without respect to the language as just ideas. This idea that you can
to take like you have to have close reading, whatever the method is, you have to read closely and have an ear for especially for poetry, right? Am I tracking with you there?
Adam Walker (17:19.041)
Yes. Yes, yeah, absolutely.
Adam Walker (17:26.914)
Yeah, you have to have it. It's so important because without it, I mean, all you have is the idea. Now, some methods, as you say, are more interested in ideas. And actually, this is the problem. This is, I think, the surprising and sometimes delightful discovery that a lot of English majors or, well, first years make when they take a course on poetry is it actually isn't about the ideas.
They're not trying to write a philosophical treatise. This isn't philosophy we're talking about. This isn't theology. This isn't anthropology. This isn't a meditation on the Bible even, even if we're talking about Milton. It's something kind of more than that. It's actually language. And it's an interesting moment, especially when they're writing their papers and you can see when it clicks sometimes where students begin, wait.
They stop using language like, in Act 3 of Othello, Shakespeare argues that, and they start saying things like, look at the way the metaphors of monstrosity are working in Act 3, how Iago is dehumanizing the people around him through his animal metaphors. And so they're much more interested suddenly in Shakespeare's language, and they realize that he's not making an argument. He's creating kind of a world.
a psychology. And so that's one of the beautiful things of language. yeah, there have been some professors who completely neglect this and teach literature as though it were politics or ideology or philosophy. But that's not pure literary study, if such a thing exists, because literary sanctity kind of doesn't exist anyway. Literature goes into all of these fields. But to love language...
and not just the ideas of language, that's something that you get with literary study that I think you don't get necessarily in other disciplines.
PJ (19:38.866)
Are you familiar with Paul Ricoeur? Have you ever heard that name?
Adam Walker (19:43.136)
No, tell me about him.
PJ (19:44.6)
So he wrote the book rule of metaphor and I found that really helpful but The main point is that the foundation of wisdom it for him is metaphor and the way that it resists But the whole point of a metaphor is that it resists Paraphrase like if you can paraphrase it then it's dead right like when you say dead as a doornail All that means at this point is that you're just really dead
Adam Walker (20:02.498)
Yeah. Yes.
PJ (20:13.056)
And so that metaphor is dead, but that to have a living metaphor is where wisdom starts because it gives us the fertility to be creative and to have, for wisdom that, that wisdom for the future requires open pathways, not closed dead end pathways. So anyways, it just reminds, like very much reminds me of what, what you're talking about. So I didn't know if that would be a connection there, but, so anyways, sorry, it seems like a little bit of a rabbit trail, but.
Adam Walker (20:13.23)
.
Adam Walker (20:19.202)
Yes.
Adam Walker (20:31.31)
Perfect.
Adam Walker (20:42.348)
Yeah, that was great. I'll have to look that up.
PJ (20:46.584)
You've talked a little bit about how it's naive to be passionate about literature. Just for sake of clarity, think I'm pretty sure I understand what you mean by that. You're talking about from the academic side of things, because I think, yeah, the average person is like, the only read it literature for passion, right? Like that's...
Adam Walker (20:57.72)
From the ac- yes, no, absolutely. Yeah, I'm-
Adam Walker (21:05.44)
Absolutely, and thanks for asking for clarification on that because I want to make that very clear. And people who I think have seen my content know that I am unabashedly emotive with the poetry. And that, yeah, this can look a little unprofessional from a certain academic standpoint. Not all of my colleagues think that what I'm doing is cringe or...
a little unprofessional. But I think that that has nothing I think it's very, important that we do that. Because if it's not out of love of literature, why are we studying what we study? you know, like, why should we? Why should we hold back? I think the greatest professors I've known really, really loved literature. And you could tell when they talked about it. And that love was so infectious.
And so that's absolutely right, PJ. I mean, it can be perceived as naive, but it's really important.
PJ (22:12.226)
Well, I think the answer goes back to like, if you don't, if you don't love it, why not philosophy or theology then? you're all you're concerned about is the ideas. I mean, that's a very dead end approach. Like you said, most professors aren't doing that, but there is that dead end where it's like, why aren't you studying economics? Why aren't you studying theology? Why aren't you studying philosophy? If you can't fall in love with the literature itself, then it's just a poor substitute. And I have seen that it's, I think it's
falling out of favor for the reasons we're talking about.
Adam Walker (22:46.19)
I think so too.
Yeah, the academy in the 80s and 90s really became really ideologically driven, especially from the far left, I think most of this is where that was coming from. There was this, think, well-intended compulsion to have literature save the world, and so we should only be teaching those poets or those works of literature that align with
the vision of our world according to what we understand is right. And in response to this, the more conservative institutions were doing the same thing with literature, making the same mistake and using it, I think, to prop up a certain theology or their own anti-ideology, which was an ideology in itself. But you do have a turn now. You have this difference where...
Actually, students don't want to deconstruct the heck out of a poem. They actually want to understand it. And this is a gross generalization of deconstruction, what I just said. But there's this idea that we must critique, we must critique. Everything must be critiqued and problematized and historicized and sexualized and all the rest.
PJ (23:56.664)
You
Adam Walker (24:19.384)
But in doing so, we missed the dimension of literature as it is and why it was created and how it works. And so there are movements, there are critical movements that are, I think, rescuing literature from the clutches of that really, really militant orthodoxy, we could say. Because for a while it was a predominant orthodox position.
PJ (24:47.916)
And I think that's really fair to talk about as a generalization. I'm sorry, I don't mean to belabor this point. It's interesting that when I love reading Derrida, when I think he does really great work, he's doing very, very close readings of the text and he is loving the language, right? And so that's where, I mean, you mentioned using deconstruction, that's where deconstruction shines. But we do see...
Adam Walker (25:04.364)
Yes, he is.
Yeah.
Adam Walker (25:12.899)
right?
PJ (25:15.16)
I think we see this over time. mean, you talk about first year English students coming in with misconceptions and you're like, no, that's not actually how it works. Right. But that's, that's how things go from someone who has a very intentional purpose like Derrida and then gets filtered out and it becomes what you talk about is like this, this exaggeration, but that is how some people use it.
Adam Walker (25:44.48)
Absolutely, yeah. And there's this pendulum swing, I think. And students already have an innate love, I think, or at least a capacity even, if they don't read, to love what they read and to really get into it. You just have to protect it as a student. So sometimes, because the academy sometimes will want to beat that out of you. Yeah.
PJ (26:14.104)
So I'm curious, you mentioned that your dissertation, if you don't mind my asking, was about trying to create a critical method for...
ascertaining maybe not the spiritual value, maybe a critical methodology, a critical vocabulary for talking about the spiritual nature of poetry. Why did you feel the need to write that dissertation? Why did you feel the need to focus on the spiritual side of poetry?
Adam Walker (26:43.886)
that's a really interesting question. I realized that spirituality was really important to the Romantic poets, and they weren't Christian, necessarily. Not all of them, anyway. Most of them weren't. However, because some critics believe that Wordsworth isn't Christian, Shelley's not Christian, these are not Christian, so they're no longer spiritual, they made a mistake.
PJ (26:56.352)
No.
Adam Walker (27:13.45)
in thinking that secularism was merely a departure from religion. But really what you see in these poets' is that religion doesn't turn into secularism. It actually just transforms basically from the religious impulse itself. And so spirituality was really important to, words were too Shelley even, who was an avowed atheist.
to Coleridge, certainly, who became a Trinitarian Christian.
in his later years, but many others. And there wasn't a way to talk about this. And I came into graduate school wanting to do something to study that.
to get a way to, to, to found a way to see it. Because once you name it, once you develop a vocabulary for talking about it in a sophisticated way, then it becomes legitimized. And then people actually see it in other works. And so it really extends off this idea of poetry as enactments of mobile consciousness and states of consciousness. And so Dennis Taylor, who was a professor at Boston College,
in the 90s I believe, wrote an essay called The Need for a Religious Criticism, I think it was called. And in it he says, you know, we have historicized, problematized, we've done all these things, everything, you know, every theory you can apply to literature we've done. And students leave the English departments equipped to really analyze anything. But we don't...
Adam Walker (29:02.382)
have a method for understanding the spiritual impulse behind some poetry. I think he listed 10 examples of ways that people might use this in the classroom or use this in the books. And it was a fine essay and I thought, you know, he's right, there really isn't a critical vocabulary for discussing this. Partly, I think, because the trends in the American English Academy have changed so much over the past 70 years.
When Bloom was a graduate student, Harold Bloom, when Harold Bloom was a graduate student, most of the English professors were clergymen. They had an office in some Christian church or denomination. And he wanted to change that because really, the clergymen did have quite a grip on the poetry in a way that kind of distorted perspectives. He was like, well, let's get away from that and really analyze it apart from any...
religious bias and he and several others in the Yale School, other great American critics changed that and started developing a more objective way of studying poets without recourse to Christianity. And then I think people kind of forgot about what Christianity was and the religious contexts of certain poets and even the religiosity of the atheists.
PJ (30:13.794)
Hehe.
Adam Walker (30:30.126)
of the 18th and 19th century. You know, we talk about atheism today as though it's... we're talking about the new atheism that came out at the turn of the 21st century. But back then, atheism just meant you weren't Christian. It could mean you were a pantheist. It didn't just mean you were a materialist. It meant you were possibly even a deist. You see some of that in Shelley's own letters and in his own poetry. He talks about the spirit of nature. So his atheism was highly spiritual.
It wasn't really a legitimate way to talk about that. So I wanted to do that and so my dissertation was single authored. It was a single authored case study on William Wordsworth. And so I looked at his poetry and developed a way to talk about that critically. And it's a method that can be applied to other romantics as I'm doing in the book project. So that was the experiment.
And that's how it started.
PJ (31:35.01)
So you mentioned the name Harold Bloom. So my follow-up question would be, in your kind of intro to your channel, you say that you believe in traditions, but not in canons. And I can't think of a better segue than you mentioning Harold Bloom to ask you what you think about Western canon.
Adam Walker (31:44.792)
Mmm.
Adam Walker (31:50.752)
I know, yeah. the Western canon. I mean, yeah, no, and that's fair, PJ, and Harold Bloom comes up a lot among my readers. I have gratitude for him because he did write for non-academic readers, and it shows today. The people who are watching my content on YouTube, they're readers of Harold Bloom, and he's a great critic. That being said, I depart with him.
PJ (32:08.996)
yeah.
Adam Walker (32:19.154)
on a number of issues. The Western Canon is fine. It's a fine book. I remember, I recall having heard that Bloom didn't actually want to write it. And again, he mentions this in the preface. I think he felt compelled by perhaps publishers to do this. And I think it was inspired by his own sense that
the intellectual West was abandoning its heritage and there needed to be an authoritative list. And he was the one to provide it. I think that's fine and actually really, really helpful in some ways. I try not to use canons because whether or not this is how Harold Bloom used the word, the connotation with canons is that
It's an inflexible standard of judgment. And so I see this a lot on some YouTube videos and in some public areas where they're talking about greatness. They'll say, well, how does this compare to Shakespeare? Austin Shakespeare, obviously Shakespeare is better than Jane Austen. And it's like, you really have to consider the fact that for one, they're doing different things and you can't judge them.
together like that. Rather...
a better way for me to think about it is in terms of tradition. This actually goes back to Eliot's essay, Tradition and the Individual Talent. I think it was 1919 he published that. It's also a really good essay. And in it, describes tradition as kind of like a network or a community in which no one poet is isolated in meaning. You have to understand the network.
PJ (34:19.927)
Right.
Adam Walker (34:20.008)
of other poets to whom he's responding or she's responding to and how they're furthering a certain tradition or a legacy or an art or a style and reinventing it in different ways. And so you really see it not as like a hierarchy, which I think is usually associated with canonical thinking, but you see it rather as a community of thinkers who
in a way are really collaborating. I don't see literature as this agonistic struggle as Harold Bloom does in books, I should say. It's really enterprising and really compelling. His idea of literary history is, you know, the new poets rebelling against the recently dead poets, the whole burden of the past. And I think Walter Jackson Bate,
said it really well in his book which came just before, it's not the agony of influence, the anxiety of influence, that lost me there for a second. So, I don't see it that way. I see it as less anxiety and more collaboration. But the past is a burden for a lot of poets, and they have to wrestle with that heritage.
and they have to push it forward in a new way. And there is a struggle, and there is an anxiety, but I just don't see it in the oppositional, agonistic way. And I think that informs the way I think of literature as more traditions than as canons. Although, as you know, I've got several videos of a canon that I put together, which tries to actually marry both conceptions in an interesting way. I don't know how successful.
PJ (36:06.562)
Ha ha ha ha.
Adam Walker (36:14.276)
It really is, but that's where I'm coming from there with that distinction.
PJ (36:21.816)
So forgive me, and I think I'm following with you mostly, but how, if you could summarize that, how do you try to marry those two? How do you try and marry that kind of authority with that kind of flexibility?
Adam Walker (36:35.02)
Yeah, so my method was academic consensus over a broad range of years. So I wanted to put together a list, a canon, but I didn't want to rely on my own judgment and prejudices because I do have my own bias on what makes literature great. So what I did was I compiled
I got together 16 really popular and influential anthologies from over four centuries, from the 18th century to the 21st, and I cataloged the number of each poet that was mentioned in all 16 books, and I tallied how many times each poet were mentioned, and I ranked them based on that tally. And I felt like that
That provided a good consensus, at least, of what some poets thought as, you know, this is the canon, this is really good poetry. You have to read, for instance, Johnson, are for poetry, you have to read Wordsworth. He's there everywhere. And this gave a good reflection of...
of the values of the past four centuries that have really shaped the study of English literature today. So was a way to kind of keep my hands off of it, but at the same time, bring in a consensus of people who compiled, you know, anthologies of poetry over the years. And many of these people were of different continents, had different investments, had different ideas themselves. So I wanted to add a little diversity that way. So that's how I tried to...
to blend those two, yeah.
PJ (38:26.902)
What are the differences that you saw? you're talking about you're trying to find kind of what was the same across what were the surprising differences that you found? I know one of your more popular videos is like this was the Harvard poetry curriculum 50 years ago. What have you seen change over poetry over the last? It sounds like couple centuries.
Adam Walker (38:50.121)
gosh.
Adam Walker (38:56.886)
an interesting question.
PJ (38:57.12)
Or even from 50 years. might be like, here, give me a dissertation on the fly. I think that was probably a little unfair.
Adam Walker (39:00.002)
No.
Adam Walker (39:03.864)
Well, no, it's, mean, one of the surprising things about putting together this list was Sir Walter Raleigh came up as like one of the top 40. He's not even that great. He doesn't even have that much. Why? You know, why did that? So I was surprised by that. Skeleton, John Skeleton came up as one of the top 40. He's also...
Not that great, and not that important either, I would say, in terms of Spencer. I mean, he was up there in the top 44 with Spencer. That was surprising. And I think that shows an interest in philology. So the English literature departments in America in the early 20th century were obsessed with philology. And so they were reading Spencer, they were reading the Elizabethans, they were really interested in the 17th century.
The Renaissance, the Old English period, the Anglo-Saxon works, Middle English poetry. What begins to change around the mid-20th century is you have people looking at contemporary poetry seriously in the college classroom. You have an interesting emergence of a distinction between the scholar and the critic, one who is this...
storehouse of historical, philological, linguistic and literary information and the professors who critiqued poetry. And it was really the critic professors who expanded the canon, I think, in the 20th century to include the Romantics, the emerging modernist movement, which at that time was still developing, and the Victorians. And so that's something certainly that's changed.
over the four centuries, I think. I'd say half of Samuel Johnson's poets on whom he writes the lives on aren't even read anymore. But they reflect the values of the 18th century. And just as the anthologies today in Barnes & Noble and Books-A-Million here in the US reflect readers' interests today, at least in the past 50 years, what's changed?
Adam Walker (41:25.486)
It's hard to tell, PJ, I think there's certainly more interest in poetry over the past 10 years, 20 years. And I think social media has something to do with that. Much more interest in poetry, although YouTube, the literary side of YouTube is mostly novels focused, I think because it's pretty daunting to read Tolstoy on your own. And so you really do need a guide. Are all of Jane Austen's works, I think she's a little...
PJ (41:49.496)
Hmm.
Adam Walker (41:55.214)
Yeah, you would want a guide for the long novels. But poetry seems a little more accessible to a lot of folks. And there's an interest in poetry, I think, because it's so portable, the lyric poem is so short, there's so much you can do with it, you can blend it with performance, with visual art, and people are doing that. And so I think in the past five years, I'll say at least in my department,
among students there's a greater interest in poetry than there was five years ago. So that's a bit of good news actually, that's some hope I think, at least from my perspective.
PJ (42:41.304)
I did want to ask you one, thank you. That's always exciting to hear people interested in things like poetry. So let me finish with that first, you saying that. But how do truth and literature interact? How do truth and fiction interact? Of course, I always think of Oscar Wilde responding to kind of that platonic.
idea where people are like, well, you're just lying. He's like, yes, but we're such wonderful liars. I believe it's something like that for his quote. When you talk about fiction, but a very Oscar wild thing to say, but how does truth and literature interact?
Adam Walker (43:24.494)
That's a really good question. I know it's one that's really important to your podcast. It's funny when Charles II came back during the Restoration, he comes back and the monarchy is restored and Edmund Waller writes a panegyric poem celebrating his greatness. And Charles II allegedly told Waller, he said, I liked your poem you wrote.
in praise of me. He said, I also read the poem you wrote on Oliver Cromwell. And I thought that the Cromwell poem was better. And Waller says, my king, you know we poets soar highest in fiction than in reality, or in truth. And, you know, there's something kind of true to that, but it gets at the point that
Literature is the verbal representation, the verbal art of human life and experience. I think that's really different from saying something like, literature is the representation of documented truth or evidence. And you see this, you you mentioned Plato, and he's really hard on poets. think, you know, the Ion especially.
PJ (44:40.99)
yes, yes.
Adam Walker (44:46.55)
And one of the reasons why he critiques it, in the eye on it at least, is that it's three steps removed from truth in his whole scheme.
there's the ideal, then there's the actual, then there's the representation of the actual. And so it's like a bastardization of reality. And it's interesting to see the way poets respond to this because they do have to face this problem. And they all face it in different ways.
Adam Walker (45:17.76)
Sidney, Sir Philip Sidney in the Renaissance would talk a little bit about poets, the value of their imagination and not their documentation of reality, but their imagination of what should be is what actually inspires people toward wisdom and better worlds. So it's interesting, you you think of works like works of fiction, Franz Kafka, Virginia Woolf, Dostoyevsky.
They're more concerned with depicting an emotional or psychological authenticity than bare external facts or representation. And so it gets to this concept of truth where you have to say,
you kind of have to reverse the Enlightenment understanding of truth and kind of the Baconian inquiry of the world based on empirical evidence and say, yes, that's a kind of truth. But there's also the kind of truth that resonates.
with experience that can reproduce an experience or can confirm someone that they are not alone in their experience by depicting it happening to a character. And usually it's these intense, the landscape is not the physical reality but the psychological reality.
And I think that it's an interesting question about truth is, you know, what is being said that's true. Truth is being communicated, but it's from the subjective expression, which connects to other modes of expression. know, Shelley also deals with this, Percy Bish Shelley. He says that actually fiction is a direct route to truth. And so it's totally...
Adam Walker (47:22.91)
It changes, I think, and contests Plato's idea there. Now fiction's not actually a distortion of the real, but actually means of presenting a higher idealized truth, one that taps into the deeper moral and emotional truths of life. And that's really what we're interested in as human beings, how to live well. Human life is tragically brief. And
There's only so much collective wisdom out there because our lives just don't stack up on one another in such a way that we can make much headway into the inquiries of life and wisdom. And so you have to go to literature to understand that. And this goes back to the distinction between prose and poetry. think while prose conveys or can convey a very factual information, poetry, by which Sydney meant
All imaginative fiction captures, I think, the essence of truth by speaking to the heart and the imagination, inspires this deeper understanding, and it really helps us to adjust our posture in the world. It changes us in a way when we encounter it. So it's not just the reception of bare facts, it's also the possibility of being changed, which always happens in literature. And I think that's how truth really comes through there.
through that representation of experience and not the documentation of facts. You know?
PJ (48:55.916)
That's a phenomenal answer. So I hope I know. Thank you. Now you mentioned a little bit about like, just to bring it full circle, that a lot of this is about connecting that subjectivity, the subjective side connecting. And you talked about the need for community in poetry, but you also said that poetry literature has to be public facing. And maybe I'm asking this question in reverse because you kind of just answered it, but
Is that, am I on the right track there when you talk about why poetry has to be public facing?
Adam Walker (49:32.748)
Yeah, I think so. Especially the teaching of poetry and the conversations we have about poetry. I think wrongly we can get the impression that studying poetry, I hope this isn't the case for many non-academic readers, but I think it sometimes is. That's a very specialized thing. It's something professors do. It's something you learn to do in college when you have to take your English course credits.
and that it speaks to a either highfalutin and pretentious motive being, or a very specialized way of understanding the world, but it really is just human. That's the prerequisite. You must be human and you must bring your humanity to the poem or the work of literature, whatever it is you're reading. And so I think, yeah, the study of literature really should be public facing.
We really do need to foster more conversations about it and to cultivate the kinds of encounters with literature that can facilitate those changes and the encounters with truth.
PJ (50:50.648)
And I think this goes back to what you were talking about earlier. Are you familiar with the painting Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog? It's like on the front of every... Sometimes, whenever you talk about that conception of poetry, that's what I... I think there is still that popular conception of people who are like, you're standing above the clouds and the agonizing individual.
Adam Walker (51:00.371)
Casper David Friedrichs. Yes. yeah.
Adam Walker (51:17.688)
You're brooding with the hair, blowing in the wind. Yes. Yeah, the romantic. yeah. Yeah. And you know, yeah, that is kind of the stereotype that can be. And we can thank the romantics for that. wasn't until the romantic period that that was our conception of the poet, who is this wild Heathcliff, kind of wandering mountains and lonely genius. But yeah, exactly.
PJ (51:20.66)
Yes.
PJ (51:31.48)
Yeah
PJ (51:44.664)
I want to be respectful of your time. First off, thank you for coming on today. Secondly, if I could ask you one last question. Besides watching your channel, subscribing to your excellent channel, what is something you'd recommend to our audience to either do or think about this week after listening to this episode?
Adam Walker (52:05.742)
Hmm.
Adam Walker (52:09.358)
That's a really generous question. Thanks for asking that. And thanks, by the way, for having me on the channel. If I could say anything to somebody who is wanting to read literature, I would say to surrender very generously your attention to whatever is your reading and know that it has the capacity to change you most often for the better. We live in a world in which experience is bypassed
PJ (52:14.69)
Absolutely.
Adam Walker (52:38.84)
by speed, by entertainment. We don't want experience. We want the result of experience. But if you offer your experience, your time, to whatever it is you're reading, know that you are really on holy ground. There's a sacred space between the poem and the reader. And a lot of people think that...
the book or the poem actually exists on the page, but it doesn't. It actually exists when you're reading it in the mind. And it's interesting. When Moses had the encounter at the burning bush, he was asked to remove his shoes. A lot of times if you go into holy temples in the east or almost anywhere, you're asked to remove your shoes. And I don't really know why that is, but I think it symbolizes that
an unmediated encounter with the grounds of experience. You must encounter it on your own terms, as you are. surrender your attention to it, your imagination to it, and it will talk back. And in it, you'll be talking to a host of others, and you'll be seeing through other eyes and experiencing
things vicariously through the imagination which will actually yield the wisdom of the experience itself. It's quite remarkable in this way. And I hope that would be an encouragement to folks. That what you have, what you need to encounter literature is not a degree or any special classes, but just what you have. Your attention, your time, your love, and
the work will yield itself to you and you'll have something from it. And for advice, I'd say, I would encourage people to start more book clubs. think ask a friend, if you want to start a book and you're like, I'm so intimidated by poetry, find one of your nerd friends or people who read and say, let's read this together and we're going to meet for an hour over Zoom or we're going to meet at a coffee shop and talk about this. You've got a big novel.
PJ (54:54.697)
Hahaha!
Adam Walker (55:04.286)
Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Jane Austen or something, be like, let's break this up and meet and talk about it. I would love to see more of that. think that's the way literature is really meant to be experienced. And I think that it really helps. Even if it's two people or three people who don't really know much about the context or the information around it, I think the communal experience of literature is really important. And so I would encourage people to do that if they're a little intimidated. It's just such a great way to experience literature.
PJ (55:36.064)
Adam Walker, wonderful to have you on today. Thank you so much. I appreciate it. You're a joy to talk to.
Adam Walker (55:41.154)
Thanks, P.G. I really enjoyed this conversation. Thank you very much.