My Apology

Chelsea Diem

Literary Criticism

December 2, 2008

My Apology

My major is English education, and my name is Chelsea Diem. The order of words that I chose for the opening line of my apology seems to reveal exactly what I think in regards to me being an English major. When we were presented with the task of apologizing for being English majors, I have to admit that I continued to think that I was going to have to say, “I’m sorry for pursuing an English degree”. This was not something that I was prepared to do, but then I began to understand what the word apology in this situation meant.

Noun: apologia `a-pu'low-jee-u- A formal written defence of something you believe in strongly.

Now this definition illuminated exactly what it was that I had to do. I was going to have to make a stand for one of the most important aspects of my life: English! So here I am sitting at my computer with my thoughts spiraling out of control and my fingers desperately trying to keep up in order to type. I guess I’ll begin with why this assignment elated me to a great extent. While it may seem to many people that the reason one would choose to add on the education title to their English degree is so that they can actually do something that would resemble a “real” job, I can say personally for me that is not the case. I chose to be an educator of English because I want to be able to help people understand what it was about English that is undeniably crucial to our everyday lives, hence my excitement. This apology grants me the honor, or maybe more accurately the attempt to explain to whoever will listen why English is nothing short of fantastic, and on that same note I hope to be able to carry these ideas into my classroom some day. My defense seems to parallel greatly with each of the apologist that we have looked at this semester, but I have to admit that it appears as though both Percy Shelley and Sir Philip Sidney were able to convey my thoughts years before I was ever able to conjure them.

The best way that I can explain English is that it is the poetry of life. When I have the opportunity to mold the minds of various high school students in an English class, the idea that I want them to consider to be a “woo woo” idea is that English is everywhere.

In regards to that last statement I hope that to be able to convey what both Sidney and Shelley touched on, which is that no matter what field you enter, the fruit of that field stems from English. For example in the Defence of Poesie Sidney writes, “The poet with that same hand of delight doth draw the mind more effectually than any other art doth”(25). This quote really seems to hammer the nail on the head, while poetry and writing are viewed as nothing more than an act of fancy; Sidney proposes that it also stretches the mind more than any other field. Therefore other fields such as the sciences and so on benefit from the knowledge that is gained though English. Without rhetoric, writing, and literacy none of the other crucial occupations that make this world go around would be able to exist. Shelly also brings up this explanation in his work A Defence of Poetry, “Poetry is indeed something divine It is at once the center and circumference of knowledge; it is that which comprehends all science, and that to which all science must be referred” (39)

"For until they find a pleasure in the exercises of the mind, great promises of much knowledge will little persuade them that know not the fruits of knowledge."6

Poetry is indeed something divine. It is at once the center and circumference of knowledge; it is that which comprehends all science, and that to which all science must be referred. It is at the same time the root and blossom of all other systems of thought; it is that from which all spring, and that which adorns all; and that which, if blighted, denies the fruit and the seed, and withholds from the barren world the nourishment and the succession of the scions of the tree of life. It is the perfect and consummate surface and bloom of all things; it is as the odor and the color of the rose to the texture of the elements which compose it, as the form and splendor of unfaded beauty to the secrets of anatomy and corruption. What were virtue, love, patriotism, friendship—what were the scenery of this beautiful universe which we inhabit; what were our consolations on this side of the grave—and what were our aspirations beyond it, if poetry did not ascend to bring light and fire from those eternal regions where the owl-winged faculty of calculation dare not ever soar? Poetry is not like reasoning, a power to be exerted according to the determination of the will. A man cannot say, “I will compose poetry.” The greatest poet even cannot say it; for the mind in creation is as a fading coal, which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness; this power arises from within, like the color of a flower which fades and changes as it is developed, and the conscious portions of our natures are unprophetic either of its approach or its departure. Could this influence be durable in its original purity and force, it is impossible to predict the greatness of the results; but when composition begins, inspiration is already on the decline, and the most glorious poetry that has ever been communicated to the world is probably a feeble shadow of the original conceptions of the poet. I appeal to the greatest poets of the present day, whether it is not an error to assert that the finest passages of poetry are produced by labor and study. The toil and the delay recommended by critics can be justly interpreted to mean no more than a careful observation of the inspired moments, and an artificial connection of the spaces between their suggestions by the intertexture of conventional expressions; a necessity only imposed by the limitedness of the poetical faculty itself; for Milton conceived the “Paradise Lost” as a whole before he executed it in portions. We have his own authority also for the Muse having “dictated” to him the “unpremeditated song.” And let this be an answer to those who would allege the fifty-six various readings of the first line of the “Orlando Furioso.” Compositions so produced are to poetry what mosaic is to painting. This instinct and intuition of the poetical faculty are still more observable in the plastic and pictorial arts; a great statue or picture grows under the power of the artist as a child in a mother’s womb; and the very mind which directs the hands in formation is incapable of accounting to itself for the origin, the gradations, or the media of the process.