Performed poetry and all-round experience

The National Curriculum makes spoken poetry part of what children should know, but dramatically limits what it can do. Thinking of sound as a purely internal dimension of the poem, it ignores the way oral performance brings the context of the room, the person and the situation all into play with the meaning. Orality used to be much more important to English than it is now: Henry Newbolt put it at the centre of his 1921 English Report, arguing that sound and poetry are the primary medium in which children's loves might be formed. It is there for emotional aliveness, not cultural superiority, as Newbolt's critics have charged. But one of the missing contexts for Newbolt and for the curriculum itself is the twentieth-century change towards poets themselves reading. As Yeats, Pound, and Eliot met their audiences, they found that their poems were acquiring new meaning from the situations and places they were being read in. What we see with the oral turn is a space where aesthetic 'form', physical 'context', and social-cultural 'occasion' can briefly merge into one another, because the poem is being briefly inscribed, registered, or overlayed onto all of them. Oral delivery means the poem acquires some of the flavour of the place it is in - meaning that great care has to be taken to make classroom performance into real connection.