Poetry is one of the hardest things to teach. The task is not made easier with the knowledge that in the past students have been taught it badly. It is almost a certainty that they’ve experienced dull teachers who don’t really love poetry yet are faced with the obligation to teach it. Sometimes these teachers present it as a form of self-expression, little knowing that it is the formal limits of poetry, imposed by tradition, that themselves create the self expressed in that medium. The vapid, reductive “express yourself” approach kills the mystery of poetry and precludes any interest in it that students might develop, or at least the ones (most of them) who have better things to do. And so when I was an English teacher, even though I tried to make sure students knew the basics of poetry by the time I was done—rhyme schemes, meter, sound devices, sonnets, limericks—I always felt the need to first instill, if not a love for it, at least a sense of why other people might love it.

In the first lesson of the poetry unit, I projected and read examples of the quality I called “euphony”—meaning, not strictly the definition in M. H. Abrams’s Glossary, but rather that quality of poetry read out loud that thrills, moves us on a subconscious level. You could call it the spine-chilling principle in poetry. I gave—maybe to the bewilderment of students, but I didn’t care—examples from Latin literature, such as the end of Virgil’s first Eclogue:

et iam summa procul villarum culmina fumant
maioresque cadunt altis de montibus umbrae.

Although I translated it for them, it was the sound, independent of the sense, that I wanted to emphasize. In the same spirit, I read a few lines from Keats’s “Eve of St. Agnes”:

Unclasps her warmed jewels one by one;
Loosens her fragrant boddice; by degrees
Her rich attire creeps rustling to her knees:
Half-hidden, like a mermaid in sea-weed,
Pensive awhile she dreams awake, and sees

I assured students that nothing too unseemly is going on in this passage. Perhaps this assurance was undermined by telling of how I inadvertently leapt from my chair in delight when I first came upon those lines as an undergraduate, and proceeded to read them over and over again.

To illustrate the concept of euphony, I told students about J. R. R. Tolkien’s verdict that the phrase “cellar door” was the most beautiful utterance in the language (or something like that). Initially skeptical, students were hardened in unbelief by their attempts to pronounce this supposedly beautiful phrase with their rhotic American accents, with results that were probably not what Tolkien had in mind. (It works magnificently with the silent Oxford or the liquid Celtic “r,” but the sound of the Midwestern “r” resembles a driver slamming his brakes.) So much for that illustration. I had better luck with other words I deemed singularly musical: pensive, murmur, forlorn. No poet uses these particular words so often as Milton, from whom I took several wonderful examples of euphony, such as

And all their echoes mourn.

or

mazie error under pendant shades.

Depending on the mood of the class, I sometimes felt it was unwise to go on and on about my favorite lines of Milton. Sometimes I thought it helpful in the moment to make the point that much of the appeal of popular music is based on the same rules of euphony employed in formal poetry. In frivolous moods I even played the chorus of a Brooks and Dunn song: “How long gone are you gonna be”: by my reckoning the “cellar door” of Nineties country pop. Or I mentioned the delicious sound of the words “cartoon in a cartoon graveyard” in Paul Simon’s “You Can Call Me Al.”

However, I realized there were some problems with this approach. I think I managed through self deprecating irony to avoid the poetry-class cliche of Boomer narcissism in which the teacher patronizingly insists to the kids that the music of today (by which he really means his day—Dylan, Springsteen) is poetry as much as anything else. When mentioning popular music, the teacher has to manage to be self-consciously rather than unselfconsciously cringe. Yet there still remains the danger that students will come away without a clear idea of what distinguishes pop music from poetry. This possibility reveals the limitations of using an all-encompassing idea of “euphony” as the principle of poetry appreciation. Poetry is a union of sight, sound, and sense. At least in the world created by the typographical revolution, what poetry does to your eyes cannot be ignored. I once made this point to a very bright class by comparing Pink Floyd to Wordsworth. The song “Comfortably Numb” echoes The Prelude and the “Ode on Intimations of Immortality” in both sentiment and imagery:

When I was a child, I caught a fleeting glimpse
Out of the corner of my eye.
I turned to look, but it was gone,
I cannot put my finger on it now.
The child is grown, the dream is gone,
I have become comfortably numb.

The song expresses a powerful idea that everybody knows is true. However, the poetic element of it—whatever is thrilling, poignant, beautiful in the words themselves—is strictly aural; unlike the excerpts from Keats and Milton above, the words on the page produce no frisson of delight. (The closest the song gets is with the old phrase “fleeting glimpse.”) Contrast Waters’s with Wordsworth’s expression of the same idea:

There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth, and every common sight,
To me did seem
Apparell’d in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream.
It is not now as it has been of yore; —
Turn wheresoe’er I may,
By night or day.
The things which I have seen I now can see no more.

It is primarily the eye that senses the extent to which Waters’s lyrics are comparatively prosaic while Wordsworth presents “language at its most distilled and powerful,” to borrow Rita Dove’s definition of poetry. Although poetry should be read aloud, a great poet can play “unheard music” for the inner ear, first registered by the eye, through words carefully chiseled as if in marble onto the page. Phrases like “meadow, grove, and stream” and “apparell’d in celestial light” speak to a unity of ear and eye. However, pop music produces no pleasure on the page. (Rap lyrics are probably the most extreme instance of the disjunction between how words sound and how they look.) This is not to condemn pop music; it is simply to distinguish it from poetry.

Besides appealing to the merely aesthetic categories of sound and sight, poetry also unites them with sense. The examples I’ve given of poetic diction do not merely produce the phenomenon of euphony: they also produce a kind of insight. Perhaps they hint at a transcendent world hiding somewhere behind this mundane one. Hilaire Belloc called it the Unknown Country:

All that can best be expressed in words should be expressed in verse, but verse is a slow thing to create; nay, it is not really created: it is a secretion of the mind, it is a pearl that gathers round some irritant and slowly expresses the very essence of beauty and of desire that has lain long, potential and unexpressed, in the mind of the man who secretes it. God knows that this Unknown Country has been hit off in verse a hundred times. If I were perfectly sure of my accents I would quote two lines from the Odyssey in which the Unknown Country stands out as clear as does a sudden vision from a mountain ridge when the mist lifts after a long climb and one sees beneath one an unexpected and glorious land.

Belloc wonders that “often only one subject with its predicate and its statement and its object” can do the trick:

There is never any detail of description, but the scene rises, more vivid in colour, more exact in outline, more wonderful in influence, than anything we can see with our eyes, except perhaps those things we see in the few moments of intense emotion which come to us, we know not whence, and expand out into completion and into manhood.

Belloc gives his own examples of the spine-chilling principle in poetry, such as the anonymous lyric

And we in dreams behold the Hebrides.

as well as a number of lines from Shakespeare and Milton, Virgil and Catullus, Keats, and Schiller.

Before the bell rang on my Poetry 101 class, I always tried to recite a poem that demonstrates this principle of, well, whatever you want to call it—poetic diction, the Unknown Country, the union of ear and eye, sound, sight and sense, the spine-chilling principle.

Into my heart an air that kills
From yon far country blows:
What are those blue remembered hills,
What spires, what farms are those?

That is the land of lost content
I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again.

At least some of the time, a few students seemed like they finally got it.