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“Had we but world enough, and time…” The opening line of Andrew Marvell’s To His Coy Mistress sums up the dilemma of the English exam regulator Ofqual, which this week decided the Covid-19 crisis means that next year GCSE English literature students will, if they wish, be able to drop poetry completely. Ofqual feels that, with no certainty of a full return to school in the autumn, it will be “extremely challenging” to teach a full syllabus. It worries that students would struggle “to get to grips with complex literary texts remotely”.
This is no doubt true, but Ofqual’s solution is perverse. Study of a Shakespeare play has been deemed sacrosanct – no doubt making Shakespeare optional would have caused a tempest. The other three time-honoured components – the 19th-century novel, post-1914 British fiction and drama, and poor old poetry – will be optional, with students having to pick two from three. Modern fiction and drama is likely to be a default choice for many, leaving a straight fight between Donne and Dickens.
Poet and teacher Kate Clanchy, recent winner of the Orwell prize for political writing for her memoir Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me, explained earlier this week why this decision risks damaging the wider cause of the humanities, because of the signal it sends about them being disposable extras. She also pointed out that Ofqual is out of step, since poetry is riding a wave of popularity among teenagers. Judith Palmer, director of the Poetry Society, highlighted the diversity of contemporary poets as another factor in the subject’s favour. And she is right that it would be a step backwards to cut it just as an increasing number of writers of colour are making it on to syllabuses – and poetry is, in defiance of some people’s expectations, holding its own against other cultural forms amid ferocious online competition.
The unresolved, open-ended nature of so much poetry, where meaning has to be extracted from intense engagement with language, is all too appropriate for our present age of uncertainty. The particular joy of reading it in groups is learning to enjoy the thrill of the chase after meaning, and to recognise that different interpretations are valid. Children’s author Michael Rosen summed it up: “Poetry offers a view on humanity, society and the world that is playful, contemplative, mysterious, questioning, and one that is often interested in giving readers the chance to hold several different ideas in our heads at the same time.”
Rather than streamlining reading lists, it might instead be time to change the way students are examined. Read Marvell because he is marvellous, not as a means to passing an exam. If the pandemic is making the current exam system unworkable, find another way of encouraging young people to study – and, better still, to love – literature. Poetry is about response, not regurgitation; the joy of intellectual inquiry; the free play of the spirit. That is what Ofqual should be protecting.
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