�Why Do I Have to Learn ThisStuff?�: Misinformation andThe American High-School

Literature Textbook

by Kyle Stevens

IOne of the most common questions asked by

high-school students is: �Why do I have to learn thisstuff?� High-school English textbooks answer thisquestion, with regard to what is taught in Englishclass anyway, and the answer is what students havealways suspected: There is no good reason to knowmuch of what they are being taught. Englishtextbooks are full of such egregious errors that theirpublication demonstrates that one needs no morethan a superficial knowledge of their subject matter toedit or write for them. If those who are responsible forintroducing students to literary studies do not need toknow the subject, indifferent adolescents have a rightto wonder why they should bother to do theirschoolwork. Indeed, if teachers are passing on theinformation that is being provided by textbook compa-nies, students may be better off ignoring their readingassignments.

Declaring that students should ignore theirschoolwork may seem astonishing. Educators havealways faced the challenge of convincing them of theimportance of education, and meeting this challengehas become increasingly difficult, as schoolwork hasbeen obliged to compete with part-time jobs and anabundance of more pleasurable pursuits. Perhaps themost striking paradox of modern adolescent life isthat technology has made it easier for young people toindulge in fantasies that lure them away from theirstudies, while increasing the need for them to become

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educated. Employers who were content to hire high-school graduates fifty, even twenty, years ago won�teven consider hiring someone without a college degreetoday, something which may partly explain the recentpush for higher standards in education. How then canstudents be better off ignoring their schoolwork? Ifschool is about nothing more than fulfilling require-ments and getting a diploma, students should, by allmeans, learn what they are being taught. But if get-ting an education involves becoming knowledgeable inthe subjects that are taught in school, it is hard toimagine how students can become educated, at leastin an English class, and perhaps in other classes, ifthey are obliged to use one of today�s textbooks.

Part of the problem is that editors who put togeth-er textbooks don�t pay attention to what they aredoing, something which can be observed by carefullylooking at the twelfth-grade Elements of Literature�sdating of Francis Bacon�s Essays. The first place thestudent is likely to encounter a date is in the marginsof the Renaissance introduction, under a quotationfrom Bacon�s �Of Studies� (see 197), which has beenplaced next to a discussion of humanism. Thepublication date assigned to the quotation is 1625.The date is correct, even though the first version of �OfStudies� was published in 1597. We might betempted to applaud the editor for finding out that notall of Bacon�s essays were published in the firstedition of his Essays and that those that were in it,such as �Of Studies,� were revised for the 1612 and1625 editions. Someone has gone to the trouble tofind out something about Bacon. This someone is notthe editor. In the glossary of literary terms at the back

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of the book, we read that Bacon developed the essayform in England and published a collection of�extremely formal essays in 1597� (1194).

While he was responsible for developing the essayin England, Bacon published no formal essays in1597. Rather, he published a collection of prosepieces that were little more than compilations ofaphorisms arranged in paragraphs and called thebook Essays, borrowing the title from Michel deMontaigne�s book of informal essays, which wascreating a stir throughout Europe at the time. Bacon�stitle was, like many good titles, an attention grabber.What could be called his formal essays did not appearuntil later editions of his book.

Misdating the birth of the formal essay inEngland, something that Glencoe�s The Reader�sChoice: British Literature also does (see 237), mayseem like a minor error to the non-specialist and willcertainly go unnoticed by the average reader. The mis-take might even be overlooked by many of those whoare aware of Bacon�s achievement. Bacon was the firstwriter to publish essays originally written in English,and those that he published in the seventeenth cen-tury were very formal prose experiments. Students arelearning what could be called, from the perspective ofa generalist, correct information. The minor detailsaren�t really that important, are they? Why shouldhigh-school students care if the publication date ofBacon�s formal essays is 1597, 1612, or 1625? Whyshould anyone, except a specialist, care about thehistory of the essay or any other literary genre for thatmatter? The editors of Elements and The Reader�sChoice certainly don�t care. But why then are they

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making statements about the appearance of the for-mal essay in England? Do they believe the informationthey provide is nothing more than filler?

The above criticism may seem overly harsh. Icould even be accused of going out of my way to finda problem where one doesn�t exist. I am trying to sug-gest, after all, that Elements� presentation of Bacon�sliterary career contradicts itself. The book, however,never really asserts that the Essays was first pub-lished in 1625, only that the citation from �Of Studies�was. The fact that Bacon revised �Of Studies,� or anyother of his essays, does not necessarily mean that his1597 efforts were not formal essays, and few wouldcondemn an editor for not taking the time to find outwhy the date he was using in the glossary was differ-ent from the date he had used earlier in the book. Buteditors, as every want ad for an editing position tellsus, are supposed to be sticklers for detail. This editorisn�t. He had before him a text that noted that Baconpublished a book called Essays in 1597 and that herevised the prose pieces in that book for later editions,turning them into what we regard as essays. If thiswere not the case, the date next to the quotation from�Of Studies� would read 1597, the year the essay firstappeared in print. The editor read the source-text insuch a way that it must have appeared to contradictitself, yet he did not read carefully enough to figureout why.

The contradiction created by assigning two datesto the publication of Bacon�s formal essays is almostunnoticeable, but there are more obvious contradic-tions in high-school textbooks. The indifference to thehistory being reported in them is occasionally quite

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blatant. Sometimes it almost seems as if the editorswere intent on proving that any element of truth to befound within their books is there purely by accident.Both the 1996 and 1999 editions of Prentice Hall�sBritish Tradition, for example, attribute�at least atone point in their texts�the creation of the English, orShakespearean, sonnet to Shakespeare. According tothese two Prentice books, �Shakespeare changed thepattern and rhyme scheme of the Petrarchan, orItalian, sonnet, employing a form now known as theEnglish, or Shakespearean, sonnet� (198�199, 1996;202, 1999). The use of the word changed in this sen-tence requires a reader to assume that poets had onlywritten Italian sonnets before Shakespeare sat downto write his sonnet sequence. If others had writtenEnglish sonnets before he did, Shakespeare could notbe credited with changing the Italian sonnet.

A knowledgeable reader might smugly assumethat since the English sonnet is also known as theShakespearean sonnet, the Prentice editors musthave concluded that Shakespeare was responsible forchanging the Italian sonnet into the English sonnet.Such a reader would not be exactly right, even thoughthe possibility that someone made such a conclusionat some point could be responsible for the construc-tion Shakespeare changed. The Prentice editors arenot simply wrong. They demonstrate that they arewrong in both editions of their textbook that I havehad occasion to see. �William Shakespeare,� the �96edition notes, �did not invent what is now called theShakespearean sonnet (Sir Thomas Wyatt and theEarl of Surrey did)� (226). This is not completelycorrect. Wyatt did not write what are called English

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sonnets, although he was the first to write sonnets inEnglish. By 1999, the editors had realized that Wyattnever wrote an English sonnet, and they removed hisname from the above sentence. Thus the �99 edition�although it does not refrain from claiming thatShakespeare changed the Italian sonnet�doescorrectly report that Henry Howard, Earl of Surreyfirst wrote English sonnets (see 218). Shakespeare didnot change the Italian sonnet; he followed Surrey andothers, manipulating what Surrey had created togreat advantage. Hence we call English sonnets,Shakespearean sonnets.

Students will unfortunately be unable to guesswhen they should believe or disbelieve what thePrentice books tell them. A teacher may be tempted topoint them in the right direction. But what are they tomake of the value of the subject when their teacherhas to correct their books? I know what I would havethought when I was in high school�that the schoolwas wasting my time. Will a good teacher risk provok-ing students� already well-established indifference bycalling attention to the incompetence of the peoplewho work on their books? That this question needs tobe asked attests to the untenable position in whichtextbook companies have placed teachers. Teachersneed to convince a skeptical audience that the subjectthey are teaching is valuable, or their audience willstop listening and learn nothing. At the same time,they need to provide worthwhile information; other-wise they will be confirming the opinions of studentswho are skeptical about the value of what is beingtaught. But because of incompetent editors, teacherscan�t provide worthwhile information without contra-

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dicting their books, which is likely to confirm studentskepticism.

That some textbooks make mistakes in theirdiscussions of the origin of the essay and the historyof the English sonnet may convince no one that thereis a problem with the education high-school kids arereceiving. And if these were the only mistakes, or theworst among a small number of them, people couldconclude that there is nothing particularly wrong withthe quality of the materials being provided to teachersand students. The problem is that error is a normalfeature of textbooks.

The historical introductions and the critical appa-ratuses are packed full of misinformation and couldbe held up as exemplars of faulty scholarship.Prentice, for instance, claims in the Renaissanceintroduction of its 1999 edition that Henry VII �inher-ited . . . England� (198) in 1485, rather than seized thethrone from the much maligned Richard III. It is easyenough to see how a person who knew little aboutEnglish history might come to believe that Henry VIIinherited the throne. If he did not already know it, thisperson would find out in an encyclopedia or someother source that England has a hereditary monarchyand that Henry VII�s reign began in 1485. Knowingnothing else about Henry VII�s rise to power, thisperson could easily come to the conclusion that Henryinherited the throne. Such a person should not beworking on a textbook.

Other mistakes are almost inexplicable. TheElements introduction to the Restoration andeighteenth century states that �for more than twentyyears, while the Puritans held power, the theaters in

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England were closed� (476). On the same page, welearn that the theaters were closed in 1642 (476) andthat Charles II almost immediately reopened themwhen he ascended the throne in 1660. How does from1642�1660 equal �more than twenty years�? Perhapsthe phrase sounded better to an editor�s ear than thehistorically accurate �about eighteen years.� Using theconstruction more than helps to emphasize that thetheaters were closed for a long time, while using a niceround number like twenty makes the constructionseem less sloppy.1

The teacher�s edition compounds the folly byclaiming that a law introduced during OliverCromwell�s dictatorial rule prohibited the staging ofplays (T472). If the editors know that Cromwell tookpower in the 1650s�and their Renaissance timeline(see 194�195) proves they know it�how did they cometo the conclusion that Cromwell closed the theaters?It might seem fair to ask: Is any one paying attention?

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____________________ 1The staff at Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Elements� publisher,is particularly enamored of twenty-year increments. In theteacher�s edition of their Holt Literature and Language Artstwelfth-grade book, we read, �In �When I consider how my lightis spent,� Milton, some twenty years older than he was when hecomposed Paradise Lost, grieves for his lost sight and expresseshis fear that he will never use his abilities as he had hoped�(T379). The number of years separating the composition of thesonnet �When I consider how my light is spent� from the publi-cation of Paradise Lost is in actuality about fifteen years. Thefirst edition of Paradise Lost was published in 1667, while thesonnet was written sometime around 1552. The editor reversesthe order of events and asserts that Milton composed thesonnet some twenty years after he wrote the epic, in the 1680s.Even if Milton had lived until the 1680s, it is hard to imagine hewould be afraid that he would �never use his abilities as he hadhoped� twenty years after composing Paradise Lost, since hehoped to use his abilities to write an epic. Milton overcame hisfear and achieved what he hoped to achieve.

But there is a certain logic to what the editors havewritten, surprising as that may sound. The book notesearlier that the Puritans and Cromwell ruled Englandfrom 1649 to 1660. The Puritans banned plays, andtheir rule has been equated, for simplicity�s sake, withthat of Cromwell, so the editors, forgetting about theyear in which Cromwell rose to power, concluded thatCromwell closed the theaters.

What the book actually teaches or confirms�since only a knowledgeable reader is likely to seeit�is that it is inadequate to assert thatParliamentary rule didn�t begin until 1649. At thebeginning of the civil war in 1642, Parliament was incontrol of many of the most populated parts ofEngland, including London, where the theaters werelocated, while Charles I was in control of the lesspopular parts, most notably Oxford, where he set uphis base of power. �Victory for the Parliamentaryforces,� as the historian G. M. Trevelyan puts it, �wascompleted in 1646� (301). Parliament was basically incontrol of all England after the king�s forces weredefeated, although until he began a second civil warin 1648, which was quickly suppressed, Charlesremained the nominal head of the government andretained the power to negotiate with Parliament overthe role he would play in the governmental systemthat it was attempting to create. The Puritans prettymuch ruled the majority of the English people forabout eighteen years, or, as Elements would put it,�more than twenty years,� and all of England for aboutfourteen years.

The sloppy approach that editors take whileresearching and preparing their books is troublesome

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not only because students are presented with inaccu-rate information but also because it encourages themto make wrong conclusions, even when the text theyare reading is not technically inaccurate. Thisproblem is unwittingly demonstrated in a recent bookpublished by the Elements publisher, called HoltLiterature and Language Arts: Essentials of BritishAnd World Literature, which was developed specifical-ly for California. The book announces in a calloutlikeparagraph labeled �Roman Occupation, 55 B.C.�A.D.409� that �Roman conquerors arrived with JuliusCaesar and remained in Britain for more than fourhundred years� (4). Caesar invaded Britain in 55 B.C.,but after a few years, he was forced to take his armiesback to Rome. The Roman occupation didn�t actuallybegin until almost a hundred years after Caesar�sinvasion, when Claudius successfully subjugated theBritons. It thus lasted over three hundred and fiftyyears, not over four hundred years.

The sentence�which appears with some variationin both Elements and the Holt Language andLiterature book�that convinced the editor to assertthat the Romans began their occupation of Britain in55 B.C. does not actually say that the occupationbegan in that year. In the Holt book, the sentencereads: �Beginning with an invasion by Julius Caesarin 55 B.C. and culminating in one organized byEmperor Claudius about a hundred years later, theCelts were finally conquered by the legions of Rome�(8). This sentence is vague enough not to be inaccu-rate. It notes that Caesar invaded England and thatClaudius invaded it again almost a hundred yearslater. Nothing is said about what happened between

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Caesar�s and Claudius� invasions, so a reader such asthe editor who prepared the new introduction caninfer that Rome had maintained a presence in Britainbetween the two invasions.2

The Holt editors, many of whom worked on theElements program, seem to have taken a page out ofThe Glencoe program when they wrote these littlecalloutlike paragraphs. The Glencoe editors havereduced their whole historical apparatus to para-graphs that do no more than summarize a historythat they must be aware students don�t know.Presenting material in this way practically insuresthat students learn nothing, yet it also helps the edi-tors avoid making as many errors as other textbookeditors make. Providing little more than outlines intheir introductions, the Glencoe editors do notattempt to write historical narratives and candispense with the guesswork that their counterpartsin other companies use to create them. This is not tosay that Glencoe�s books are free of historical error orcontradiction. They�re not. The twelfth-grade book, forinstance, defines the Renaissance as the �rebirth ofItalian culture� (210) rather than the rebirth ofClassical culture, as if Italy lacked a culture during

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____________________2The Holt book uses the general term Celts, whereas theElements book uses the more specific term Britons, the name ofthe Celts who were living in the island now known as GreatBritain. The emendation is pointless. Changing Britons to Celtsdoesn�t really change the meaning of the sentence, so there islittle point to making the change, whereas there is much in theHolt book taken from Elements that is outright wrong that noone has bothered to correct. Many errors, I should add for thesake of fairness, were corrected.

The Middle Ages. The book also claims that Henry VIIIbroke with the Catholic Church �in 1530� (201), atleast three years before he did.

The Norton Anthology of English Literature pointsout on its timeline that Henry�s break with Rome tookplace between 1532 and 1534. By dating the eventover a span of years, Norton is taking into account thedifficulty of assigning an exact date to Henry�s sever-ing of relations with the pope, a process that occurredin stages. At the end of 1532, Anne Boylen waspregnant, and Henry privately married her in Januaryof 1533. He had made his choice. Either the CatholicChurch was going to annul his marriage to Catherineof Aragon, or he was going to be obliged to defy it. InMay, Thomas Cranmer, the reform-minded archbish-op that Henry had appointed, annulled Henry�s firstmarriage without the pope�s approval. Rome nevervalidated the annulment, and Henry soon declaredhimself the Supreme Head of the Church of England.By 1534, any hope that Henry would resubmit to theauthority of Rome had vanished. Thus StephenGreenblatt, considering the events from the perspec-tive of the Catholic martyr Thomas More, describesthe year 1534 as �the gathering darkness� (11).

On the Glencoe timeline, which runs across thebottom of the introduction�s pages, Henry�s break withRome is placed in 1534 (see 200). The editors mayhave gotten this last date from Norton or whateversource the Norton editors had used. Where they got1530 will have to remain a mystery. If I was obliged toguess and was willing to credit them with verifying thedate at all, I would say they got it from the uncorrect-ed proofs of some history of Henry�s reign.

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The type of error illustrated by Glencoe�s definite-ly stating that Henry broke with Rome in 1530 at onepoint and in 1534 at another point is not the worsttype of error in the Glencoe program, which undoubt-edly produces the most dumbed down, if not the mostinaccurate, English literature book being consideredin this essay. Because they reduce their introductionsto mere summaries, the Glencoe editors most often errnot by providing wrong information but by leaving outnecessary information. In the sentence following theone that informs students that Henry VIII split withthe Catholic Church in 1530, the Glencoe book states,�Henry�s daughter Elizabeth came to the throne in1558� (201). There is no mention of Edward VI orMary, nor of the year in which Henry died.3

Leaving such information out obliges theunlearned student to fill in the gap, and unlikely tocheck an alternative source, the student may assumethat Henry died in 1558, just as the editors of the HoltLiterature and Language book assumed that theRoman occupation of Britain began in 55 B.C.Glencoe�s presentation of the material is even likely topersuade students to extend Henry�s life into the late1550s, for the sentence that discusses Elizabeth�sbecoming queen concludes a paragraph that isconcerned with Henry VIII. The way in which the

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____________________ 3To be fair to Glencoe, the gap is filled in later, in the biographyof Queen Elizabeth that appears next to her poem �OnMonsieur�s Departure,� but to assume that students will pick upthis extra bit of information is to assume that teachers are goingto teach Elizabeth�s poem. Many students may walk out of highschool believing Elizabeth�s reign followed Henry�s. Part of doinga good editing job is organizing information well.

material is organized thus creates the impression thatElizabeth�s ascension occurred at the conclusion ofHenry�s reign.

Hardly a chapter in any of the available textbooksis completely accurate, but a sense of the extensive-ness of the problem really can�t be given by haphaz-ardly calling attention to what may seem like theworst errors in them. If we focus instead on one book,Elements of Literature, Sixth Course, we can get asense of the value of contemporary high-schooltextbooks. The mistakes in this book have most likelybeen made by the editorial staff. When the book�s firstedition came out in 1989, the material in it was quitegood, but it has gotten progressively worse in editionafter edition.

Mistakes are everywhere. Some are exaggerations;others are anachronisms. The latter type of mistakecan be seen in the introduction to The Romantic Age,where we learn that eighteenth-century unemployedpeasants collected the dole (see 628)�a welfareprogram begun in England during World War I andexpanded after World War II. There were poor laws inthe 1700s that enabled out-of-work peasants to getsome provisions for sustenance, but these laws didnot provide the kind of assistance that those on thedole receive. An example of the former type of mistakecan be found in the introduction to The Middle Ages,where public outrage after Thomas à Becket�s murderin 1170 is said to have been the cause of the corrup-tion rampant among priests in Chaucer�s day (see 85),when the problem of corrupt priests plagued all ofEurope, not just England. The corruption satirized byChaucer had many causes and to reduce them to a

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single murder in the twelfth century is ridiculous.The editors of the recently published The Holt

Reader: An Interactive WorkText, who have shortenedElements� historical introductions, have done a muchbetter job. After discussing Becket�s murder, theReader notes that �the power of the Church led to thekinds of liberties taken by several of the clergymen inThe Canterbury Tales� (27). The connection betweenBecket�s murder and these liberties has beeneliminated. Someone has seen that Elements hasexaggerated the consequences of Henry II�s turningBecket into a martyr beyond all belief and correctedthe problem.

The Elements editors have even managed to turntheir use of fine art�which is one aspect of recenttextbooks that has been almost universally praised�into a defect because they have chosen inappropriateimages and mangled the art history that accompaniesthem. An example of the use of an inappropriateimage appears next to the section of Chaucer�s�Prologue� to The Canterbury Tales that describes theYeoman (108). The Ellesmere manuscript�s illustra-tion of the Canon Yeoman adorns the page, eventhough the Yeoman and the Canon Yeoman are differ-ent characters. The mangling of art history issometimes slight. For instance, the editors misspell,in edition after edition it might be added, J.Hoefnagel�s name, rendering it �Hoofnagel� (191).Sometimes, however, the information accompanyingthe art is blatantly wrong, such as when FredericoZuccaro is credited with painting The Rainbow Portraitof Elizabeth I (c. 1600), whereas art historians,including those who set up the viewing gallery at

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Hatfield House, where the painting is located, conjec-turally attribute its composition to Isaac Oliver. TheElements editors are, by contrast, above conjectureand don�t even bother to attribute the painting toZuccaro. He, the credit boldly asserts, was the painter(see 221).

What may be the most amusing faux pas in thewhole book involves both an inappropriate image andan inappropriate historical note. In the teacher�sedition, a short biography of Dame Laura Knight hasbeen used as the background material for Fairground,Tottenham (1925) by Allan Gwynne-Jones, a paintingthat is by some warped logic regarded as an aptillustration for James Joyce�s �Araby.� A bazaar,which the main character in �Araby� visits, is not afairground, nor ought Tottenham, which is inEngland, be mistaken for Dublin, the setting ofJoyce�s story. Ireland, as the Irish have beenstruggling to point out for centuries, is not England(see T989).4

The art history errors could be considered themost inconsequential, since students will be studyingliterature, not art, but the Elements editors have madea point of incorporating the artwork into the programthat they have developed. They provide lessons in theteacher�s edition called Responding to the Art, whichteachers are supposed to use to help students learnabout the different historical periods and the litera-

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_________________4Earlier editions of Elements have a painting of afairground by Knight accompanying Joyce�s story. Thepainting was changed, but no one saw the need to changethe biography.

ture that they are studying, as well as the art. DameLaura Knight�s biography is meant to help teachersinform students about the age in which Joyce wrote.The program is an integrated one, and every one of itselements has been developed to contribute to the stu-dents� understanding of the subject being taught. Ifthe book is used in the way the editors have developedit to be used, the art should be an integral part of thestudents� educational experience, not something to begazed at during dull moments of class.

Using the Responding to the Art feature, however,is to risk confusing, as well as misinforming, stu-dents. Take the text written to help teachers discussChristopher R. W. Nevinson�s The Arrival (c. 1913),which Elements erroneously claims was painted in1923 and 1924 (see 909). The commentary providedfor the teacher labels this painting a Vorticist workand goes on to say that �Vorticism was an Englishanswer to Futurism� (T909). This aside on therelationship between Vorticism and Futurism, whichwas primarily an Italian movement, is essentiallycorrect, although the text does err, as we will see,because it slides over the complexity of the relation-ship between English artists, Futurism, andVorticism. But the most striking problem with the textis that telling students about Futurism and Vorticismis pointless because Futurism is left undefined andthe commentary on Vorticism, found on the previouspage, is too general to be useful to anyone whodoesn�t already know quite a bit about it. In otherwords, only someone who had studied the two move-ments will be able to understand the import of their

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being mentioned.While the information on Futurism and Vorticism

is not inaccurate, everything written about Nevinson�spainting is, and the inaccuracies lead the reader intosuch a labyrinth that one would be tempted to treatthe whole thing as a farce, if it weren�t for the contextin which it appears. The Arrival is actually a Futuristpainting, something that demonstrates the pointless-ness of mentioning either Futurism or Vorticism. Ifthe editor can�t properly categorize the painting, whatis the point of telling students that it belongs to oneschool of art as opposed to another? But categorizingNevinson as a Vorticist is not simply irresponsiblebecause he is a Futurist; it is irresponsible becauseVorticism was a reaction to Nevinson�s importation ofFuturism into England. �In June 1914,� according tothe display caption accompanying The Arrival in theTate Gallery, �the �Observer� published �Vital EnglishArt: A Futurist Manifesto,� which was co-produced byNevinson and the Italian Futurist leader, the poetFilippo Marinetti. This attempt to lead the Londonavant-garde prompted Wyndham Lewis to launchVorticism [a term coined by the American poet EzraPound] with the publication of the magazine �Blast.� �

The Arrival was actually painted prior to Lewisand Pound�s launching of Vorticism. The Elementseditors can�t know this, since they misdate thepainting, but if the painting had been painted in 1923and 1924, it still couldn�t be a Vorticist work, since�[t]he movement,� as the Oxford Dictionary of Artobserves, �did not survive the First World War.�Nevinson�s commitment to avant-garde art, for that

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matter, was tempered by the war, as his warpaintings, one of which appears on page 930 ofElements, demonstrate.5

The number of mistakes caused by a few carelessstrokes of a keyboard is astounding. By labeling theFuturist Nevinson a Vorticist, the editors align him toa group of artists who were reacting to his work andwould have suggested, if they had correctly dated hispainting, that Vorticism had been launched at least ayear earlier than it was. By misdating the painting,they not only extend the life of the Vorticist movementby at least five years but also extend Nevinson�s out-and-out commitment to avant-garde art by at leasteight years.

Other farces appear in the book, but to get a realsense of how errors affect the presentation of thematerial being taught, we should turn to a particularsection. I therefore want to examine Elements� intro-duction to the Renaissance. This introduction seems

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____________________5To present this phase of Nevinson�s career, Elements indulgesin the felt need to represent Nevinson�s art as controversial andclaims that his war paintings, �while stylistically conservative,run counter to the dominant patriotic sensibility of the day�(T930). England�s patriotic sensibility had deteriorated as WWIproceeded, and the anti-patriotic feelings that Nevinson devel-oped had become a dominant element of England�s wartimesensibility, as Wilfred Owen�s and Siegfried Sassoon�s poems,some of which appear in Elements, reveal. No doubt patrioticfeelings continued to fill the hearts of many Englishmen, butsuch feelings would have been regarded as passé by those whohad seen the carnage of European battlefields or the battles� vic-tims, many of whom arrived home crippled. The war destroyedthe patriotic sensibility that had brought droves of young mento recruiting offices in 1914.

particularly bad. A mistake may not exist on everypage, but there are more mistakes than it has pages.Consequently, almost every historical figure orepisode that is introduced is discussed inaccurately.To focus on this introduction may thus seem unfair,but it is characteristic.

The examination of the lives of DesideriusErasmus and Thomas More is particularly revealing ofthe kind of ignorance that a book publisher will acceptfrom its employees. After briefly reviewing his life andinterests, the text notes that Erasmus was friendswith More and points out that the two friends �hadmuch in common� (199). This is true enough, buthaving stumbled upon the fact that Erasmus andMore had much in common, the text proceeds toexplain what they had in common, and error, egre-gious as well as obvious, raises its ugly head. Todetermine the commonalities between these twothinkers, the person working on the text must havedecided that what was true of Erasmus must alsohave been true of More. Both thinkers, the personthus concludes, must have been �dedicated church-men� (199). Erasmus was a churchman: He was amonk. More, by contrast, was a lawyer who becameLord Chancellor of England, something mentioned inthe text. He was, in other words, a layman, not achurchman, despite his refusing to acknowledge thatHenry VIII was Supreme Head of the Church ofEngland and losing his head for his intransigence.

A churchman, as Catholics understand the term,is one who has taken religious vows and become amember of the clergy, as More considered doing beforehe settled into his career as a lawyer. The word

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churchman, it is true, began to mean a member of aChurch in the late seventeenth century, but when it isused in this sense, the word is only applied to themembers of Anglican state churches throughout theworld, that is, The Church of England, The Church ofIreland, and so on (OED). Neither Erasmus nor Morewere churchman in this sense, both being Catholics,and anyone in possession of a decent dictionary couldhave found that out.

Details such as those included with the accountsof Erasmus� and More�s lives, whether they have beenintroduced to demonstrate the truth of a general claimor used to add substance to the narrative, are consis-tently inaccurate. The editors seem to have relied ontheir vague memories of college lectures, unauthorita-tive sources, and carelessly read background materi-al to fashion their account of the sixteenth century.That such is the case becomes particularly obviouswhen the editors call Catharine of Aragon�s nephew,Charles V, �the emperor of Spain� (202), instead of theHoly Roman Emperor, while they are discussing thepressure Charles put on the pope not to give HenryVIII a divorce in the 1520s and early 1530s. They arereferring to the right person but giving him the wrongtitle. Charles was the king of Spain, and if he had hadpower only over Spain and its foreign possessions, hisinfluence with the pope might not have been anygreater than Henry�s. But his position as Holy RomanEmperor gave him quite a bit of influence in Rome,and he used it to defend his aunt�s marital rights. Thetext should be discussing the Holy Roman Emperor.

I am perhaps nitpicking. Whether we call Charlesthe Holy Roman Emperor, the king of Spain, or the

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emperor of Spain, he is the same person. Calling himthe emperor of Spain, however, is misleading, sincethat was not his official title. The editors of The HoltReader recognized the problem, and they refer toCharles as �the king of Spain and the Holy RomanEmperor� (55), probably in an attempt to correct thetext they were following, without calling too muchattention to its mistake, since the title �the king ofSpain� only seems to be introduced because leaving itout would have left the reference to Spain in theprincipal textbook unexplained.

More often than not the errors created by sloppyresearch are more significant in that their presencenot only leads the editors to misrepresent a particularelement of the history being reported but encouragesthem to make other mistakes. The text, for example,claims that most of the English agreed with HenryVIII�s decision to split with the Roman Church (202).The evidence for this account of the reception of theReformation in England is probably the lack of anysuccessful or well-remembered resistance to thereforms that were instituted in the 1530s and beyond,but there was dissent. In 1536, 40,000 religiousconservatives protested the activities of ThomasCromwell, the architect of the most radical changes inthe English church at the time, in a rebellion knownas the Pilgrimage of Grace. There were also a numberof local revolts throughout England that year, whichprevented the king�s commissioners from carrying outtheir orders when they arrived at parishes to imposereform. Private dissent, even among those unwilling tojoin in any sort of rebellion, was also quite common.As Christopher Haigh demonstrates in English

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Reformations, there was �popular hatred of the �newlearning� � (137), that is, Protestant theology, amongthe common people and �general hostility amongnobles to the divorce and the break with Rome� (139).

If there were so many people opposed to reform,why, one might be tempted to ask, does the HenricianReformation seem to have proceeded so smoothly?One reason is that those who were in a position tostop reform quietly allowed Henry to become the Headof the Church to avoid the need to lay their heads onthe executioner�s block, as More was obliged to do in1535. The right circumstances for a rebellion alsonever presented themselves, partly because thenobles distrusted each other and were afraid to jointogether and stage a revolt that might have forcedHenry to act in accordance with their wishes. Aconspirator could gain advancement in Henry�s court,after all, by betraying his fellow conspirators. Fear ofHenry and Cromwell among the nobles, not England�sdesire for reform, allowed the Reformation to proceedin England.

Yet Henry tried to appease those who wereuncomfortable with reform (among whom he ranked),and as late as 1535, �it was not inevitable�it was noteven likely�that the break with Rome would be fol-lowed by changes in religious belief and practice�(Haigh, 123). Things had changed by 1536. Politicalconsiderations�the need to forge alliances withLutherans in Germany�obliged Henry to introducemore extreme elements of Protestantism into hisChurch. But people�s ingrained beliefs often didn�tchange. Thus the more radical reforms instituted inEdward VI�s time were, as Haigh puts it, �forced upon

27

hostile parishes� (181). Most of the people didn�t wantProtestantism, although like More and Erasmus, bothof whom criticized Church corruption earlier in thesixteenth century, they would probably have approvedof an end to Church abuses.

Ignoring the rebellion, the local revolts, and otherresistances to reform, Elements condemns ourstudents to imagining an England that acceptedreligious change with open arms. If we were living insixteenth- or seventeenth-century England, whenconcerns over a papist invasion were still real, thisversion of history might be justifiable for its propagan-da value. The truth, as any politician worth his saltknows, isn�t always very useful. The idea that Englandwelcomed Protestantism is, in fact, part of a mythpropagated to promote the eternal character ofEngland�s national identity and demonize Catholicinvolvement in English politics. But the myth hasbeen debunked, and recounting it in present-dayAmerica is just pointless. Of course, Elements shouldnot be singled out: The myth is being treated as his-torical truth in all high-school textbooks. EvenMcDougal�s The Language of Literature: BritishTradition, probably the most carefully developedtextbook available on the market today, asserts that�Protestant ideas brought popular support for Henry�sactions� (278).

Students may not need to know what earlysixteenth-century English people felt about theirReformation king to understand the Renaissanceliterature they are reading. None of the literary textsin any of the books explicitly deals with the Englishpeople�s reaction to Henry�s becoming the head of the

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English church or the events that led him to breakwith Rome. Indeed, the only piece of literature in anyof the books that even implicitly deals with theseevents is Thomas Wyatt�s �Whoso List to Hunt,�which is traditionally said to be about a love triangleinvolving Wyatt, Henry VIII, and Anne Boleyn. Wyatt,the story goes, had to abandon his courtship of Annewhen Henry turned his attentions toward her. But ifa textbook is going to tell students about the recep-tion of the Reformation in England, its editors orwriters should at least research what happenedbefore they begin relating that history.

The Elements editors do not want to completelyignore the diversity of religious opinion in ReformationEngland, and having ignored the Catholics, with theexception of More, they go on to mention Protestantdissidents, and here is where their misrepresentationof religious opinion in the 1530s seriously affects theirpresentation of the history they are telling. Startingwith an unfounded belief that the majority of theEnglish were reform minded and desiring to presentthe diversity of Protestant opinion without discussingthe development of the English Reformation beyondHenry VIII�s reign, the editors proceed to collapseyears of English history into a single decade. Theythus inform their readers that dissidents who wereunhappy with the limited nature of Henry�s reformswere �known as Puritans, Baptists, Presbyterians,Dissenters, and Nonconformists� (203). No one wasknown by any of these names in Henry VIII�s England.

The word Puritan first shows up in print in adocument from the 1560s that refers to a group fromthe 1550s, the decade the word was probably first

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used to designate a group of dissidents; Baptist,derived from Anabaptist, a word that was used inHenry�s time to refer to a mainly German and Dutchreligious group, dates from the 1580s; Presbyterianappeared, according to the OED, in the late sixteenthand early seventeenth century, while Dissenteremerged in the 1630s, although this term, like theterm Nonconformist, wasn�t really applied to groups ofdissidents until after 1660, during the Restorationand beyond. The editors have no idea what formreligious dissent took in Henry�s time; they have justnamed every sixteenth- and seventeenth-centurydissident religious group that they could rememberand placed them in the 1530s.

The practice of condensing years of history into afew sentences�which is one of the practices thatleads the editors to mangle their discussion of EnglishProtestantism in the 1530s�has probably beenemployed to reduce the length of the book, but it hasother consequences. As the account of Henry�s reignproceeds, it becomes clear that the practice helps toguarantee that the history being related is inaccurate.Discussing the fate of Henry�s first wife and hisseizure of Church property, Elements notes that�[w]ith Catherine packed away under housearrest�since she refused to accept the annulment ofher marriage�Henry closed all of England�s monas-teries and sold the rich buildings and lands to hissubjects� (202). Catherine was placed under housearrest, and Henry did eventually close the monaster-ies and sell their property. The problem is thatCatherine died in 1536, the year that the dissolutionof the monasteries began, and many of the monaster-

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ies that were marked for destruction in that year paidfor, and were granted, a reprieve.

The period of Catherine�s house arrest does notcorrespond to the period in which the monasterieswere closed, as Elements implies, although Catherinemay have lived long enough to hear about some of theclosures. Judging from the other textbooks, whichprovide almost the same information without implyingthat Catherine�s years of confinement coincided withthe years in which the monasteries were closed,Elements simply wants to inform students about thefate of Catherine and the monasteries. The allusion tothe time period in which they met their fate seems tobe an attempt to outdo the competitors. No one,unfortunately, verified the accuracy of the statementthat was meant to achieve this feat. The result is thatthe competitors� discussions of what events occurred,without any reference to when they exactly occurred,remain superior, if only because they are not techni-cally inaccurate.

Elements� discussions of the reigns of almostevery Renaissance monarch are as skewed as itsdiscussion of the reign of Henry VIII in that theycontain either dated misconception or factual error.Henry VII is said to have seized the throne �afterEngland was exhausted by the long bloody strugglecalled the Wars of the Roses� (203), a struggle whichscholars have realized for some time chiefly involvedthe aristocracy, not the average person. As PeterSaccio puts it, �Risings of the commons were excep-tional. Despite the occasional outrages and disorders,peasants mostly tilled their fields and merchantsmostly tended to trade� (154). This is not to say that

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the wars were not bloody. Geoffrey Hill, a poet andscholar of almost inscrutable meticulousness,remarks in his �Funeral Music: An Essay�:

It is now customary to play down the violenceof the Wars of the Roses and to present themas dynastic skirmishes fatal, perhaps, to theold aristocracy but generally of small concernto the common people and without mucheffect on the economic routines of the king-dom. Statistically, this may be arguable;imaginatively the Battle of Towton [the battleHill had in mind while writing his sonnetsequence �Funeral Music�] itself commandsone�s belated witness. In the accounts of thecontemporary chroniclers it was a holocaust.�(68)

Such accounts of fifteenth-century battles, coupledwith Tudor propaganda, helped to establish the mythof an England exhausted by the Wars of the Roses,but it no longer deserves a place in a text purportingto be historically accurate. England, in general terms,was exhausted by nothing, as even Hill acknowledges.

Queen Mary is said to have made a strategic errorwhen she �burned about three hundred of hersubjects at the stake� (204�5). Burning heretics was acommon practice, indulged in by Catholic andProtestant authorities alike. More, who is praisedearlier in the introduction for his humanistic valuesand faithfulness, was personally involved in sendingheretics to the stake prior to his own difficulties withthe state approved Church. In the 1530s, Henry VIIIalso involved himself in the trials of heretics. Mary�sreal strategic error was to die, as Haigh points out (see

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especially 235�39). History has often been unkind tothis Catholic monarch, but only because she died andher successor, Elizabeth I, reestablished a Protestantstate church.

If Elizabeth and the monarchs who followed herhad been Catholic, Mary would very likely have beenremembered as a hero, the restorer of the true faith toEngland. As things turned out, Mary�s death led to astrengthening of Protestantism, not because Maryburned heretics, although this fact was rememberedin the ensuing propaganda war�in books such asJohn Fox�s Acts and Monuments (1563), or The Bookof Martyrs as it is more commonly known�butbecause many staunch Protestants had fled toGermany during Mary�s reign. In Germany, theseexiles met with and adopted religious views that wereconsiderably more radical than those current inEngland. When they returned home after Mary�sdemise, they and those who followed them becameknown as the Puritans and, eventually, all those othergroups which Elements claims were causing trouble inthe 1530s. The intellectual, and perhaps biological,descendents of these returned exiles would fill theranks of the New Model Army in the 1640s.

After relating a version of events that privilegesthe perspective of sixteenth-century Protestant propa-gandists, the editors go on to inform us that the pope�promptly excommunicated� (205) Elizabeth forrestoring Protestantism to the English Church. Therewas nothing prompt about her excommunication,although the movie Elizabeth (1998) makes it seemprompt. Elizabeth was excommunicated in 1570,some twelve years after she ascended the throne, by

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Pius V, who didn�t become pope until 1565. Later, thetext, attempting to illustrate the bloody tendencies ofher personality, calls Elizabeth �a true daughter of herfather, [who] sent her Scottish cousin [Mary Stuart] tothe chopping block� (208). Using the execution ofMary Stuart to illustrate Elizabeth�s bloody nature isat best disingenuous.

Elizabeth did eventually have Mary executed, butshe never wanted to do so. She actually protectedMary for years by refusing to allow her to be put ontrial for treason, even though evidence existed thatproved she had plotted to usurp the English throne.In 1586, Elizabeth could no longer put off a trial, andwhen Mary was pronounced guilty, the members ofParliament unanimously called for her execution.Elizabeth had expected them to do so and had�postponed their meeting [for as long as possible] . . .anxious to put off their demands for the Queen ofScots�s death� (Hibbert, 212). Even after Mary�s headhad been removed, Elizabeth tried to distance herselffrom the event and, shortly after hearing of the execu-tion, is said to have �burst into tears, protesting thatshe had given no orders for [it] to take place and thatthose responsible must be punished� (Hibbert, 215).Elizabeth had given the order, but she wanted torewrite history. She was not stupid, and seeing thedanger of setting a precedent for having an anointedmonarch executed, she wanted Mary�s execution to bepronounced unlawful in a court. She was never ableto do so.

The only English monarch not inaccurately repre-sented in Elements� Renaissance introduction isCharles I, who is discussed for a total of four lines.

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James I, we are correctly informed, was not as good apolitician as Elizabeth. He believed that his subjectshad a duty to accommodate themselves to him,although in practice he was often forced to accommo-date himself to Parliament. Despite begrudginglygiving in to Parliament on many occasions, Jamestried his best to get his subjects to follow his lead andoften found himself in conflict with them.

The Elements editors are not satisfied with theidea of a king who, at least in theory, was indifferentto what his subjects thought of his policies. We live indemocratic times, so it is hard for us to imagine aruler indifferent to public opinion. Elements doesn�teven make the effort and asserts that James �triedhard� (210) to please the English public. Part of theevidence used to substantiate this assertion is that hewrote two books on divine monarchy�a belief whichcaused him many difficulties�and one denouncingtobacco. The latter book was unlikely to find favoramong the English. Although James hated it, tobaccowas popular among the people, as a note in theteacher�s edition points out. Citing Charles B. Heiser,Jr., this note remarks that �almost everyone whocould afford to took up smoking,� and it goes on to saythat the king�s �hatred for Raleigh, who was an enthu-siastic advocate of tobacco, has been suggested as areason� (T210) for his denouncing what Spenserfamously called �divine tobacco� (The Faerie Queene,bk. 3 c. 5. st. 32).

Representing his treatises on divine monarchy asbooks James wrote to win favor among the English isalso problematic. Even if his belief in the doctrine ofdivine kingship hadn�t placed him in conflict with his

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subjects, James could hardly be said to have writtenthe treatises to please them. Both of them werepublished in 1598, five years before he became king ofEngland, and one of them, the Basilicon Doron, writ-ten in what the Cambridge editor calls �Middle Scots�(268n.1) and hence hard for an English reader todecipher, was composed during an illness from whichJames thought he might die and was addressed to hisson Henry, not his subjects. The book was initiallywritten for a son whom James thought was about tobecome a child king, just as James had been. Hewanted to leave his son the advice he had failed toreceive. When James finally did become king ofEngland, the book was published in an Englishtranslation from 1599 that had circulated amongthose who supported his right to become the nextEnglish monarch, and sales were brisk. The Englishwanted to find out about their new king.

The discussion of the interregnum isn�t any betterthan the discussions of the monarchs and theirreigns, even though, like the discussion of Charles I,it is quite short. The shortness is, in fact, the problem.What proved a virtue in the account of Charles� reignproves a weakness in the account of the interregnum.The text attempts to explain the complicated periodbetween 1642 and 1660 in a sentence or two, so thereis little space to do much more than tell students that�England was ruled by Parliament and the Puritandictator, Oliver Cromwell� (211) until 1660. Cromwell,however, died in 1658, as the timeline at the begin-ning of the chapter points out, and was replaced byhis son, Richard Cromwell, whose incompetenceprompted the English to ask Charles II to return to

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England. Introducing Richard Cromwell, the editorsmay think�if they are aware of his existence atall�will make the history they are telling too compli-cated. If this is what they think, they have a lot lessrespect for their audience, teachers and studentsalike, than those who prepared McDougal�s TheLanguage of Literature. This book not only introducesstudents to Richard Cromwell but also discusses howhis incompetence led to his downfall and the restora-tion of the monarchy (see 281).

Lack of respect is precisely the issue here. Editorsseem to believe that teachers won�t notice if somethingis wrong and students won�t bother to learn anythingthey are being taught. No knowledgeable reader seemsto have looked at the books in years, and the editorsare almost certain that none will. When the newsbothers to report on inaccuracies in textbooks, itusually limits itself to exposing the faults of sciencebooks. The humanities, the consensus in this nationseems to be, is a second rate field of study. Publishersof humanities books have been given a free ride. Putout a book of about a thousand pages, and schooldistricts will buy it, regardless of its quality. They real-ly have no choice, if they want to use a textbook.

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IIAlthough I have made reference to textbook

versions of literary and art history in the precedingpages, I have, for the most part, focused on errors ofpolitical history, a field of study that some mayconsider secondary, the background provided to addflavor to the real object of study: literary texts. Somemight even feel that people who were most likelyEnglish majors in college should be forgiven theirignorance of history, even though they are being paidto provide educational material. Most present-dayliterary critics could not be counted among suchpeople. History, perhaps more than ever, has becomean essential part of literary studies.

Understanding the context in which a literarywork is produced is, in the minds of most literarycritics, of the utmost importance. Many state educa-tional standards even acknowledge the importance ofhistory to literary studies by requiring students to beable to situate texts within their historical context.Students� only hope of proving they have met this par-ticular standard is that the evaluators of standardizedexams are as ignorant of history as the people editingthe books being studied. But if we act for a momentas if political and social history were just backgroundand focus on the textbooks� discussions of literarymatters, we will see that the people preparingtextbooks aren�t well informed about either literaryhistory or literary form.

We have already seen what some editors have

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managed to make of the history of the essay and thesonnet. The Elements editors are equally unaware of,or indifferent to, other features of literary history,such as the history of the use of blank verse inpoetry. According to the prefatory essay on ParadiseLost (1667, 1674), �blank verse was the usual meter indramatic poetry, [but] it was not used at all fornondramatic poems in Milton�s day and for long after�(emphasis added, 438). Most of this statement is, invery general terms, true enough. However, the sugges-tion that Milton was alone in using blank verse innondramatic poetry during the English Renaissance�which is what we must assume is meant by Milton�sday, since it was fashionable to use prose and heroiccouplets in plays after 1660, when Milton wroteParadise Lost�is quite problematic.

Blank verse was actually used in nondramaticpoetry before it was used in dramatic poetry. Surreyemployed it, for the first time in English, in his trans-lation of the second and fourth books of Virgil�sAenied in the 1540s, and the meter was soon beingused in other poems: Nicholas Grimald�s �The Deathof Zoroas� and �Marcus Tullius Ciceroes Death� (bothpublished in 1557), George Gascoigne�s The SteelGlass (1576), Christopher Marlowe�s translation ofLucan�s Pharsalia, Book I (c. 1590), and GeorgeChapman�s �De Guiana� (1596) are all written inblank verse, although Chapman�s verse paragraphsend in couplets. All these poems, it is true, werewritten prior to Milton�s birth, but they do evince thatblank verse was not entirely a dramatic meter. Whatis more troublesome about Elements� statement onthe use of blank verse is that after Milton, nondramat-

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ic poets continued to write in it: �In the times ofDryden and Pope,� the Princeton Encyclopedia ofPoetry and Poetics observes, �blank verse waspracticed by minor imitators of Milton� (79) and bypoets such as John Cowper later in the eighteenthcentury.

Milton�s choosing to use blank verse may havebeen a conscious decision on his part to differentiateParadise Lost from poems written in the more fashion-able meters of his age. His choice may even add towhat Harold Bloom regards as the dramatic characterof the poem�which is the inference Elements wantsus to make�since it was in plays that blank verse wasmost often used. But Milton�s choice was not original,and if its oddness is to be remarked upon, theprecedents for it should at least be acknowledged,even if the majority of them are too obscure to namein a high-school textbook. The editors easily couldhave made such an acknowledgement by writingrarely used instead of was not used at all. Theycouldn�t have been positive that the information theywere providing was accurate, so the safest thing to dowould have been to avoid making any absolutestatements. If the editors wanted to establish Milton�sstatus as a great innovator, they could have pointedout that Milton helped to transform blank verse intothe meter of the English epic, for although many ofthe epics written in the Restoration and eighteenthcentury were written in heroic couplets, most Englishepics, especially since the Romantic Age, have beenwritten in blank verse.

A more obvious error can be found in the essay onthe Elizabethan theater. Elements, imitating the folly

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of every textbook on the market, asserts that �In1576, James Burbage . . . built the first public theaterand called it, appropriately, The Theater� (284). ButThe Theatre was not the first theater to appear inEngland. In 1567, nine years before Burbage built aplayhouse, his brother-in-law, John Brayne, �wenteast of Aldgate to Stepney,� as Steven Mullaneywrites, �where he erected a theatre called the RedLion. It was the first permanent building expresslydesigned for dramatic performances to be constructedin Europe since late antiquity.� The Theatre hasprobably been called the first theater because it iswhere Shakespeare began his theatrical career and isthus the most famous of the theaters that speckledthe landscape of London�s suburbs in the latter half ofthe sixteenth century. Many a site on the Internet alsoannounces that it was the first theater to appear inEngland. We may not be able to expect scholarly rigoron the Internet, where anyone with the money, themodem, and the time has the freedom to post misin-formation without consequence, but we should beable to expect it in textbooks.

Elements� discussion of the sonnet form is evenmore troubling than its pronouncements about blankverse and the Elizabethan theater, for the informationabout the sonnet is provided to help students writetheir papers. The book discusses the two mostcommon types of sonnet, the Italian, or Petrarchan,sonnet and the English, or Shakespearean, sonnet.The Italian sonnet has two parts, an octave and a ses-tet. The rhyme scheme of the octave follows this pat-tern: abbaabba. English sonneteers, however, tookliberties with this scheme, so a poet like Phillip Sidney

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would occasionally use an abababab rhyme scheme.The rhyme scheme of the sextet varies, but the mostcommon schemes are cdecde or cdcdcd, althoughEnglish sonneteers often wrote sextets that rhymedcdcdee or cddcee. These last variations may havesuggested the form for the English sonnet, whichrhymes ababcdcdefefgg, or has three quatrains and acouplet. The two rhyme schemes often produce thestructure of the sonnet�s argument. In the Italiansonnet, a problem is established in the octave andresolved in the sextet, whereas in the English sonnet,a problem is posed in the three quatrains, with eachquatrain dealing with a separate, though related,aspect of this problem, and is resolved in the couplet.The movement from problem to resolution is calledthe volta or turn.

The above description of the most common typesof sonnets is paradigmatic, not prescriptive, and weshould not expect every sonnet to follow either ofthese paradigms exactly. Experienced sonneteers willplay with the expectations created by the paradigmsto produce meaning. But in order to be able to see apoet�s manipulation of the form, students will need tolearn the paradigms. The editors of Elements don�tunderstand this feature of the education process andtake as paradigmatic a Shakespearean sonnet,Sonnet 18, in which Shakespeare conflates the Italianform and the English form by using the English form�srhyme scheme and the Italian form�s argument-struc-ture. The maneuver is common in Shakespeare.�Many of Shakespeare�s sonnets,� Helen Vendlerwrites, �preserve (except for rhyme) the two-partstructure of the Italian sonnet . . . [and b]ecause the

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ghost of the Italian sonnet can be said to underlie allthe sonnets in the sequence, a �shadow sonnet� oftencan be intuited behind the sonnet we are reading�(50). Unaware of this quality of Shakespeare�ssonnets, the Elements editors claim that the Englishform�s rhyme scheme is divided into three quatrainsand a couplet, while its argument is divided into anoctave and a sextet, with the final couplet often being�a second turn of great impact� (224). TheShakespearean experiment is introduced as theparadigm, and students are obliged to treat the exper-imental nature of Shakespeare�s use of form ascommonplace. The editors should know better, sincea note in the teacher�s edition refers the teacher toVendler�s book (T225), where the information aboutthe structure of the argument in Sonnet 18 wasprobably found.

Things get even worse in the Handbook of LiteraryTerms at the back of the book; in it, one of the mostbasic literary terms is inaccurately defined. The entrythat defines figures of speech notes that over 250 fig-ures of speech have been identified and that all ofthem �are based on comparison� (1194). Not only isthis untrue, but it is also not true of the figures ofspeech to which students are likely to be introduced.Students, the book advises, should also see the defi-nitions of a number of other terms in the Handbook,including metonymy. If students suddenly becomecurious, unlikely as that may sound, or a teacherasks them to learn the definitions of these otherterms, they will find a correct definition of metonymy,a figure of speech based on association. There are, aseven the Elements editors are competent enough to

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realize when they define metonymy, figures of speechthat are not based on comparison.

A number of other dubious statements regardingliterary form can be found sprinkled throughout thebook. One such case can be found in the essay on theballad, where Elements proclaims that �[b]allads comefrom an oral tradition so there are no strict rules� (96).Two mistakes are present in this deceptively simplestatement. It is just wrong to assume that poetry sungand passed on in an oral tradition must be less formalthan poetry created in the context of a written tradi-tion, as if the absence of writing meant that formalexpectations didn�t exist and that oral poets wereunlearned as well as illiterate. There are both formaland narrative rules to genres that originate in oraltraditions. The Greek oral epics, for instance, arecomposed in dactylic hexameter, lines of six dactyls,poetic feet that contain one stressed syllable followedby two unstressed syllables.

The other mistake specifically concerns the text�srepresentation of the ballad. This poetic form also hasits rules. Most ballads employ �quatrains in alternat-ing four- and three-stress iambic lines� (Abrams,Glossary, 12) and in which only the second and fourthlines rhyme. These stanzas are even known as balladstanzas. Ballads exist with stanzas that do notconform to these specific formal constraints: They usedifferent types of stanzas, which have different formalconstraints. A number of other features, adequatelyexplained in Elements, are also common to ballads,and a poem lacking a significant number of these fea-tures is not a ballad. The rules for composing balladsmay not be as strict as those for composing sonnets,

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but the rules are stricter than the rules for carryingon conversations.

Elements� marginal commentaries are also quiteunreliable. John Donne�s love poems, the bookobserves, are collectively known as Songs and Sonnets(1535), the title given to the second edition of hispoems; this title, the passage continues, �is mislead-ing� because, for among other reasons, not one of thepoems �is a sonnet by formal definition� (245). Onereligious sonnet does appear in the collection calledSongs and Sonnets, but even if this were not the case,the note in the textbook would only be correct ifsonnets had been defined solely in formal terms in theearly seventeenth century, when Donne�s love poemswere collected and published. The problem is that �inDonne�s time, the term sonnet often meant simply�love lyric� � (Norton, vol. 1, 236).6 The title would not

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_________________6The following poem by Richard Lovelace is thus ironicallycalled �Sonnet� in the first edition of Lucasta (1649):

IWhen I by thy fair shape did swear,And mingled with each vow a tearI lov�d, lov�d thee best,I swore as I professed;For all the while you lasted warm and pure,My oaths too did endure;But once turn�d faithless to thyself, and oldThey then with thee incessantly grew cold.

III swore myself thy sacrificeBy th�ebon bows that guard thine eyesWhich now are alter�d white,And by the glorious lightOf both those stars, of which their spheres bereftOnly the jelly�s left:

therefore have misled the audience for whom thepoems were published. Someone seems to havenoticed the error while the Holt Literature andLanguage Arts book was being prepared, for this booknotes that none of Donne�s love poems are �sonnets bystrict, modern definition� (301). Yet the editors contin-ue to obscure their earlier mistake by attempting tohide the fact that the reason the poems are known asthe Songs and Sonnets is because that was the title ofthe second edition of Donne�s poems. They do nottreat the label as a title and write that the �love poemsare collectively known as songs and sonnets, but thelabel is misleading� (301). Do they believe thathigh-school students are too stupid to grasp that themeaning of a term like sonnet could have changedsince the seventeenth century.

In the eighteenth-century unit, it is said thatheroic couplets are �so called because [AlexanderPope] and his predecessor John Dryden used them intheir translations of the epic poems of antiquity�(522). The use of the term heroic couplet, however,predates Dryden�s use of such couplets in a transla-tion of a classical epic�his translation of Virgil�sworks did not appear until 1697�and Pope�s use ofthem altogether. �The adjective [heroic] was applied inthe later seventeenth century,� M. H. Abrams tells usin his A Glossary of Literary Terms, �because of thefrequent use of such couplets in �heroic� (that is, epic)poems and plays� (p. 77).

The inaccuracies concerning literary trivia

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_________________Then changed thus, no more I�m bound to youThan swearing to a saint that proves untrue.

discussed above would seem to have little to do withthe teaching of literary texts. But getting the triviawrong is not as harmless as one might think: It canaffect the way students are asked to think about texts.Consider one of the questions following Alfred, LordTennyson�s �The Lady of Shalott,� the one whichbegins by informing students that the poem waswritten during Tennyson�s �ten years of silence� (p.813) and which goes on to ask them to compare hislife during these years with that of the Lady in thepoem. The problem here is that the poem was firstwritten prior to the ten years of silence in 1831�32and published in the badly reviewed book of 1832. Itwas revised, along with a number of other poems,between 1832 and 1842 and republished in 1842,when the years of silence ended. The poem may havebeen revised, but its plot and theme remained thesame, a fact which renders the question being askedfoolish. To answer it, students must assume that theLady is a thinly disguised representation of Tennyson.While doing the assignment, they will apparentlycome to understand how writers translate theirexperience into literature.

One of the most inexcusable errors of a literarynature turns up in the apparatus accompanyingGeorge Orwell�s �Shooting an Elephant.� Orwell, aseveryone knows, is a master of irony, andElements� discussion of Orwell�s essay fittinglyconcerns its irony. The discussion begins with asmall essay that defines situational irony�whensomething happens that is different from what oneexpects�and verbal irony��saying one thing andmeaning another� (1138). Both of these types of

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irony, the text maintains, are used by Orwell in�Shooting an Elephant.� Orwell�s essay illustrates theirony of his being a police constable in Burma, whilebeing morally opposed to British imperialism, andexamples of situational irony can be found every-where in it.

Finding examples of verbal irony, by contrast, isimpossible. There are none. The teacher, nonetheless,is obliged to find one, since the book says that�Shooting an Elephant� contains verbal irony, and thetext, intent on helping a surely befuddled teacher,asserts that the sentence that reads �All I knew wasthat I was stuck between my hatred of the empire Iserved and my rage against the evil-spirited littlebeasts who tried to make my job impossible� (1139)exemplifies verbal irony. This sentence articulates aparadox and is not meant to be read ironically at all.It does, it could be argued, bluntly explain the irony ofOrwell�s situation, but that is different from sayingone thing and meaning something else.

The only statement in the essay that even remote-ly illustrates verbal irony is near the conclusion.Orwell writes, �legally I had done the right thing, for amad elephant has to be killed� (1143). Orwell does notfeel as if he has done the right thing. He realizes thathe has caved in to the pressure of the crowd and killedan elephant that probably did not need to be killed.But Orwell isn�t really using verbal irony here, for heis not saying something that is categorically untrue inorder to provide a wry commentary on what hebelieves to be the truth, as someone does when hecomes out of a downpour, drenching wet, andannounces, �It�s a beautiful day.� In legal terms, as

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Orwell says, he was in the right, which may suggest tothe reader that British colonialism creates conditionsin which saying what is wrong is right, hence theremote possibility that the statement could be said toillustrate verbal irony.

If I seem to be picking on Elements, it is onlybecause it has been consistently among the top-sell-ing programs in the nation over the last decade. It isa program held in high regard among industryinsiders. I should therefore note that most of itscompetitors� programs are at least as bad and at timesworse. If we compare Elements� treatment of Wyattwith Glencoe�s, for example, we will see the superiori-ty of the Holt program. There are different sources forWyatt�s poems, manuscripts and a little book that iscommonly referred to as Tottel�s Miscellany, althoughits actual title is Songs and Sonnets (1557). This bookhas historical importance, but it is not an authorita-tive source for Wyatt�s poems. Literary tastes hadchanged between Wyatt�s day and the late 1550s, andTottel changed the poems, making them metricallysmoother, to please the tastes of those who would bereading them. Elements calls attention to this fact andprints manuscript versions of Wyatt�s poems.Glencoe, by contrast, uses Tottel�s edited version ofWyatt�s �They Flee From Me� and gives it the title thatTottel gave to it, �The Lover Showeth How He IsForsaken.� Glencoe�s editors, in effect, attribute awork to Wyatt that is, at best, only half his. Anyresponsible editor would note that the version of thepoem being used is the version that was edited byTottel in the 1550s.

Discussing the inaccuracies in the Glencoe,

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Prentice Hall, and McDougal books would not improvemy discussion of the problem with textbooks, yet themost telling illustration of the problem, I want tostress, is that Elements would be superior to bothGlencoe�s and Prentice�s books, and as good as, if notbetter than, McDougal�s, if its editors had carried outthe promise that their product seems to offer. But thefailure on the part of the Elements editors, and thoseworking for the competition we mustn�t forget, goesbeyond their misinforming students about whensignificant events, political and literary, occurred andwhat people thought about them. Such misinforma-tion could easily be corrected, and educationshouldn�t just be about facts, as Charles Dickensreminds us in Hard Times (1854).

In the opening paragraph of Hard Times, Dickensintroduces his famous portrayal of a flawed educa-tional system, one more interested in passing on factsthan habits of mind that will facilitate creativethought. �Now, what I want is Facts. Teach these boysand girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted inlife� (3), Dickens� pedantic speaker intones andthereby draws a sharp distinction between the worldof facts and the world of imagination, a worldrepresented by Sissy Jupe in the novel. Dickens�protest against reducing education to a reiteration offacts should be heeded, but to assume that thismeans that facts are unimportant is as wrong headedas assuming that the imagination hinders learning.

The French philosopher Jean-François Lyotarddiscusses imagination in the following terms. Theability to produce knowledge comes �from arranging. . . data in a new way. . . . This new arrangement is

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usually achieved by connecting together series of datathat were previously held to be independent. Thiscapacity to articulate what used to be separate can becalled imagination� (51�52). If the data being receivedby students is inaccurate, the products of their imag-ination�in the case of schoolwork, the conclusionsthat they will be obliged to make about the subjectthey are studying�will be flawed. The most seriousproblem with textbooks then is not that their informa-tion is flawed but that the conclusions to which theirinformation will lead are flawed. This aspect of theproblem can be demonstrated by taking a brief look atElements� presentation of Wordsworth, a poet whoinvariably gets taught in twelfth-grade Englishclasses because students, it is believed, will morereadily identify with Romantic writers.

The presentation is problematic from the startbecause the discussion of the Romantics� aesthetictheory in the unit�s introduction is based on a reduc-tive reading of the �Preface� to Lyrical Ballads (1798,1800), a reading that focuses on Wordsworth�s notionthat poetry is �a spontaneous overflow of emotion�without taking into account Wordsworth�s observationthat it is also something �recollected in tranquility.�The latter half of Wordsworth�s definition is meant tocall attention to the work that goes into creating apoem, and omitting it allows Elements to argue thatthe Romantics chose to write lyrics, as opposed torigid poetic forms that rely on �argumentative tech-niques� (632), because the lyric form �lends itself tospontaneity, immediacy, a quick burst of emotion,and self revelation� (632). The opposition between thelyric and rigid poetic forms has been created to differ-

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entiate eighteen-century poetics from Romanticpoetics, something that could have been done muchmore easily, and less inaccurately, by discussing theopposition between the Romantics� emphasis onprivate experience and the eighteenth-century poets�focus on public discourse.

The editors know that the Romantic aesthetic wasopposed to the aesthetic popular in Pope�s day, andfollowing a procedure similar to the one they hadfollowed in their discussion of the commonalitiesbetween Erasmus and More, they decided that whatwas believed in the eighteenth century was rejected inThe Romantic Age. The Romantics� use of poetic formis forgotten, and students are asked to ignore theirmastery of the formalistic requirements of the sonnetand blank verse, to name just two of the forms thatcame back into vogue in the early nineteenth century.Elements is rehashing a vulgar romantic ideology thatpresupposes that form and structure are diametrical-ly opposed to emotion, or natural feeling, and must beeschewed to capture natural truth. This kind of think-ing ruined the writing of Jack Kerouac, which sufferedimmensely after On the Road�s success, when Kerouacgained the bargaining power to deny his publishersthe right to edit his manuscripts; editing, he felt,would obscure the truth of the message he wished toconvey, but it helped On the Road (1958) become,even in the opinion of the novelist Thomas Pynchon,�one of the great American novels� (xvi).

Elements� contrasting of the natural, spontaneousverse of the Romantics with the highly formal verse ofthe eighteenth century is not even historicallyaccurate. In his own day, Wordsworth was accused of

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being overly formal. �When he sent one of his books toCharles James Fox, the leader of the liberal faction inParliament, Fox,� Robert Haas reports, �wrote him anote saying he didn�t like �Michael� and �The Brothers�because he felt �blank verse inappropriate for suchsimple subjects� � (68). Fox�s criticism is grounded ina notion of decorum that stipulates that certainsubjects have to be written about in certain forms,and blank verse, according to the traditional rules ofdecorum, is a form appropriate to noble subjects. Foxis, of course, missing the point. Wordsworth wants toshow that �simple subjects� have a nobility of theirown, and part of the way he achieves this objective in�Michael� (1800) and �The Brothers� (1800) is byusing a poetic form that is associated with elevatedsubjects.

The misguided character of Elements� representa-tion of Romantic poetics is even made evident later inthe chapter, when the text discusses the Romanticlyric. �The Romantic ode,� the essay on the lyric notes,�was a self conscious use of a classical form that hadbeen brought into English literature . . . by JohnDryden and Thomas Gray� (672). How, someone whohad accepted Elements� view of Romantic aestheticsmight ask, does the Romantics� observance of a spon-taneous poetics, in contrast to eighteenth-centurypoets� observance of a highly formal one, permit theRomantics to produce odes? One might ask this ques-tion, but if one did, one would be asking a questionthat assumed the wrong things about Romanticpoetry, since the terms of the question forbid one toposit that writing Romantic poetry involves more thana poet�s having a spontaneous burst of emotion. But

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the editors ought to have asked the question; if theyhad, they may have considered revising the view ofRomanticism that they were presenting.

A more fruitful question for us to ask at this pointmight be: Why doesn�t the book mention Ben Jonson�sOde on the Death of Sir H. Morison (written in 1629,published in 1641), an ode written long before Drydenor Gray put pen to paper? Or why doesn�t it discussAbraham Cowley�s irregular odes, which werepublished in 1656 and which influenced Romanticodes more than any of Dryden�s odes? Neither Drydennor Gray was responsible for introducing the ode intothe English tradition.7 If we wanted to ask a questionthat would be of value to students, we might ask thisone: Why do the Romantics appropriate a form that is�serious in subject [and] elevated in style� (Abrams, AGlossary, 124), in other words, traditionally consid-ered noble, to write about private experiences?

Elements� little essay on the Romantic lyric turnsfrom the ode to �the meditative poem.� CallingWordsworth�s �Tintern Abbey� (1798) �the prototype ofthe form� (672)�despite the fact that Wordsworthmodeled his poem on Coleridge�s �Frost at Midnight�(1798)�the essay goes on to say that Wordsworthuses blank verse in his meditative poems to create the�artful illusion� that we are listening to someonespeaking while we are reading them. This last pointwould be denied by few, for the rhythms of blank

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____________________ 7Ben Jonson is generally credited with introducing the ode intoEnglish literature, but the term ode had been used in the titlesof English poems prior to Jonson�s writing of the Ode on theDeath of Sir H. Morison. The term, as Victor A. Doyno notes, wasloosely used �to mean simply a rather short love poem� (1xiii).

verse most closely resemble the rhythms of spokenEnglish, but the editors do not discuss this aspect ofblank verse. They discuss how the Romantics� use ofit allows them to compose �stanzas [that] are theequivalent of paragraphs, beginning and endingwhere sense, rather than strict form, dictates.� Thediscussion relies on the opposition betweeneighteenth-century formalism and so-called Romanticnaturalism that the editors posited in their introduc-tion and ignores their comment on the artful allusionthat the Romantics struggled to create. But theRomantics use of the verse paragraph is not some-thing that distinguishes them from eighteenth-centu-ry poets. Pope, among others, uses verse paragraphs.The couplet also allows for the constructing of poeticunits that end where sense, rather than strict form,dictates, with the exception that a verse paragraphcomposed of couplets has an even number of lines.8

What is perhaps the bigger defect in the discus-sion of the Romantic�s use of blank verse is theassumptions it makes about a poet�s handling of strictpoetic form. When poets choose to write a poem in aparticular form, the editors want students to believe,they allow the form to control their expression. Youngpoets who are still learning their craft may beconstrained in this way, but an experienced poetwill not be. Strict form does not prevent poets from

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____________________

8This apparently obvious rule is not necessarily observed.Poems written in couplets can contain triplets, such as this onefrom Dryden�s �Absalom and Achitophel� (1681): �He is not now,as when on Jordan�s sand/ The joyful people thronged to seehim land,/ Covering the beach, and blackening all the strand�(270-272).

following sense. Those who are in command of theircraft are able to manipulate the strictest of forms sothat stanzas end where sense rather than formdictates, at least if that is their intention. Often poetsusing strict forms are able to create the �artfulillusion� that we are listening to a natural speakingvoice by making sense burst through the boundary ofform. Robert Browning, for example, employs enjamb-ment to deceive his readers into believing they areoverhearing a duke discuss his last wife in �My LastDuchess� (1842), a poem written in couplets.

The simplified version of Romantic aesthetics putforward in Elements, I have tried to show, will poten-tially harm the development of aspiring writers andimpair students� ability to understand how literatureworks. But it will do something else, something that isperhaps more relevant to what students are doing inschool. It will harm their ability to learn to understandthe literary texts they are studying by obliging them tomake inane interpretations of the poems they areasked to read.

That such is the case is illustrated by Elements�presentation of Wordsworth�s sonnet �The World IsToo Much With Us,� a presentation that also revealsthe importance of avoiding the ostensibly trivialmistake of assigning the wrong date to the composi-tion of a poem, which I will quote in full for the bene-fit of readers who may have forgotten it.

The world is too much with us; late and soon,Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:Little we see in Nature that is ours;We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;

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The winds that will be howling at all hours,And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;For this, for everything, we are out of tune;It moves us not. Great God! I�d rather beA Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.

According to the material accompanying it, �TheWorld Is Too Much With Us� was written �[i]n 1807, ata time when [Wordsworth] realized that his imagina-tive powers were beginning to fail . . . [because] heknew he was no longer responding to nature with . . .youthful passion� (671).

One of Wordsworth�s primary themes is the loss ofone�s ability to respond to nature with �youthfulpassion.� The theme appears in his work as early as�Tintern Abbey,� a poem which was composed in 1798and in which Wordsworth explains that the period inhis life when he could say that he was �like a roe� (67),or lived in harmony with the natural world, haspassed: �The coarser pleasures of my boyish days/And their glad animal movements [have] all gone by�(73�74), he muses. Were his imaginative powersfailing as early as 1798, or had he realized they were?Apparently he had not�he wrote quite a few of hisbest poems after that year.

Indeed, in 1804, the year he finished editing �TheWorld Is Too Much With Us,� Wordsworth, as theeditors of The Norton Anthology put it, �set to workintensively on the project� (304) of expanding theearlier two-book version of The Prelude. By 1805, hehad completed the thirteen-book version of this large

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poem. Such an achievement was hardly accomplishedby someone who was losing his imaginative powers,and Wordsworth�s ability to write the majority of the1805 version of The Prelude in 1804 and 1805 surelybelies the idea that he had realized that these powerswere failing by 1804. Knowing that the publishedversion of the sonnet was completed in 1804 is there-fore important to the reading of the poem that is beingput forth. But finding the correct date failed to induceHolt�s staff to change its view of the poem. The HoltLanguage and Literature book correctly dates its com-position but insists that Wordsworth, while writingthe poem, was under the impression that he was los-ing his ability to write strong poetry.

A mistake was found, but it never occurred toanyone, or anyone with the authority to demand arewrite, that the first mistake might have led toothers, so the Holt book unwittingly suggests that ThePrelude was essentially complete prior to the compo-sition of �The World is Too Much With Us.� Elements,with its incorrect date, is therefore more believable. Ifthe poem had been written in 1807, the year it wasfirst published, what Elements suggests about thecomposition of The Prelude would be essentiallycorrect. It would also be correct to note thatWordsworth�s poetic abilities were declining signifi-cantly. Wordsworth�s strength as a poet did diminishas the nineteenth century wore on, so much so that Ioften wonder, when people wax poetical about JohnKeats� short life and lament the loss of the poetryKeats never had the chance to write, what peoplewould say if Wordsworth had died in 1805 or 1806?Would we all be lamenting the loss of The Recluse, the

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poem Wordsworth proposed to write and for whichThe Prelude was supposed to serve as a prelude?

Wordsworth�s lengthy existence prevents suchlamentations. Most of the poems Wordsworth wroteafter the first decade of the nineteenth century are notvery interesting, but that does not prove that he hadrealized at some point that his imaginative powerswere failing, so Elements� assertion about �The Worldis Too Much With Us� would remain dubious even ifthe poem had been written in 1807. To prove itsaccuracy, something like a journal entry in whichWordsworth bemoans the drying up of his talent or inwhich his sister Dorothy, who kept detailed journals,reports him doing so would have to be found.

The background note on the sonnet also assertsthat Wordsworth wrote it in response to the criticFrancis Jeffrey�s attacks on him, specifically Jeffrey�saccusation that he was �conspiring against society. . . �instead of contemplating the wonders andpleasures which civilization has created for mankind.�A critic,� the note goes on to say, �consideredWordsworth an enemy of progress because of his �idlediscontent with the existing institutions of society�and his yearning for an earlier, less civilized timewhen people lived in harmony with nature� (671). Whythe second sentence in this passage should begin acritic is beyond me. The construction implies that adifferent critic, one too insignificant to be named, isbeing cited, but the quotation embedded in thesentence is taken from the same review as the quota-tion that preceded it, from the same paragraph inwhich Jeffrey accuses the lake poets, not Wordsworthspecifically, although he is the primary target of the

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attack, of conspiring against society. Perhaps theeditor is trying to hide the fact that in the review,Jeffrey never accuses Wordsworth, or anyone else, ofopposing progress or of valuing nature too highly andconcludes by praising Robert Southey, whose Thalaba(1801) is the review�s nominal subject, for his�brilliant delineation of external nature� (53). Thisquality of Romantic poetry is one of the few thingsthat Jeffrey found valuable in 1802, when his reviewof Thalaba was published.

But even if Jeffrey had attacked Wordsworth�ssupposed opposition to progress, in what way does�The World is Too Much With Us� respond to theattack? The poem certainly fails to contemplate thevalue of modern civilization�s achievements, butWordsworth doesn�t seem to be responding to anycriticism. He simply ignores his critics and againcommits the error for which they had supposedlyfaulted him. Ignoring criticism of his style is exactlywhat Jeffrey faults Wordsworth for in his review of TheExcursion (1814). After discussing the length of timeWordsworth spent writing The Excursion and listingthe obstacles to reform that are likely to be producedby devoting so much of one�s life to folly, Jeffreywrites:

We were not previously aware of theseobstacles to Mr. Wordsworth�s conversion;and, considering the peculiarities of his for-mer writings merely as the result of certainwanton and capricious experiments on publictaste and indulgence, conceived it to be ourduty to discourage their repetition. . . . Wenow see clearly, however, how the case

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stands;�and making up our minds . . . toconsider him as finally lost to the good causeof poetry, shall endeavor to be thankful for theoccasional gleams of tenderness and beautywhich the natural force of his imagination andaffections must still shed over all his produc-tions,�and to which we shall ever turn withdelight, in spite of the affectation and mysti-cism and prolixity, with which they are soabundantly contrasted. (60)

It should be noted here, by the way, that Jeffrey criti-cizes the �affectation,� or the overly studied quality, ofWordsworth�s poetry, not its naturalness.

There is simply no credible evidence offered inElements� apparatus to prove that Wordsworth isresponding to Jeffrey or any other critic. Students,nonetheless, may want to know and teachers will beobliged to inform them how �The World is Too MuchWith Us� functions as a response to the �critics.� Theeditors don�t do too much to help teachers on thisscore. �The speaker,� the commentary in the teacher�sedition observes, �passionately proclaims he wouldrather revert to paganism than remain cut off fromlife�s meaning� (T671). The editors, I suppose, read thepoem as an attack on progress and civilization,something suggested by their use of the word revert.We, they want us to believe, live in progressive andcivilized times; pagans did not. Wordsworth, bycontrast, asserts that so-called uncivilized times wereactually superior to our own. But that is what theeditors assert he has been criticized for believing, sothe commentary leaves unanswered the question ofhow the poem responds to the supposed criticism.

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This is not to say that the poem could not be readas Wordsworth�s response to someone who hadattacked his thought. But if one wanted to read thepoem in this way, one would need to come up withsomething better than what the Elements editors havecome up with. One might begin such a reading bypointing out that the gods mentioned in the sonnet�sfinal lines were worshipped during a period of Greekhistory that is often considered the Golden Age ofWestern culture. One could then proceed to discusswhat advantages Wordsworth ascribes to living duringthat age and could reasonably argue that those inancient Greece, in Wordsworth�s view, lived in harmo-ny with nature. But one would need to say a littlemore than this, for the poem is not quite that trite.What is perhaps more interesting about it is the wayit suggests harmony is produced.

Notice that Wordsworth does not ascribe value toancient belief because it is true. The ancients do notlive in harmony with nature as it is. Neither Proteusnor Triton can actually be seen or heard: They aremythical creatures, after all. Believing in them isvaluable, according to the poem, because doing soallowed the ancient Greeks to incorporate the naturalworld into the social, or cultural, world and blur theboundary that divides these worlds from each other.Living in a way that would allow one to accept thebeliefs of the ancient Greeks, the poem implies, isbetter than becoming too caught up in �the world�because the distinction between nature and culturehas become too rigid in contemporary life.

High-school students and some adult readersmight find the position argued in the sonnet odd, as

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they have most likely been taught to believe that truthis better than myth. Wordsworth, it should thereforebe added, is not actually asserting that ancient beliefsare superior to truth. He is suggesting that ancientbeliefs, though false, enabled the Greeks to live theirlives in accordance with a profound truth of whichthey were not fully aware. This idea is not original toWordsworth, although what he does with it is, andcalling attention to this fact would allow teachers tosituate Wordsworth�s thought within the traditions hehad inherited and debunk the pernicious notion�accepted by so many adolescents�that originalthought is fashioned in a vacuum.

The possibility of situating Wordsworth in a tradi-tion disproves, by the way, one of Jeffrey�s strongestcriticisms of the Romantics in the 1802 review ofSouthey�that they ignored �standards [that] werefixed long ago, by certain inspired writers, whoseauthority it is no longer lawful to call in question� (45),that is, they ignored poetic tradition. This criticism,interestingly enough, is an attack on the Romantics�progressiveness, which Jeffrey himself opposes.Jeffrey, in fact, was the first critic to see the connec-tion between Romantic aesthetics and the ideology ofthe French revolution. He wanted Wordsworth toabandon his revolutionary aesthetic and follow onedeveloped in an earlier age, an age in which poetswere inspired, or in which an authentic poetics was�infused or communicated [to them] by divine orsupernatural power� (OED), which is what to beinspired originally meant.

Be that as it may, the argument of Wordsworth�ssonnet draws upon a medieval and Renaissance idea

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that justified to Christians their seeing value in pre-Christian thought. Treating such thought positivelycould potentially cause difficulties for the faithful,since it was produced by pagans, or ungodly people.The anti-theatrical tract Plays Confuted in Five Actions(1582), written by the sixteenth-century PuritanStephen Gosson, illustrates the difficulties Christianscould face when they appealed to pagan authorities.In order to refute the dramatist, poet, and fiction-writer Thomas Lodge�s defense of the Elizabethan the-ater, Gosson attacks Lodge�s appeal to the authority ofthe ancients. Lodge, he writes, �confesseth openly thatplays were consecrated by the heathens to the honorof their gods, which is indeed true, yet it servethbetter to overthrow them than establish them, forwhatever was consecrated to the honor of the heathengods was consecrated to idolatry. . . . Being consecrat-ed to idolatry, they are not of God . . . [and] are thedoctrine and invention of the devil� (B4 verso: spellingmodernized).

Lodge is not attempting to praise ancientreligions, which is what Gosson is implying. He, likeall Christians, believes that the ancient gods are falsegods. He is, instead, drawing upon Renaissancephilosophers, influenced by neoplatonic thought, whoargued that �the old, the primary,� in Frances Yates�words, was �nearest to divine truth� (14) becauseGod�s influence was more powerful the closer one wasto The Fall. For Lodge, the ancients� consecrating ofplays to their gods is a sign of their intuitive aware-ness that theatrical performances pleased God, justas heathens� worshipping of gods is a sign of theirintuitive knowledge that we are obligated to worship a

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higher power, God. Wordsworth modifies the tradition that Lodge

draws upon. He situates pagans closer to nature,instead of divine truth, and suggests that their creeddid not prevent them from responding to the naturalworld with the intensity that he felt was appropriate.Wordsworth does something else as well. He implicit-ly constructs an analogy between pagans �suckled ina creed outworn� (10) and children, as they are repre-sented in �Tintern Abbey� and Ode: Intimations ofImmortality (1807). Wordsworth was not the first tomake such an analogy.

The seventeenth-century mystical poet HenryVaughan claims in �The Retreat� (1650) that a child ismore in touch with heavenly bliss than an adult, justas certain Renaissance thinkers had argued thatthose who lived closer to The Fall were more in touchwith God�s truth, despite the absence of Biblical reve-lation, than those living in the corrupt, modern world.For those who may not know it, this is the poem:

Happy those early days! When I Shin�d in my Angel-infancy. Before I understood this place Appointed for my second race, Or taught my soul to fancy aught But a white, Celestial thought, When yet I had not walked above A mile, or two, from my first love, And looking back (at that short space) Could see a glimpse of His bright face; When on some gilded Cloud, or flower,My gazing soul would dwell an hour, And in those weaker glories spy Some shadows of eternity;

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Before I taught my tongue to wound My conscience with a sinful sound, Or had the black art to dispense A several sin to every sense, But felt through all this fleshly dress Bright shoots of everlastingness.

O how I long to travel back And tread again that ancient track! That I might once more reach that plain, Where first I left my glorious train, From whence the enlightened spirit sees That shady City of palm trees; But (ah!) my soul with too much stay Is drunk, and staggers in the way. Some men a forward motion love, But I by backward steps would move, And when this dust falls to the urn, In that state I came, return. (Spelling Modernized)

Vaughan, though he may seem to be, is not a proto-Wordsworthian, a Romantic poet before his time.Nature is not to him �all in all� (�Tintern Abbey,� 75).It is something in which one can potentially perceiveGod, if one can free oneself from the world�s corrup-tion.

The idea that it was possible to perceive God innature is commonplace in seventeenth-centurythought. Even Bacon, often lauded for establishingthe scientific method and helping to rid Westernthought of mystical elements, makes such claims inthe Novum Organum (1620). �There is a great differ-ence,� Bacon writes, �between the idols of the humanmind and the ideas of the divine mind; that is to say,between certain empty opinions and the genuinesignatures and marks impressed on created things, as

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they are found to be� (49). The �genuine signaturesand marks� are those that have been placed in natureby God. For Bacon, the scientific method is an instru-ment that will help people discover God�s truth in thenatural world, or see beyond the false opinions oftradition and see nature as God intended it to be seen.Vaughan is a man of his age, although when heconstructs an analogy between children uncorruptedby the ways of the world and humankind at the dawnof time, he is perhaps calling attention to an implica-tion of his century�s thought that had gone unnoticed.

Mario Di Cesare thus warns readers in a footnoteto �The Retreat� in his anthology of seventeenth-cen-tury religious poetry that Vaughan�s poem is �[n]ot tobe compared to Wordsworth�s Intimations ode. . . . Thepoem blends Platonist and Hermeticist ideas withChrist�s words, �Suffer the little children to come untome� � (148, n. 9). Di Cesare�s note would be better if itwarned us not to mistake Vaughan�s ideas forWordsworth�s. There is no reason why one shouldn�tcompare the two poems, if one pays attention to theirdifferences as well as their similarities. Indeed, in anote to the Intimations ode that he dictated to hisfriend Isabella Fenwick in 1843, Wordsworth providesmaterial to help one make the comparison. He saysthat there is nothing to contradict the idea expressedin the ode. �The fall of Man,� he observes, �presents ananalogy in its favor . . . and, among all personsacquainted with classic literature, [this analogy] isknown as an ingredient of Platonic philosophy�(Norton Anthology, vol. II, 286) or, to be more precise,neoplatonic philosophy.

�The World is Too Much With Us� seems to draw

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upon the ideas presented in the Intimations ode, forthe mention of The Fall in the Fenwick note illustratesthat Wordsworth was interested in developing ananalogy between childhood, as it is represented in theode, and ancient times. Wordsworth�s response to anycritic that may have attacked his opposition toprogress or a critic like Jeffrey who accused him ofopposing �certain inspired writers, whose authority itis no longer lawful to call in question� is that peoplehave long acknowledged that both the world andindividuals become corrupt as they grow old, so weshould disentangle ourselves from the world�s corrup-tion.

Neither students nor teachers are likely todevelop an interpretation of Wordsworth�s sonnet thatresembles the one offered above, or any other interest-ing interpretations for that matter, if they follow thecritical apparatus that Elements provides. They aremore likely to discover in the poem platitudes aboutthe joy of returning to nature that they could havelearned without going to class at all. Material thatmight help connect Wordsworth�s ideas about thecorruption of humankind as it ages with his ideasabout the corruption of individuals as they grow oldis, however, present, at least in an inchoate form, inthe book.

The pre-reading material provided with a selectionfrom the Intimations ode observes that the ode isabout how the world �appeared luminous� to theyoung Wordsworth, but as he grew older, �thisbrightness seemed to fade� (667). The memory of theworld�s luminosity intimates to the mature speakerthat his soul had lived in a state of bliss prior to his

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birth. The material even alludes to the Fenwick note,although Wordsworth�s reference to The Fall is notmentioned. But if it had been mentioned, connectingthe ode to the sonnet would not be difficult. If one isled to recognize that a child�s visionary abilities are, inWordsworth�s view, analogous to those of ancientpagans, one will also be led to ask: What does thepagans� ability to see Proteus and Triton intimate?Establishing a connection between Wordsworth�sthought and that of his predecessors would be moreilluminating for students than presenting a badlyresearched, badly considered view of his poetry thatwill serve them nowhere, not even in the collegeEnglish course for which high-school English ismeant, in part, to prepare them.

If American students are as bad as people saythey are, it is unlikely that they will ever notice any ofthe mistakes in their books, even when a particularbook contradicts itself, or raise questions that mightcall attention to the books� inadequacies. They willnever really know how correct they are when theydecide that they are better off ignoring their assign-ments. If we can�t expect textbooks to provide thematerial for a good education, we can, I suppose, takesome comfort in our knowledge that many studentsaren�t taking advantage of the ill-considered educa-tion that is being offered to them.

This form of comfort isn�t particularly satisfactory,and teachers are left with the burden of figuring outhow to transform the books they are being given towork with into valuable educational tools. Perhapsthey could stir up their students� interest and under-mine the ineptitude of textbooks by having students

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actively seek inaccuracies. Such a project might evenget students to become more invested in their educa-tion. Exchanging the classroom�s dictatorial struc-ture�which has alienated students for generations�with a method of learning that challenges studentsto be independent might actually make school enjoy-able for them and would surely improve the likelihoodof their remembering what they were learning.

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IIIA friend of mine who teaches university literature

courses assures me that none of the problems that Ihave been writing about matter. Students, he main-tains, �don�t know what centuries are,� never mindwhat happened in any of them. He is confident thatstudents aren�t learning anything in high school oranywhere else. What textbook companies are puttingin their books is irrelevant, in his opinion, to the cur-rent educational problems in this country. My friendis being facetious, of course. He cares about literaturein a way that has come to seem dated, even amongsome literature professors,9 and is distressed to findstudents who think that Shakespeare wrote in OldEnglish or that Chaucer wrote in the eighteenthcentury, as one student claimed on a test not so longago, despite having registered for a course meant tofulfill a pre-1700 literature requirement.

The attitude that my friend feigns is, however,

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____________________

9An essay by David F. Bell, the chair of the Department ofRomance Studies at Duke University, in a recent PMLAillustrates the point I am making here about some literatureprofessors. The essay begins: �One of my colleagues stopped mein the hall recently to explain how happy she was to havereached a moment in her academic career when she no longerhad to teach literature. Another colleague . . . could no longerimagine teaching literature in any context other than culturalstudies�that is, in a setting in which the literary text was atmost an illustration of an ideological, historical, or theoreticaltheme� (487).

present in others. A senior editor at a major textbookcompany, who is uncharacteristically troubled by thefaults of textbooks, has found resistance to hisattempts to produce better books, not only from hiscolleagues�who actually removed him from anassignment because he was being overly particular,something that would not have proved cost effective�but also from people who help decide what books getused. When presented with material that attemptednot to fudge historical fact by sliding over complicat-ed material in a sentence or two, the participants inthe focus groups that this editor had attendedcomplained, �students won�t read this.�

When I was in school, teachers gave studentsassignments, and students did them, or at least mostof them did. Someone would occasionally refuse, likea friend of mine who handed a test back to a teacheras she handed it to him and placed his head down onhis desk to go to sleep. He didn�t see any point totaking the test, since he hadn�t done any of thehomework or come to the majority of the classes. Itwas little more than an accident that he was in classthat day. He was trying to do his parents a favor bykeeping social services off their back. The teacher senthim to the principal�s office, where he intended toexplain his actions in the most reasonable terms heknew. What he did was laugh when the principalbegan to lecture him on the importance of getting aneducation. The principal promptly suspended him,solving both his problem and that of his parents. Hedidn�t have to go to school, and social servicescouldn�t complain about his absence. I found myfriend�s attitude amusing at the time; I sort of still do.

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What is troubling is that students who resemblethe student my friend was are dictating the quality ofthe education that everyone receives. Another Englishtextbook editor remarked, during a discussion thatwe were having about the types of errors that hiscompany allowed to reach the classroom, that thepeople using the books �can barely read� and �don�tcare.� The time and effort it would take to properlyresearch for a textbook, he wanted me to realize,would be time wasted. At least some of the peoplepreparing textbooks are justifying the lackadaisicalway they approach their jobs by reasoning that thequality of a textbook is unimportant because studentsare too ignorant to understand the material they arebeing given and too indifferent to consider its value.

We are, in effect, telling students to just say �no�or play dumb. If they do, as they have been doing, wewill try to make their schoolwork short and simpleand hope that they will consider saying �yes.� We�reforgetting that their complying with the demands of aless rigorous education will do them about as muchgood as their refusing to participate in a proper one.My high-school friend wasn�t interested in school. Hedropped out, took a GED, and went to a technicalschool, where he acquired a skill with which he wasable to find a job that pays him well enough to leadthe life he wants to lead, at least as of 1995, the lasttime I saw him. He probably wouldn�t have read thetextbooks that schools are being given today. He neverfound out if the books that he was told to read werehard or easy because he never opened them up. So hecertainly shouldn�t be the type of student that admin-istrators or teachers consider when they choose a

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book. They should be thinking about students whoare willing to learn. What will happen to them?

Students interested in their education couldsuffer the fate Pynchon fears may befall young writerswho watch too much television. In his introduction toSlow Learner (1984), Pynchon warns aspiring writersto check their facts. Those writing for �Opera librettos,movies, and television drama are allowed,� he quips�to get away with all kinds of errors in detail. Toomuch time in front of the Tube and a writer can get tobelieving the same thing about fiction� (xxvi). Judgingfrom what can be found in today�s textbooks, toomuch time with their heads in schoolbooks and youngpeople may start to believe the same thing aboutnonfiction. Check your facts and forget about whatthe professionals are doing. They�ve forgotten, or per-haps never knew, what it means to be professional.

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BibliographyTextbooksApplebee, Arthur N. et al. eds. The Language of

Literature: British Literature. Boston: McDougal Littel, 2000.

Bowler, Ellen et al. eds. Timeless Voices, TimelessThemes: The British Tradition. Upper SaddleRiver: Prentice Hall, 1996.

Chin, Beverly Ann et al. eds. The Reader�s Choice: British Literature. New York: Glencoe, 2000.

Daniel, Kathleen et al. eds. Annotated Teacher�s Edition: Elements of Literature, Sixth Course. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 2003.

�Annotated Teacher�s Edition: Holt Literature and Language Arts, Sixth Course. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 2003.

�Elements of Literature, Sixth Course. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 2003.

�Holt Literature and Language Arts, Sixth Course.New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 2003.

Koenig, Juliana, et al. eds. The Holt Reader: An Interactive WorkText. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 2003.

McCollum, Douglas et al. eds. Timeless Voices, Timeless Themes: The British Tradition. Upper Saddle River: Prentice Hall, 1999.

Works CitedAbrams, M. H. A Glossary of Literary Terms 5th ed.

Fort Worth: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1985.77

Abrams, M. H. et al. ed. Norton Anthology of English Literature 7th ed. vol. I. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2000.

�Norton Anthology of English Literature 7th ed. vol. II. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2000.

Bell, David F. �A Moratorium on Suspicion?� PMLA117:3 (2002): 487�90.

Di Cesare, Mario ed. George Herbert and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Poets. New York, W. W. Norton and Company, 1978.

Dickens, Charles. Hard Times. New York: Harper andRow, 1965.

Doyno, Victor A. �Introduction.� Parthenophil and Parthenophe. By Barnabe Barnes. Carbandale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1971.

Bacon, Francis. Novum Organum. Trans. and ed. Peter Urbach and John Gibson. Chicago: Open Court, 1995.

Gosson, Stephen. Plays Confuted in Five Actions.London, 1582.

Greenblatt, Stephen. Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1980.

Haigh, Christopher. English Reformations: Religion, Politics, and Society Under the Tudors. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993.

Haas, Robert. Twentieth-Century Pleasures. NewYork: The Ecco Press, 1984.

Hibbert, Christopher. The Virgin Queen: Elizabeth I, Genius of the Golden Age. Reading: Addison Wesley, 1991.

Hill, Geoffrey. King Log. Dufour, 1968.

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James VI and I. Political Writings. Ed. Johann P.Sommerville. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994.

Jeffrey, Francis. Jeffrey�s Criticism: A Selection. Ed.Peter F. Morgan. Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1983.

Lovelace, Richard. Lucasta: Epodes, Odes, Sonnets, Songs, etc. to which is added Aramantha.London, 1649.

Lyotard, Jean-François. The Postmodern Condition: AReport on Knowledge. Trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984.

Mullaney, Steven. �The Place of Shakespeare�s Stage in Elizabethan Culture.� Encyclopaedia Britannica [10/02/02] http://search.eb.com/shakespeare/esa/660003.html.

Preminger, Alex, et al. eds. Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974.

Pynchon, Thomas. Slow Learner. Toronto: Bantam Books, 1985.

Saccio, Peter. Shakespeare�s English Kings: History, Chronicle, and Drama. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1977.

Spenser, Edmund. The Faery Queene. New York:Penguin, 1978.

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Trevelyan, G. M. A Shortened History of England.New York: Penguin, 1988.

Vaughan, Henry. Vaughan�s Works. Ed. L. C.Martin. Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1957.

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Vendler, Helen. The Art of Shakespeare�s Sonnets. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press, 1997.

Wordsworth, William. Poetical Works. Ed. ThomasHutchinson and Ernest de Selincourt. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969.

Yates, Francis A. Giordano Bruno and the HermeticTradition. London: Routledge, 1964.

�Vorticism.� Xrefer: The Oxford Dictionary of Art. Oxford: Oxford University Press. [10/02/02] http://www.xrefer.com /entry/145854.

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