Until quite recently poetry was taught badly-at least according to current academic standards. Poetry was used to teach grammar, elocution, and rhetoric. It was employed to convey history, both secular and sacred, often to instill patriotic sentiment and religious morality. Poetry was chanted in chorus at female academies. It was copied to teach cursive handwriting and calligraphy. It was memorized by wayward schoolboys as punishment. It was recited by children at public events and family gatherings. Being able to write verse was considered a social grace in both domestic and public life. Going to school meant becoming well versed.
Dana GioiaRelated topics
able academic becoming children chorus family female grace grammar history mean patriotic public punishment quite rhetoric school secular sentiment teach well writeRelated quotes
The vast majority of American children have been educated in the American public school system, in which textbooks and courses of instruction are increasingly oriented to reflect humanist views and a secular philosophy. The undermining of respect for parental authority in favor of state direction or individual autonomy, and the contemporaneous purging of religious influence in the public schools has impaired the development of healthy family members. Values that had historically provided strength to the family, such as firm discipline and corporal punishment, patriotism, and academic achievement, were either attacked, or given token attention.
Bob McDonnell
The current language Pāṇini describes is very close in structure to the late Vedic found in certain Brāhmaṇa texts. As noted earlier, scholars have recognized other varieties of Sanskrit. Epic Sanskrit is so called because it is represented principally in the two epics, Mahābhārata ("Great Epic of the Bhārata Dynasty”) and Rāmāyaṇa ("Romance of Rāma”). In the latter the term saṃskṛta ‘adorned, cultivated, purified (by grammar)' is encountered, possibly for the first time with reference to the language. The date of composition for the core of early Epic Sanskrit is considered to be in the centuries just preceding the Common Era.
Pāṇini
However, I had recently had the impression they were changing-not so much by becoming less pro-Pakistan as by becoming less anti-India. I was wrong. My visit to Nixon did anything but avert the war. It was useful only to me. The experience taught me that when people do something against you, that something always turns out in your favor. At least you can use it to your advantage. It's a law of life-check it and you'll see it holds true in every situation of life. ... And do you know why I won this war? Because my army was able to do it, yes, but also because the Americans were on the side of Pakistan.
Indira Gandhi
But the God hypothesis for morality and altruism has its own problems. It fails, for example, to specify exactly which moral judgments were instilled in people by God and which, if any, might rest on secular reason. It doesn't explain why slavery, torture, and disdain for women and strangers were considered proper behaviors not too long ago, but are now seen as immoral. For if anything is true, God-given morality should remain constant over time and space. In contrast, if morality reflects a malleable social veneer on an evolutionary base, it should change as society changes. And it has.
Jerry Coyne
Verse no longer stands at the centre of communicative discourse. It is no longer, as it was from Homer to Milton, the natural repository of knowledge and traditional sentiment. It no longer gives to society its main record of past grandeur or its natural setting for prophecy, as it did in Virgil and Dante. Verse has grown private. It is a special language which the individual poet insinuates, by force of personal genius, into the awareness of his contemporaries, persuading to learn and perhaps hand on his own uses of words. Poetry has become essentially lyric - that is to say, it is the poetry of private vision rather than of public or of national occasion.
George Steiner