As a teacher of composition with virtually no experience with literature beyond introduction to literature and a Shakespeare class in my undergraduate program more than 25 years ago, I appreciated the practicality of Sheridan Blau’s The Literature Workshop. I teach freshman composition as an adjunct at a very small college with no full time English instructors, but the college is required by the accrediting agency to add fulltime professors and course offerings each year, and I am likely to be the next person they add to their faculty. As the sole member of the English department, I will certainly be teaching any literature courses they add, so I appreciated the book’s theoretical base at least as much as its practical applications.

The Think Aloud activities we conducted in class were very much like one of Blau’s workshops, in which he provided opportunities for students to read and reread a text, and then discuss the difficult parts with their peers to determine what the text was saying. My observation of that activity confirmed what Blau says about the power of rereading to clarify a text. As we read the poems again and again, the “lightbulb” became increasingly brighter. However, I have to say that I never achieved the satisfaction of feeling that I really understood what the poem was saying. And that leads me to question two things about Blau’s workshop on interpretation: 1) What if the students are not able to figure out what the poem is saying? and 2) How is relying on peers to tell me what the poem means any different from relying on the instructor to do the same thing? Either way, I conclude that finding meaning is a mystical power I do not possess. I certainly had that feeling from reading the discussion about the poem “Pitcher,” because I do not believe I would have seen a metaphorical meaning in the poem if I had read it 100 times. I felt much better when Blau admitted that someone had to point it out to him, too.

I can fully identify with the students who feel that their inability to understand a text is a measure of their incompetence as a reader, and simple tools such as rereading, providing necessary background and pretexts, and old-fashioned experience with literature can make a huge difference. I may not have seen the metaphorical reading of “Pitcher,” but with enough experience reading poetry, I may learn to look for metaphorical interpretations. Additionally, I have never heard an English professor candidly confess, as Blau did, to not understanding lines in many difficult poems that he has studied and taught for years. I wonder if my Romantic poetry professor had similar experiences with the poem “Julian and Maddalo,” a poem I admitted out loud in class that I did not finish reading because I did not understand one word. The student next to me who said she thought it was “beautiful” did not help a bit, but I suspect now that she didn’t understand it either.