Talks on Teaching Literature — Themes and Context

The Problem of Teaching an Art

Bates begins by naming the teacher’s blackest moments: the suspicion that literature cannot be taught at all. He insists that if a pupil learns anything in literature—as opposed to learning about it—the pupil does it alone. This is not a counsel of despair but a recognition that art exists because it says what cannot be said otherwise. A painting, a melody, a poem gives delight through qualities that belong to nothing else. Words cannot replicate those qualities, or the work itself would be superfluous. The teacher is therefore “apparently confronted” with an impossible task. Yet Bates does not stop there; he uses this paradox to frame the talks that follow, turning a theoretical dead end into a practical starting point.

Examinations That Test Understanding, Not Memory

In the chapter on examinational work, Bates describes a device he used at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Students were given a brief extract from a standard author they had never seen before—in one case, the opening lines of Paradise Lost, Book II—and asked to state its excellent points of workmanship, thought, and imagination. The purpose was to see how intelligently they could apply principles they had learned, not to test recall of assigned readings. Bates emphasizes that only merits were requested, to strengthen the habit of looking for excellencies. One student’s comment on the word “barbaric” in Milton’s line shows the kind of independent thinking the exercise aimed to elicit: the student connected the word to “early inhabitants of the uncivilized rich countries of the east” throwing wealth around like pebbles.

The Danger of Stultifying Themes

Bates warns against setting students to write “formal and lifeless themes on pedantic topics” that replace intelligent comprehension with mechanical imitation. Such exercises, he argues, are not the study of literature but a “stultifying process” that lessens the power of appreciation. He insists that the supreme test of any subject given for written work is whether it is reasonable to suppose students can and will have individual, original thought about it. The writing of themes belongs to the examinational side of the work and should not be dwelt on more than necessary. It must stay within the range of the student’s personal experience. This pragmatic caution runs through the talks, always returning to the goal of genuine engagement rather than rote performance.

Structure and Movement Between Lectures

The book’s structure mirrors its origin as a series of lectures delivered at the University of Illinois Summer School in June 1905. Each talk builds on the previous one, moving from the problem and conditions of teaching literature through specific difficulties, foundations, and methods. Bates devotes separate chapters to the study of prose, the novel, and Macbeth, using each as a concrete illustration of his principles. The movement is from general to particular, from doubt to practical suggestion. The final chapters on criticism, literary workmanship, biography, and voluntary reading broaden the scope again, ending with a chapter titled “In General.” This alternating rhythm of problem and example gives the talks a cumulative force, as if the reader is attending the summer school alongside the original audience.

Bates’s talks are best read as a series of provocations rather than a manual. He does not promise a system that will make literature teachable; instead, he offers a way of thinking about the classroom that keeps the art itself at the center. Readers who expect step-by-step instructions will be disappointed, but those who welcome a thoughtful, sometimes skeptical companion in their own teaching will find much to return to. The book rewards attention to its recurring images—the black moment, the stultifying theme, the unfamiliar extract—and to the quiet insistence that students must be allowed to think for themselves.

That old Bates book kept circling back to me—the way he insists a teacher must feel literature before explaining it. It reminded me of something quieter, a Spanish reader I stumbled upon later, where the stories simply breathe. A First Spanish Reader — Inside the Classic has that same unhurried warmth, letting the language unfold like a familiar tune. I think of them together sometimes, two gentle voices across the years.