Excerpt from Shakespeare for Community Players
In many regards the greatest sufferer under the old system has been English literature, the branch which it would seem desirable to teach most thoroughly. After due allowance has been made for the saving grace of the personality of the teacher, the English class of the secondary school must linger in the minds of most men and women to-day as a very dull affair. There is something awful about forty boys and girls staring at When I consider how my light is spent, as if it were some thing to be looked at, like a wax flower under a bell jar. We talked about it, ticked off the iambs with our pencils, put in two neat vertical lines for the caesuras, but it never occurred to any body present to vocalise the poem and allow it to speak for itself. It would not have made any real difference to us anyway, because nobody had ever taken the trouble to teach us to read poetry. Years afterward I found out by the merest chance that it is one of the finest poems in the language, when it is read aloud. The irony of the situation is rather increased than other wise by the historical fact that Milton himself never saw the poem either in manuscript or print, but was forced to use the unaided human voice to mark the iambs and caesuras.
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