The Irrational Element in the Undergraduate Poetry Workshop: Beyond Craft

Abstract

Poetry must be irrational.

—Wallace Stevens

When I consider the education of the poet, two differing scenes come to mind. The first affirms the unschooled genius of the poet: Keats and Leigh Hunt in long, revelled nights of inspiration at Hunt’s cottage, writing sonnets side by side, adorning one another with laurel crowns. The alternate scene proposes an apprenticeship for the poet: novices Plath and Sexton seeking out a master in Lowell, absorbing his skill and advice from the back of his Boston seminar. The workshop, the modern education for poets, often wishes to be more like the former, a creative crucible of contemporaries, but it exists mostly in the latter model, as an ordered craft school of the guild.