some other reviews

From The Gadfly at edexcellence.net

While the thought that students should bother with the poetry of the Romantics, the prose of Darwin, the philosophy of Mill, or the speeches of Churchill is anathema to many, even the greatest critics of Western culture must concede that the English language that still unites us (though not as strongly as it should) has never been used more effectively than by those in the land of its birth--England. "The language has been shaped by those who have used it best," write the Ravitches in their introduction to this exquisite anthology. "Everyone who writes in English inherits this legacy, from Chinua Achebe to Saul Bellow, Salman Rushdie to Toni Morrison, Derek Wolcott to Seamus Heaney. These great contemporary writers transform the literary tradition in their own distinct ways, but their guideposts are the monumental achievements of English literature." We may choose to deny our students the history of Western civilization, and still survive. But deny our students English literature, and we excise the very font from which the versatility and beauty of the language we speak flows. Diane and Michael have given us the best argument for why English literature should never "go gentle into that good night"--the words of the language's masters themselves.

Seattle Times December 11 2006

"A shortcut to being Lit Savvy. The greatest-hits package is a mix of experts from longer works and complete short pieces (poems, essays, speeches) that distills the eseence of great literature."

Hindu Times, February 7 2007

"This unique collection offers the best that has been thought and said."

Charleston Post & Courier

"The enduring impression is of ideas. Big, serious, complex ideas requiring attention spans not fed on sound bites and 15 second commercials. It's enough to tempt one to buy a booster

A great review!

From Elizabeth I to Churchill: A Literary Survey

By Kent Owen

 

20 January 2007

The Wall Street Journal

 

The English Reader

By Michael Ravitch and Diane Ravitch

Oxford, 486 pages, $30

 

    ANTHOLOGIES of works written in English have been available since at least 1861, when Francis Turner Palgrave published "The Golden Treasury of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language." Later anthologies have sometimes shown a finicky bent toward including samples from too many sources. This can make for a certain overstuffed amplitude.

 

    So it's a treat to come across a book organized on a different basis -- one that communicates the vitality and richness of the English language instead of the outer limits of too muchness. Diane and Michael Ravitch (mother and son) have arranged a well-curated collection of durable poems, essays, hymns, speeches, folk songs and prose excerpts, beginning with Elizabeth I's "Speech on the Eve of Facing the Spanish Armada" and ending with Winston Churchill's "Speech to the House of Commons, June 18, 1940." In between are 3 1/2 centuries of words and phrases, rhymes and rhythms, measured thoughts and impassioned poetry that, taken as a whole, represent much of the English literary tradition and, moreover, the cultural legacy that is Britain's.

 

    Whether sampling from Shakespeare's sonnets and dramatic speeches, or William Blake's mystical poems, or the lyrics of John Keats, the Ravitches make it their overarching purpose to restore a compelling awareness of the work to our contemporary consciousness. What common readers once knew as a matter of course has come to seem remote or of little interest. It is no small matter that the ways of thinking and feeling that inform the institutions of Western civilization should be regarded with indifference.

But although its aim is mildly didactic, "The English Reader" is by no means an ordinary textbook. In point of fact, it isn't a textbook at all. More than anything else, it serves to entertain, putting at hand the serendipitous pleasures of a good used-book store. (Readers in search of more ambitious and comprehensive anthologies might turn to Harold Bloom's "The Best Poems of the English Language" or John Gross's "The New Oxford Book of English Prose.") The curious browser in "The English Reader" is rewarded with one discovery or reacquaintance after another.

 

    To wit: Robert Louis Stevenson's bracing essay "Aes Triplex"; William Hazlitt's astringent "Man Is a Toad-Eating Animal"; helpings from John Stuart Mill, Walter Bagehot, Samuel Johnson, G.K. Chesterton, E.M. Forster and George Orwell. We also find British suffragist Emmeline Pankhurst delivering a speech in New York City in 1913 and Irish patriot Roger Casement addressing the Old Bailey after his arrest for treason in 1916.

Lest one suppose that everything is weighty with greatness, there is Felicia Hemans's "Casabianca" ("The boy stood on the burning deck / Whence all but he had fled") -- one of the best-recalled and most oft-recited specimens of overwrought poesy in English.

 

    As editors, the Ravitches have brought together many powerful works of literary art. Suitably, their introduction is eloquent and their notes brief, telling and to the point.

 

---

Mr. Owen is a writer in Bloomington, Ind.

A lovely article

This eloquent column from The Minneapolis Star-Tribune discusses some of the issues raised by The English Reader:

Limp Language Leaves Kids with an Awesome Paucity of Speech

By Katherine Kersten, Star Tribune

Eavesdrop on any group of teens hanging around outside your local high school. Their emotions may run the gamut, but their ability to express themselves generally does not. They've got one all-purpose word -- "awesome" -- to cover everything from mild approval to exhilaration. When they're indignant or angry, they have to fall back on clichés -- including a few tired four-letter words.

What accounts for this? Some would say that our kids have grown up on a diet of linguistic Wonder Bread.

If the kids asked us to name a verbal model -- a master of words who could craft a truly stinging insult -- whom would we suggest? Donald Trump?

For my money, nobody dissed 'em better than William Shakespeare. The unparalleled master of the English tongue may have lived 400 years ago, but he made name-calling an art. Take the words he put in Prince Henry's mouth in "Henry IV, Part 1": "Thou clay-brained guts, thou knotty-pated fool, thou whoreson, obscene, greasy tallow-catch!"

Today, teens aren't the only ones who have lost the ability to speak and write with vigor and eloquence. Folks of all ages are reading less -- especially the classics, whose authors wielded our language most powerfully. As a result, our ability to express ourselves is diminishing, because we can't draw on their example for inspiration.

Last month, Diane Ravitch, an eminent historian of education, provided the perfect antidote: "The English Reader: What Every Literate Person Needs to Know." In this anthology, she and her son Michael Ravitch have gathered what they regard as the most memorable speeches, poems, essays and songs in the English language.

"Today, our common cultural reference points come from the visual culture: Britney Spears, Jennifer Lopez," Ravitch told me last week. Our schools could help remedy the problem, but often don't, she says. That's because "'relevance" is now the watchword in education.

In textbooks, teens tend to find countless stories about young people much like themselves, according to Ravitch.

"How much richer it is to be able to use your imagination -- to communicate with people who lived 200 years ago and come away with something that remains in your head and your heart," she adds.

Norman Fruman, an emeritus English professor at the University of Minnesota, agrees. "Good literature deals with ideas, as well as emotions and the psychology of human behavior," he says. "It records our greatest tragedies and our highest aspirations." During 40 years as a teacher, he saw a steep decline in students' knowledge of their literary heritage.

Students' ignorance impoverishes them in several ways, he says.

Fruman illustrates with an anecdote: Years ago, a quiet young woman who always sat in the back row approached him after a class discussion of "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," a poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. "She told me that Coleridge powerfully expressed her own terrifying experiences of depression. 'The words just jumped off the page,' she confided. 'They were speaking to me and recording my experience.' "

Robert Kennedy also drew solace from the classics. After his brother John's assassination, he memorized lines from the Greek playwright Aeschylus about the wisdom that comes through suffering. Ravitch herself lost a child to leukemia in 1966. She has included the poem that sustained her -- "Oak and Lily," by 17th-century writer Ben Jonson -- in "The English Reader."I still can't read it out loud, it moves me too much," she says.

Language has the power to capture intimate emotions, but it can also move entire nations. "The English Reader" includes "words that changed the world, words that inspired revolutions," Ravitch says.

Fruman uses King Henry's great speech at Agincourt in Shakespeare's "Henry V" as an example. "When I hear it, I want to jump up and follow him into battle," he says. Fruman also recalls hearing Winston Churchill's thrilling words on the radio in 1940: "We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender." It's no accident that the other great Allied leaders of World War II -- Franklin D. Roosevelt and Charles de Gaulle -- were also great orators, he adds.

The 2002 New York City ceremony marking the first anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks suggested that contemporary leaders know they can't match that standard. Speakers read Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, recited Franklin Roosevelt's Four Freedoms, and quoted from the Declaration of Independence. Not one used his own words.

These speakers were important public figures -- two governors and the mayor of New York City. Apparently, however, they didn't trust themselves to say anything worth remembering.

The Oxford Blog Interview

OUP: The English Reader is a somewhat unconventional and eclectic mix of English prose and poetry. What was the thinking behind the selection process?

Michael and Diane Ravitch: One of the most exciting aspects of selecting the pieces for The English Reader was this unusual task of blending poetry and prose. We assigned ourselves a dual mission: to include the greatest and most influential passages of English literature, and to tell the reader a story about English intellectual history. Since our book is intended for the general reader, the selections are extremely diverse. For the poetry, we included most of the standard classic anthology pieces, but we also tried to put in a few surprises. We excerpted passages from great but less famous epic poems such as William Blake's “The Four Zoas” and Lord Byron's “Don Juan.” At the same time we included a few poems on the grounds of their popularity in their own day, such as Felicia Hemans' poem “Casabianca,” which generations of school-children once studied, and some later poets parodied.

The prose ranges even more widely. Certain pieces are intellectual and literary landmarks, such as the excerpts from Mary Wollstonecraft's “A Vindication of the Rights of Women” and from Edmund Burke's “Reflections on the Revolution in France.” For some of the other prose writers, the choice was not so simple. If we couldn't find a particularly famous essay or speech, we would choose instead a piece that both appealed to us greatly and that accurately represented the author's style and their point of view. As a consequence, alongside the more famous selections, we have some rarely anthologized pieces, such as “Man is a Toad-Eating Animal” by William Hazlitt. This essay not only displays his wonderful imaginative prose but it shows how radical British intellectuals and Romantic poets were fired up by the French Revolution. It is a good companion piece to the excerpt from Edmund Burke, who opposed the revolution.

We also included songs, political speeches and sermons, all of which are usually segregated into their own separate anthologies. By mixing them all up, fascinating connections become apparent. All these forms of expression are arguments, in their own way, different voices in a four hundred year dialogue about love and death, democracy and religion, individualism and patriotism.

Click on the title of this post to read the rest

The English In Us

An oped we wrote for the New York Sun Friday 12/15

In this Christmas season, many of us will sing "Joy to the World" without knowing that it is a hymn written by the English preacher Isaac Watts, and several days later, we will follow it up with "Auld Lang Syne," an old Scottish song that was rewritten by the poet Robert Burns. Not only are these songs part of the standard repertoire of American life, they are also part of our legacy from the British Isles.

In 1910, when Robert Frost taught at a high school in rural New Hampshire, he expected his students to memorize poems by William Wordsworth, Robert Browning, Alfred Lord Tennyson, and Rudyard Kipling. Today it is hard to imagine a high school teacher assigning a similar program.

For most of the 20th century, in schools across America, Frost's assignment would not have been considered at all unusual. Indeed, most parents and high school teachers believed that the literary masterpieces of the English tradition were essential elements in a decent education, a shared legacy that every educated person was expected to know.

Nowadays few high school and also not many college students have read Wordsworth, Browning, Tennyson, or Kipling. Even the best-educated students are unlikely to have encountered such great prose writers as Samuel Johnson and Thomas Carlyle, whose works were once considered the birthright of anyone who spoke the English language. These are precious resources of language and spirit that we have neglected to preserve for future generations.

This month, Oxford University Press is publishing our anthology of the greatest poems, essays, songs, and speeches of Great Britain, which we titled "The English Reader: What Every Literate Person Needs to Know." We deliberately chose a provocative subtitle because it is time, we think, to resist the growing impoverishment of our common cultural memory.

In the visual arts, there is still deep respect for the masterpieces of the past. People flock to the great art museums, enriching their lives by viewing the works of Botticelli, El Greco, or Picasso. That same sense of appreciation for the giants has been almost lost in literature. Educators today strive for "relevance," so that most of what students read reflects their own lives or our visually driven pop culture. Literary theorists in our universities deride the idea of a literary canon and have consigned the great works of earlier centuries to the ash heap of history.

But to ignore the tradition that shaped our democratic and freewheeling culture is the height of ignorance. By doing so, the educational establishment has relinquished its responsibility not only to preserve a major part of our cultural heritage, but also to teach students to appreciate great literature.

The English literary tradition itself is far from ideologically monolothic. It is, in fact, a series of arguments: between radicals and conservatives, between science and religion, between the romantic and the classical. It is not necessary to take sides in order to appreciate the power and beauty of the words. Thus a reader of our book can turn from David George's stirring celebration of World War I to the searing antiwar poems of Wilfred Owen, written on the Western Front.

These poems, speeches, and essays argue with each other and influence other works across generations. They refer to each other, in praise or disparagement, with the assumption that readers shared a common cultural vocabulary. D.H. Lawrence, in the selection that we chose, quotes from the King James Bible: "The grass withereth, the flower fadeth; but the word of our God shall stand for ever." Lawrence insists to the contrary that "the grass withereth, but comes up all the greener for that reason, after the rains … It is grass that renews its youth like the eagle, not any Word." The weight of the tradition gives his metaphor its power. If we are not familiar with the famous phrases from the Book of Isaiah, we are hardly able to appreciate what he is saying.

"The English Reader" starts with Queen Elizabeth and ends with Winston Churchill. In his famous speech to the House of Commons in June 1940, Churchill quoted the 17th-century poet Andrew Marvell on the death of King Charles I. "For all of us," said Churchill," at this time, whatever our sphere, our station, our occupation or our duties, it will be a help to remember the famous lines: ‘He nothing common did or mean, Upon that memorable scene.'" Churchill drew upon a poetic reference in order to emphasize that World War II represented the fight of civilization against barbarism. He inspired the British to fight by reminding them of the grandeur of their history and their literature.

Americans have inherited more from Britain than just our common language. Whatever our race, religion, or birthplace, we continue to celebrate and enjoy such ideals as individualism, liberty, justice, tolerance, equality, and freedom of thought and speech.

The terrorists who attacked America on September 11 despised the tolerance and individualism of our free society. They represent forces in the world that are eager to destroy our civilization and its beliefs. How can we defend our culture if we forget its greatest achievements?

The value of the classics

Hmm.. Perhaps there is a trend here. The classics making a come-back?

David Brooks wrote a wonderful column last week (unfortunately restricted to Times Select) about the influence of the Ancient Greeks on Robert F. Kennedy. Reading The Greek Way by Edith Hamilton helped Kennedy overcome his grief at his brother’s assassination.
Edith Hamilton wrote, “When the world is storm-driven and the bad that happens and the worse that threatens are so urgent as to shut out everything else from view, then we need to know all the strong fortresses of the spirit which men have built through the ages.''
Brooks ends with a restatement of the value of the classics.

The story of Kennedy's grief is the story of a man stepping out of his time and fetching from the past a sturdier ethic. He developed a bit of that quality, which greater leaders like Churchill possessed in abundance, of seeming to step from another age. Kennedy became a figure in the 1960s, but was never really of the '60s. He promoted many liberal policies but was never a member of a team since he drew strength from somewhere else. And the lesson, of course, is about the need to step outside your own immediate experience into the past, to learn about the problems that never change, and bring back some of that inheritance. The leaders who founded the country were steeped in the classics, Kennedy found them in crisis, and today's students are lucky if they stumble on them by happenstance.