Poetry syllabus should not be a cultural battleground - Jayne Dowle

Did he really say that, or did one of his lackeys construct it for him? Or, given the current shenanigans in the Tory high command, is he taking what some might consider a reactionary stance to curry favour with a potential leadership candidate, Michael Gove, who as a graduate in English Literature and Language from the University of Oxford (same degree as me, actually), re-introduced the idea of learning poetry by rote when he reformed GCSEs during his tenure in charge at the Department of Education? Who knows? But how would John Keats, that rebellious Romantic poet, who died in Rome at the age of 25, a contemporary of Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron, feel about being ‘cancelled’?

The son of an innkeeper and ostler is another one of the stars of English Literature booted off the GCSE syllabus by the OCR, which has ditched 15 classic poems out of a total of 45 in favour of introducing “exciting and diverse” voices to its syllabus, including “poets of colour” and disabled and LGBT writers.

In their enforced exodus Keats, Owen and Larkin are joined by Siegfried Sassoon, Thomas Hardy and Seamus Heaney, who have all found some of their most popular and accessible poems dumped too. How can anyone jettison Seamus Heaney – who only died in 2013 – recognised as the greatest Irish poet since W.B. Yeats? Where’s the quality control?

David James, a deputy head-teacher, writing online for the Centre for Policy Studies think-tank, says: “There may be many reasons for replacing Larkin’s An Arundel Tomb with Flirtation by Rita Dove (the first African American to serve as Poet Laureate of the United States) but nobody except the most swivel-eyed social justice warrior could say the latter is the better poem.”

I couldn’t have put it better myself. When I studied English Literature the idea, for teenagers at least, was to introduce outstanding writing in English to young people who maybe had never come across such works before.

The OCR’s poetry anthology encompasses three themes: love and relationships, conflict, and youth and age. Poets it has retained include William Blake, Emily Brontë, John Keats, Sylvia Plath and Carol Ann Duffy.

The ideal GCSE poem should touch a nerve with anyone reading it, but push boundaries of thought and imagination, igniting curiosity about the time and place in which it was composed, sparking debate about how it would be regarded now. That’s why Wilfred Owen has been such a popular fixture on the syllabus for decades now; through him, generations of children have found perhaps their own gateway into what ordinary soldiers endured in the First World War.

New poets proposed for the OCR roster include the British-Jamaican writer Raymond Antrobus and the Ukrainian-American deaf poet Ilya Kaminsky.

It’s so important to tread carefully here; I wouldn’t for a moment argue that the work of these writers is not outstanding or worthy of inclusion. And studying it will enable many students to extend their understanding of positions far beyond their own direct life experience.

However, GCSE poetry is not just about providing words on a page which hold relevance for the reader, and nor should it be an echo chamber in which young people are only encouraged to study works which use language in ways that are familiar to them. Where would this kind of thinking end?

“As a teenager improving my grasp of the English language, Larkin’s poems taught me so much about my new home,” Zahawi added, or at least I hope it was him, and he meant it. Poetry should be savoured, thought about, dissected and discussed, not packaged up neatly in a box that ticks all the boxes. That’s what I’m worried about most of all.