“Read from the Book That Has No Words”: Teaching Stevens in China

IN DECEMBER 1965, nervous at the prospect of teaching her first poetry class at the University of Washington, Elizabeth Bishop wrote in a letter, “I am going to make them MEMORIZE. . . . Then a few lines should reoccur once in a while all the rest of their lives. If you know ‘The Emperor of Ice Cream [sic],’ surely it should dignify every ice cream cone you eat in the future—or so I fondly imagine . . .” (441). Bishop’s insistence on memorization, as well as recalling a poem in relation to experience, indirectly chimes with the situation of many a teacher in China, though with a different emphasis. Chinese students certainly have no trouble memorizing just about anything, having jumped the hurdles of an educational system that famously privileges learning by rote. But the difference, of course, is that Bishop’s insistence on memorization would represent a challenge to her students, whereas one of the challenges facing the teacher of Stevens in China—whether a foreign teacher or Chinese national—is to what extent Stevens can be successfully explicated in the Chinese classroom.

Fortunately, as Milton J. Bates discovered while teaching in China back in the year 2000, Chinese students are not buffaloed by poetry. That is, they are, at least, not afraid to read the genre rather than simply acquiescing to the cultural expectation of memorizing poems. This has much to do with the elevated position poetry has as a medium of communication in Chinese culture, and goes hand in hand with its historical importance, from the Tang Dynasty poets to the present (and through examples of poetry that precede the Tang). Poetry is used as a teaching aid in China to assist in learning the Chinese language, and it is not uncommon to find Beijing taxi drivers who are happy to recite the poems they learned in school. Generally speaking, therefore, even with a poet as demanding as Stevens, at least Chinese students are not intimidated by “the poem” and can rely on memorization of poems to ground them in the reality or experience of a poet’s language, however culturally nuanced that experience may be. Indeed, as we shall see, rather than the cultural contexts of Stevens’s work—along with its occasionally exotic language—representing insurmountable challenges to the Chinese student, there is every reason to believe that seeing Stevens through Chinese eyes will enhance our understanding of this poet’s language, modes of thinking, and possible influences.

When Bates came to China as a Fulbright lecturer at the turn of the millennium, he was affiliated with Beijing Foreign Studies University (BFSU). During his time at BFSU, Bates taught three courses: an undergraduate survey of American literature since 1900, a graduate course in American poetry from Whitman to Plath, and a further graduate course in American fiction (see Bates). BFSU, then and now, may not be as well known in mainstream Chinese culture as Beida (Peking University) or Tsinghua University—China’s most illustrious institutions, practically in spitting distance of each other in Beijing’s Haidian—but the focus on foreign languages and literatures at BFSU meant that the Chinese students Bates encountered had an unusually high degree of English comprehension for the time.

In his insightful and entertaining account, Bates reports feeling fortunate that he was able to encourage classroom discussion of Stevens and other American authors, not least because Chinese students can lack the confidence, or find it culturally embarrassing, to project themselves through interactive participation, especially with a teacher in a classroom setting. Despite, or because of, the success Bates found in initiating discussion, this experienced critic and Stevens scholar reported having “to develop an effective teaching strategy” for each of the authors he covered, and that, ultimately, he had to devote “more preparation time to Stevens than to the others”—perhaps not surprising given Stevens’s demanding vocabulary and daring poetic gestures (174).

With his BFSU students, Bates sensibly focused on many of Stevens’s shorter poems, including selections from Harmonium: “Anecdote of the Jar,” “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” and “The Emperor of Ice...