On owing one’s poetic life to inspiring teachers of English

Abstract

In the final plenary at the International Association of Teachers of English as a Foreign Language (IATEFL) 2015 Conference in Manchester, the poet laureate Dame Carol Ann Duffy preceded her reading of a selection of poems by speaking about the significance of teachers of English. It’s a privilege for me as a poet to be used by teachers in the classroom. I fell in love with poetry as an 11-year-old thanks to my teachers and I wouldn’t have had my poetic life without my teachers. Duffy was talking about her teachers Ms Scriven and Mr Walker, both of whom believed in her writing and guided her reading. When Ms Scriven passed away, Duffy celebrated her influence by means of the poem ‘Death of a Teacher’: When I heard the hour – home time, last bell, late afternoon – I closed my eyes. English, of course, three decades back, and me thirteen. You sat on your desk, swinging your legs, reading a poem by Yeats to the bored girls, except my heart stumbled and blushed as it fell in love with the words and I saw the tree in the scratched old desk under my hands, heard the bird in the oak outside scribble itself on the air. In her plenary, Duffy established a direct relationship between the incipience of her passion for poetry and its powerful manifestation on the part of her teachers. She used her own personal experience in order to underscore the value of inspiring teachers for promoting an enthusiasm for poetry reading and writing amongst young people. She seems to believe that without such teachers, poetry would find it hard to take root in the lives of future generations of readers and writers.