"We have supped full with heroes..."

Time out of mind strength and courage have been the theme of bards and romances; and from the story of Troy down to to-day, poetry has always chosen a soldier for a hero. I wonder is it because men are cowards in heart that they admire bravery so much, and place military valour so far beyond every other quality for reward and worship?

This passage from Thackeray's Vanity Fair makes me wonder what it is about the figure of the hero that makes him or her so very attractive. The hero - whether literary, romantic, filmic, or theatrical - nearly always manages to acquire the respect and even worship of his or her audience. Why?
Is a hero a hero because he or she is capable of doing something greater than the mere mortals in the audience? Is it because the hero lives in a world that is somehow more raw, more primitive, more visceral - a world that requires heroism in a way that ours (for all its violence and tragedy) does not? Do we respect and worship heroes because we believe they are better than we, or because we see ourselves in them?

I think, perhaps, the circumstances make the hero. In reality, heroes do things that must be done if we are to hold out hope for our species - hope in both the psychological and biological sense. If someone were incapable of risking their own life to save others, our species might die out due to excessive fear, but the presence of heroes also allows us to recognize the human capacity for ethical justice.
In literature, the circumstances are controlled in such a way that someone must become a hero or the story would fail. Certainly, some Post-Modern works attempt to argue that there are no heroes, yet they most often focus on an individual who manages to mean something or at least mean nothing (which itself means something). But the focus makes them heroic because they represent the public acknowledgement of the more unpleasant, boring, seedy, and even embarrassing sides of human nature. They are heroes because they are in the public eye, drawing its sympathy, and making us question our own purpose in relation to our own realities. We may not like them, but they force us to think of them as heroes (even as anti-heroes), nevertheless.
But heroes we respect, heroes we worship, Achilles, Odysseus, Buffy, Frodo, Aragorn, Harry Potter... they are heroes in a far more Classical sense. They are heroes because somehow they take elements of the average human being and make them greater, more powerful, longer lasting. They are not perfect, but neither are we. Their imperfections make them somehow greater for their flaws because we can see that they are capable of overcoming those flaws. Perfect heroes - Galahad the pure and lily-white - are irritating because we have no hope of becoming them. Not only that, but they do not - they cannot - belong in our world. Perfect heroes die tragically because they are "too good" to live among the corruption of reality.
I would rather be Percival any day. Maybe he doesn't always get the Grail, but he gets close enough to begin to understand it and he gets to go home at the end of the day.

Poetic Musings

Today, in the midst of putting together the reading packet for my course this fall, I began to seriously think about what it means to teach poetry - specifically, what it means to teach poetry to an introductory class.
My students are freshmen and a sophomore - essentially without exposure to the kind of difficult poetry I will be asking them to read - and I have set for myself the goal of not only making them read it, but of trying to get them to take something meaningful away from it. I want to somehow impart my love of complex poetry to them - at least enough so that the experience of reading T.S. Eliot, H.D., Yeats, Wandor, Milton, and Tennyson is not painful.
So these are my thoughts.

Teaching poetry is essentially the art of making the connections between the obscurity on the page - especially with something like "The Waste Land" - and the things that have meaning in a more quotidian context. What this means, for me anyway, is that I have to make the link between contemporary context - literary, mythic, and even something as basic as life - and these mysterious works of literature that, to most freshmen, have no real basis in the external world.
To so many students, the only type of writing that has bearing on reality is journalism - and occasionally biography - though they're often jaded enough to recognize the fictionalisation of much of that. They have trouble - or at least are resistant to - connecting the world within the text to the world in which they live. Eliot's shanti, shanti, shanti means nothing to them because they don't have the context nor, once given the history, do they have a way to relate that context to something meaningful.
My goal - as a teacher, but more specifically with my course - is to get them to apply the same basic interpretive path (religious myth) across "classic" and contemporary works, and perhaps, by doing so, to get them to realize that older, "harder" works (Milton, Eliot, Tennyson), are, in fact, not so different from contemporary poetry and (even) contemporary science fiction (we're reading Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett).
What I want to be able to do in this class is to teach my students, god forbid, how to think. Yes, I'll be teaching them writing, interpretation, and close reading skills, but if they can think, and I mean really think, by the time they leave my classroom, I will consider myself successful.
I just hope it works.