I graduated High School in 1971, from a Catholic school named after a dead Pope. I remember reading Ethan Frome and The Old Man and the Sea. We had Romeo and Juliet and Macbeth for Shakespeare. We had poetry, but I do not remember specifically which poets, but all of the poets in the OP are familiar to me.
From Senior year English: the Nun that taught us wanted to teach from a contemporary novel. She chose a recent bestseller, The Godfather by Mario Puzo. She ordered the books and passed them out on the first day of class. She selected the person in the right front seat to stand and start reading aloud. It became very clear that the Nun had never read the book. about page 15, Sonny Corleone had Lucy Mancini up against a door and was pounding away.
The rest of the semester was silent reading and a quiz every Friday…
Ditto. I went to high school in the early 1960s. I may have read a book of Dickens. We did not read Kipling, Donne, or Wordsworth. I did have an AP English course that included Shakespeare. I don’t remember reading it, though. The teacher read it to us. In a monotone. It was her last course before retiring. I did my math homework while she read or sometimes I played Euchre with the guy sitting next to me. In the front row.
What gets taught in high school is almost irrelevant for almost everybody. I left with a huge hole comprising so-called classic literature. Like everybody else who cared about reading in the first place, I simply went out and read for own enjoyment. 10,000+ books later I still haven’t read Kipling, Donne, or Wordsworth, but I don’t feel embarrassed by it.
We read TS Eliot, but not* Old Possum’s Book*. I imagine it wasn’t serious enough for the AP examiners. My AP English course read Prufrock and The Waste Land.
One of my English teachers pointed out that Shakespeare’s plays weren’t meant to be read, but performed. So sometimes, we would see the plays, as films or filmed plays. It does help.
FWIW, I read Murder in the Cathedral in senior year high school English. I don’t think Eliot’s cat poetry ever got mentioned.
With a few exceptions, I don’t remember specifically which writers we learned about or read shorter works by, though we did do a fair bit of poetry and short stories. I do remember many of the longer works (novels and plays) I read in high school English. Freshman Year: Ivanhoe, Oliver Twist, Alice in Wonderland, Romeo and Juliet, Twelfth Night. Sophomore Year (American Lit) included Huckleberry Finn, Babbitt, The Great Gatsby, Catcher in the Rye, Of Mice and Men (play), The Glass Menagerie, Death of a Salesman. Junior Year (English Lit) included Beowulf, parts of The Canterbury Tales, Hamlet, Macbeth, Brave New World, Jane Eyre, The Mayor of Casterbridge, The Once and Future King, and the first book of The Forsyte Saga. Senior year included The Scarlet Letter, Tess of the D’Urbervilles, East of Eden, Heart of Darkness, Our Mutual Friend, Oedipus Rex, and two versions of Antigone (Sophocles and Anouilh). This was in 1981-85.
My HS had a heavy language arts program, so I had all sorts of things in different areas. A class where we just diagramed thousands of sentences, one where we put together the school newspaper, a creative writing class where we kept journals, yet another that was a survey of English and American literature (you still find these textbooks at the Goodwill for bathroom reading. They always have The Lottery, you’ll notice).
The lit bled over into the school’s social studies program: a class called “problems of humanity” where we read Jerzy Kosinski and Malcolm X, and a race-relations class where we read Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison.
Pretty sweet since I could smoke dope before class and still pull good grades. Fuck if I could have done that if they had been pounding math.
I graduated from high school 34 years ago and Eliot wasn’t one of the authors that we studied. I just asked my great nephew (going into his junior year, USA), he says that they’ve read some Shakespeare, Harper Lee, Tennessee Williams, Dickens, Maya Anglou, Alice Williams and Mark Twain. Not bad for the first two years.
IIRC, junior year was when we picked up the transcendentalists. For me, senior year was Shakespeare.
Well, part of my point. The other part being that there was no Golden Age when ordinary high schools taught the classics. As was, is, and will be the case, some schools and some teachers are better than others. Never make the mistake of thinking that we’re at some historic low. Things were probably worse in the past once you examine them properly.
Ha! I had to memorize (and perform!) that same passage from MacBeth in High School and also, to this day I can do it by heart. I also acted the hell out of it too
Graduated in 1996. We definitely did “Prufrock.” I don’t remember a ton of what we analyzed, since I had read 90% of it before having it in school, but I recall reading Beowulf (in 3 translations), Canterbury Tales, several Shakespeare plays (umm…Romeo, Julius, Hamlet, Macbeth and King Lear?), a bit of Faulkner and Tennessee Williams (“Rose for Emily” and "Glass Menagerie, maybe more), some godawful thing called “A Separate Peace,” I believe some Dickens–that might have been jr. high–Robert Frost’s usual suspects, Whitman and other Victorian/Transcendentalists…that’s about all I can think of right now. One of my English teachers that I had for several years, I believe was a frustrated philosophy major, so we read bits of out-of-context Spinoza and Schopenhauer, Goethe and Hegel. (She also taught German lessons, so…) Also snippets of Plato/Socrates discourses, the Iliad, and other classical contemporaneous works.
Senior year we focused on composition, more or less.
ETA–Our bit of risque work was excerpts from Boccaccio’s Decameron. And she showed excerpts of the film in class!! Tutting all the while, “Oh dear, I didn’t recall it being this explicit.” Fun times.
My kids are now 23 and 25 and never did any of those authors in High School. Didn’t even do Shakespeare.
English Literature wasn’t a high school subject way back when I went to high school, just English, but we did cover some of shaky Bill (Macbeth), some TS Elliot and Donne. We read The Hobbit when I was in year 7 and did “One flew over the cuckoos nest” in year 11.
If I quoted that sentence from TS Elliot about cats to my daughter, she’d think I was drunk.
I’m surprised at the lack of Shakespeare. We had Shakespeare every year in English, and high school in Ontario was five years, in those days. (The fifth year was what Americans might call, “AP,” and if you planned to go to university, you had to take it). So that was five Shakespeare plays you had to learn.
I’m not surprised at the lack of Eliot, though I am surprised at the lack of Donne. John Donne was part of the required syllabus (along with Andrew Marvell), and my teacher introduced us to Eliot as a “Donne-like” poet. She taught us “Prufrock,” but my curiosity led me to “Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats,” which I found much more accessible at that age.
Oh well. My paralegal students are there to get an introduction to substantial law, and they will get that. If I can pique their interest in literature; then though they need no such interest, so much the better.
Yeah, I don’t remember Donne being taught at all. I just looked up a list of his works, and I’m not familiar with any of them. It’s quite possible we did a work or two of his, but it’s not anything that got stored in my long-term memory. I suppose I should be somewhat embarrassed to say that poetry was my concentration in my English lit degree in college, but it was specifically the Romantics and Transcendentalists I gravitated towards.
But…Literature! It must be Very Serious. Any detectable level of fun might result in kids actually taking an interest, and that would fly in the face of ancient tradition.
I would have been happy to see “The Naming of Cats”, but we got no Eliot at all at my school, back in the latter days of the last century. Not much of anything else, either, really. Some Shakespeare (but none of the comedies), Poe (but only “The Raven”, which I liked enough to memorize, though it was not required), Hawthorne, a bunch of short stories (largely chosen for bleak outlook and/or unmemorability). My English teacher kept trying to sneak more interesting things into the curriculum, but she always got shut down.
It sounds like primary source and non-fiction readings that are in the Social Studies/History domain are migrating to English, while Social Studies content is reduced, and increasingly based on standardized tests of “facts” rather than interpretation.
Fun times.