theme,metaphor,work_id,dictionary,provenance,id,created_at,updated_at,reviewed_on,comments,text,context "","""Confronted by a vertiginous cascade of allusions, each one pointing to yet another unknown, retreating to the snail shell of the mind seems a whole lot more attractive: a poem responds to you, you don't respond to it.""",7186,"",Reading,19579,2012-02-07 14:36:14 UTC,2012-02-07 14:50:30 UTC,,"","Confronted by a vertiginous cascade of allusions, each one pointing to yet another unknown, retreating to the snail shell of the mind seems a whole lot more attractive: a poem responds to you, you don't respond to it. In a letter she wrote the day she died, Elizabeth Bishop complained to the editor of an anthology that included some of her poems about the notes that had been appended: ""If a poem catches a student's interest at all, he or she should damned well be able to look up an unfamiliar word in the dictionary. . . . You can see what a nasty teacher I must be--but I do think students get lazier and lazier & expect to have everything done for them."" Bishop saw in her students' resistance evidence of a bias against knowledge in favor of feeling: ""They mostly seem to think that poetry--to read or to write--is a snap--one just has to feel--& not for very long, either."" She closed, ""If you can get students to reading, you will have done a noble work.""",""