Many people think that one of the important things English courses and English teachers do is teach people how to "analyze" poetry (and fiction and drama).

It often surprises people when I say I don't think that such an activity actually exists at all.

Analysis, according to the Merriam-Webster online dictionary, is "1 : separation of a whole into its component parts 2 a : the identification or separation of ingredients of a substance b : a statement of the constituents of a mixture." That's almost never what anybody's doing when they write an analysis of a poem -- and when it is, it turns out to be a descriptive list of components (this poem is an Italian sonnet, so it has iambic pentameter fourteen lines, of which the first eight pose a problem and the last six resolve it . . . and so on). Analyzing fiction is even harder to think about, because there's no agreement about what "the parts" might be. What we really do when we write essays in English class about works of literature would be better called "appreciation."

But in any case, I don't know of any English class (except this one) where those pieces of writing, whether we call them "analysis" or "appreciation," really serve any purpose other than to demonstrate that the writer has read and understood, and thought about, the piece of literature in question. And it's not a kind of writing that gets done anywhere in the world except in English classes. Even English professors, writing articles for scholarly journals, don't write pieces which explain what's in a work. What they do when they write about one work, generally, is say that other people have missed something important about it.

So why do English classes so often ask people to write "analyses"?

Some of the reason, of course, is just habit. It's what we've always done. Usually part of the reason is to get students to demonstrate that they've actually read and understood the piece they're writing about. And there are what could be called "spinoff benefits" to the process: some people do learn to do a certain kind of thinking about texts by writing literary essays, and there are, I'm assured (though, as you can see if you take a look at my policy on grammar, I'm skeptical of this), people who learn about mechanical issues -- grammar, spelling, and so forth -- by writing literary essays and having them red-inked by a teacher. And there's an argument that asking for analysis forces students to read more closely, and that reading "great books" intensively makes you a more "cultured" person.

I think, though, there are better ways to learn those things, and to become a "cultured" person. They involve (a) writing about issues of real mutual concern for people who care about them (sometimes that's a matter of explaining what a text says and does, sometimes it's not) and (b) becoming a person who reads (maybe even reads "great" books) for the rest of your life, rather than someone who's encountered the eight or ten books you can attend to in a course and then stops, considering the process over. (This is what often happens when people spend time writing "literary analyses."

What people actually do with their reading out in the world beyond class, when they're not doing an assignment, is to share their reactions and understandings and evaluations with other people; they give each other books, recommend poems, hand each other articles, talk about them at parties and over coffee, and in general use them to compare their beliefs and evaluations with those of other people. That's what we'll be doing with literary (and other) texts in my classes.