삶의 경험으로서의 영시학습

Learning English Poetry as Life Experience in the Context of Creativity Education

A poem embodies a fragment of life experience of a poet. In it, the poet represents, in a very concrete and special way, how he feels and thinks of his life by means of the poetic words and techniques, that is, rhythms, images, metaphors and symbols, etc. Reading a poem sincerely, thus, enables us to share the poet's life experience and to feel and think as he does. In the process, the reader enacts and cultivates one's own sympathetic imagination, an important constituent of human creativity. The English Romantic poets are the great models of human creativity, especially in their passion to correct and innovate their old world into a new one by the performative function of their poetry. English poetry serves as very useful resources to supply the brilliant human creativity paragons. Learning English poetry as life experience can be itself the creativity education demanded urgently in all the educational fields these days. The creativity education has also some fundamentally utilitarian purpose in the modern information-inundated society. In this paper, learning English poetry as life experience is suggested in the case-study of Tennyson's "Tears, Idle Tears". The class begins with the student's presentation concerning all the informative knowledges of the poet and the poem together with the audio-visual materials. The main part of the learning is conducted by the professor with various challenging questions which guide the students' experience of the poem. The students respond either individually or by group according to the kind of questions. The class ends with interesting writing activities. On the way, the students, feeling for the poet's own sense of loss, experience how the poet meditates and analyzes that sense, eventually transmuting the poet's life experience into their own. They also solve the question of what the meaning of the past can be in their present life. In the process, the students' imagination and creativity can be more deeply enlightened.