Cute?

I was a little bit flabbergasted, a little bit disappointed,  and a big bit amused when a student described Coleridge's "Kubla Khan" as "cute."  To be fair, she was probably just trying to humor me and let me know that she didn't hate it, or at least she didn't want me to feel bad about my reading of the poem to the class.  She was being respectful and kind, and I appreciate that.  However, to hear and read a poem written in an opium haze about the exotic and epic palace of a cruel and powerful ruler, a place where women wail for their demon lovers and there are mystical rivers and caverns measureless to man, this palace's destruction in fire and ice, and the power of myth and poetry to replicate such things, and then to respond with, "eh, it's cute" shows a misunderstanding of the poem in general.  The entire class seemed to be bored with the poem, and any teacher knows that boredom happens sometimes, and good teachers push on and find a way to instill sparks of interest with the next text, or the next, or sometimes good teachers must be satisfied with the hope that they have prepared a garden where interest will grow at a later date, sometimes years down the road.  I know these kids, and they are brilliant kids.  I know these texts, and I know that they are brilliant texts. I don't need my students to love every text that we read, but I need them to understand most of them on a basic level.

I would be happy if one of my students had said that they didn't enjoy the text, but that they understood what Coleridge was doing, that they understood that he was exploiting the exotic ideals of The East in a romantic and mystical poem that intended to create a yearning and an awe of the unknown depths of human history, even if they felt that he failed or that he utilized racist stereotypes to achieve this end; that would be good AP level criticism; however, though it may be annoying and problematic in many ways, "Kubla Khan" is not cute.

We are beginning to read one of my favorite novels of all time, Frankenstein.  Perhaps with Mary Shelley's help, my students and I can bring the Romantic ideal out of the realm of "cute."