English Literature’s Last Stand

English literature – so it seemed to me when I was a bookish zealot of 18 – was the prince of the humanities. When I was interviewed at Oxford and asked why I wanted to study English, I informed my interrogators (I still remember the phrase that I had practised beforehand and considered richly impressive) that “literature shows us what it is or might be to be human”. I believed it. In books, I felt with Tennyson that I had sensed the living souls of the dead flashed on mine. Poems – especially by Hopkins, Eliot and Auden – worked on me like spells. I had contrived to download a recording of Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts” on to my primitive mobile phone, and at school would stand in the playground with the device pressed to my ear, enraptured by the tinny incantation, convinced I was responding to a higher call. Literature, if one were to reduce it to anything so tawdry as a formula, was history multiplied by philosophy multiplied by life. I regarded my peers who had chosen to study mere facts at university rather than to be inducted into the glamorous mysteries of the human heart with some pity (an attitude I have still not entirely shaken off).