I teach a course on how to read a poem. And I teach Shakespeare. Fall term: comedies, histories and poetry. Spring term: romances and tragedies.
I've learned in the last 15 years not to assume anything. Unless students are religious, I can't take the Bible for granted. I can't say "this has some relation to the Book of Job" because they might not know what that is.
I can't assume they've read Chaucer, either. And it's very hard to get started on Shakespeare if you haven't read Chaucer.
It used to be that you could be pretty sure that either on their own or in a good secondary school they would have read "The Iliad" or "The Odyssey." Not anymore. Now you have to send them to read it, along with "The Canterbury Tales" and the Book of Job.
They'll go, of course, and they'll read it. And they'll grasp it immediately. They're just as bright as always. But shouldn't they know it already?
It's going to be very difficult to change this; perhaps it will never be changed. But I do wish we could keep computers out of their secondary and primary education, and out of their libraries. It would be so much better for them and for all of us.
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Harold Bloom is a professor of humanities at Yale University, a literary critic and author of "The Western Canon" (Riverhead Books, 1995).
