Were my reading assignments interesting? Moving? Inspiring? These are the questions I ask myself after teaching literature classes. I hope my students will experience the sort of engagement that Eudora Welty describes here. She writes about spending an afternoon in the library reading Yeats and feeling so absorbed by the poetry that it seemed real to her. She thought that if she went outside, she would feel the poem falling on her shoulders like snow, that “it would pelt me on its way down – that I could move in it, live in it – that I could die in it, maybe.”
Welty, Eudora. One Writer’s Beginnings. Harvard University Press, 1984, p. 81.