I have long disliked the term “liberal arts.” And by “long,” I mean since I first began seriously studying that term and the idea it stands for a dozen or so years ago. My unease is not with what it means, but how it means it. 

The history of the liberal arts, or as I prefer to call it, critical inquiry, is largely the history of books and writing and creative expression. But more than that, it’s the history of the nexus of knowledge and imagination itself, as a civilizational value: of how they are created, stored, and used (or abused). It is a history of curiosity, of openness to the wider world beyond one’s own community or culture. Openness, in other words, to moral and intellectual growth as a human being. 

Irene Vallejo writes in Papyrus, her study of the development of books, that Western poetry began in the Greek oral tradition because “rhythmic language was easiest to remember.” That strikes me as sensible and obvious. She goes on to say that she can remember poems she learned to recite in school “with extraordinary clarity.” Unfortunately, I don’t share that talent. I can recall snatches of verse – Whose woods these are … darn it, I think I know…  – but no more. And yet, curiously, I can remember the words to at least several hundred songs.  Somehow music, not rhythm, is the glue that holds things in my memory. This has not diminished the power of poetry for me. But that power comes with an abundance of mystery, confoundment, and trepidation.