JR: I did my Ph.D. at the University of Virginia on the Renaissance, and originally specialized in 16th and 17th century poetry. Then I shifted to Victorian poetry, on which I've done much of my scholarship. When I came to Princeton, I taught Romantic, Victorian and contemporary poetry as well as leading poetry workshops in creative writing.

ES: You yourself were an undergraduate at Princeton. Did you have professors whose teaching inspired you?

JR: I was happy being a student, but I was very shy and didn't speak in class until my senior year. I thought anyone whose class you could say something in was great. I was amazed by the Renaissance specialist Thomas Roche, who convinced me that a person could survive into adulthood unabashed about loving things-not like a parent at all, but like an extremely young grandparent. Tom was funny, passionate, and kind-even then his saintliness showing! Dick Ludwig got me started writing poetry, and Ted Weiss took care of me for years after. My single best course was with Victor Lange, who taught four of us a seminar on modern German poetry. I can't remember much of it now and I can't even read German any more, but I was galvanized by his energy and intellectual vigor. Richard Howard was another electrifying teacher of poetry.

ES: Did you have any training or preparation to be a teacher yourself?

JR: Absolutely none. When I was in graduate school at UVA, teaching was something like death: I knew it was going to happen, but I didn’t want to think about it too much. My first course was "Introduction to Shakespeare;" I was usually pretty good in the first class, but then I didn't know what I was doing. I had no idea how to prepare a course or a class, and in the early years I was so despairing that I considered dropping out and becoming a flea market glass dealer. I drifted from semester to semester, sometimes good, sometimes bad. But I am married to a great teacher (Constance Hassett, Fordham, English) who has won many teaching awards, and I have learned a lot from her.

ES: How do you see yourself as a teacher now?

JR: I am the opposite of a born teacher; I think conscientiousness and a sense of humor are my best assets. But I have gradually figured out how to teach poetry in ways that help both undergraduates and graduate students understand and enjoy it, and overcome their panic about its technicalities. In a poetry workshop, I feel completely natural; no anxiety there. I am focused on the students and their poems, and my job is to facilitate an atmosphere for them to discuss their work. A survey course is different, because poems have to be placed historically, and there is not as much space for close reading or listening. In a survey course I have to keep telling myself that the point is their learning, not my ideas, not even the overall coherence of the course. I have to keep reminding myself just to listen to the discussion, endure the silences, get people to think. The students who sign up for a course just in poetry, rather than a literature survey, are already different. And I much prefer teaching genres to teaching histories.

ES: Can you describe the way you teach a course on poetry?

JR: I'm now planning a new course for sophomores called "Introduction to Poetry." What we're up against with these students is their peer education. They have always thought they were baffled or puzzled by poetry. It seems like a game of codes to them, and they are attracted but scared. So I want to show them that they already know something about poetry and metrics, and that they can handle lyric poems. I'm likely to start with Dr. Seuss, with the pleasures of poetry. We'll read aloud in unison, "One fish, two fish/red fish, blue fish"-basically alternating stresses. Then I'll ask them how they knew where to place the stress. The rule is that when one term stays the same and the other varies, you stress the varied term: one, two, red, blue, rather than the noun, as you would if it were one hat, two bicycles. But of course they stress correctly without “knowing” the rule. And we talk about how Dr. Seuss has metrical rules, whether conscious or not.We also talk a bit about the pictures and how they help. Then we'll go to a more complex Seuss poem, like "My hat is old/My teeth are gold,” with its Charlie Chaplin pictures, and different metrical rules. I ask them how they know the poem is ending–one way is that he violates his own rules of rhythm and lineation at the very end.

Of course, I never noticed what a third-grade teacher once told me-that at the bottom of the page there's a little mouse, and because he's looking left, you know you should stop. If he were facing to the right, you'd turn the page to continue. The next step might be nonsense verse: 'The Hunting of the Snark." And then quatrains, starting with 'Mary had a Little Lamb," and moving to "O western wind,' Wordsworth, and lots of modern variants. After that we'll do metaphor as riddles, moving up to "A Martian Sends a Postcard Home” and Emily Dickinson. That's about the first month of the course. Among assignments I might give is to unwrite a poem-take out all the imagery and rhyme and meter, and then explain the differences in meaning and affect. Or to change the meter of a poem, and see what difference that would make.

ES: I like the way you turn poetry into a form of active, student-centered learning rather than a set of definitions.

JR: But at the same time, I'm doing what Northrop Frye or Andrew Welsh analyze as the "roots of lyric"-"babble, doodle, and riddle."

ES: And what about teaching advanced undergraduates and graduate students?

JR: In my seminar on 'Lyric Poetry," we still start with Dr. Seuss. But we move to Derek Attridge's Rhythms of English Poetry for technical matters in the first half of the course. They learn to scan with his system, and we do 100-150 lines of Pope together in class, keeping statistics on variations in beats, caesuras, and punctuation. Then in the following weeks, we'll do the same with Wordsworth, Milton or Thomson, showing the statistical differences in sound. Of course, any scansion system has limits, and can't be separated from syntax. But scansion is a way of making people pay attention long enough to see what they are supposed to see about the poem. By the end of the first half of the course, the students know as much about metrics and scansion as anyone in the world, so they don't have to worry about them any more. The second half is about metaphor, and that's much easier. All students have some panic about poetry, and graduate students have professional panic; but when we've worked together they can begin to experience the pleasures.