In his essay “The Aims of Education” Alfred North Whitehead  speaks of something he calls “inert ideas,” which he describes as those “ideas that are merely received into the mind without being utilized, or tested, or thrown into combination.” These “inert ideas” can take any form, in any field of study, at any moment because the quality of “intertness” is not really in the idea itself–not in its content–but rather in our relationship to the idea, and finally whether it has life in us. 

       That sounds pretty hackneyed in the abstract–granted–but I want to take up an example to see if I can’t better explain what I mean. I am taking an English course this semester in which we discuss (sometimes at significant length) the idea of meter. For instance, just last week we were talking about the following poem:

‘Tis the year’s midnight, and it is the day’s,
Lucy’s, who scarce seven hours herself unmasks ;
    The sun is spent, and now his flasks
    Send forth light squibs, no constant rays ;
            The world’s whole sap is sunk ;
The general balm th’ hydroptic earth hath drunk,
Whither, as to the bed’s-feet, life is shrunk,
Dead and interr’d ; yet all these seem to laugh,
Compared with me, who am their epitaph.

Study me then, you who shall lovers be
At the next world, that is, at the next spring ;
    For I am every dead thing,
    In whom Love wrought new alchemy.
            For his art did express
A quintessence even from nothingness,
From dull privations, and lean emptiness ;
He ruin’d me, and I am re-begot
Of absence, darkness, death-things which are not.

It was a frustrating class because we spent the majority of the already short time we had on the poem counting syllables and laboring over the rhymes (trochee this and dimeter that!)

       Now, on the one hand, I understand that it’s helpful to establish the way a poem should be read, and that it is just as helpful to pay attention to the rhymes, but on the other hand our discussion stalled at this point in our speculation. No one, including myself, and not even the professor said anything about what bearing the meter might have on the meaning of the poem. Instead we distantly related our approximation of its structure (pentameter, pentameter, tetrameter, etc) to a few other historically relevant (read: Shakespearean) examples, and spent the rest of the class pretending that we had talked about the poem. There were never any stakes in our discussion, and the idea of “meter,” though we appeared to deal with it, was always dead.

       From this, I think the next question to ask of me is the following: alright, if speaking in that way about meter represents one of Whitehead’s “inert” ideas, what would it look like to talk about meter as if it were alive in us? Tonight, I am not sure, but I would be quite interested to hear what others had to offer on the prospect–

xaire