Informant38

Seamus Heaney on poetry and teaching it, with an excerpt of Shakespearean proportion
Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
Will hum about mine ears, and sometimes voices,
That, if I then had wak'd after long sleep,
Will make me sleep again.

"Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight, and hurt not": that, as a description of the good of poetry and of literature in general, will do. It is not required that the experience of the sounds change Caliban into another kind of creature, or that it have a carryover effect upon his behaviour. The good of literature and of music is first and foremost in the thing itself and their first principle is that which William Wordsworth called in his Preface to Lyrical Ballads "the grand elementary principle of pleasure", the kind of pleasure about which the language itself prompts us to say, "It did me good."