“I walk with Plato in my pocket, but I proceed into the world with my eyes wide shut.”
In high school, I wrote this phrase in a journal, yet the sentiment persists in haunting any ponderance of my university studies. Our books are caskets that carry dead words of the past. Opening them, we may feel the unseen presence of ghosts we cannot identify—spectres of influence from authors we have never read, those whom our fragmented studies omit.
In critique of modern curricula, it is common to encounter similar forms of lamentation: how it is blasphemous that one can obtain a degree in English without any directed study of Shakespeare, Chaucer, or Milton; how it is obscene that one can obtain a degree in Classics without ever flirting with Latin or ancient Greek. A new season has fallen upon the landscape of academia. Throughout the past half century, institutions of higher education across the country have dug out the old roots, favoring the position that the “Western Canon” is to be abandoned.
T.S. Eliot once expressed, “The purpose of literature is to turn blood into ink.” Literature transubstantiates the rawness of human experience into an enduring art. As we move away from the canon, we risk severing the veins through which that ink flows.
Choice has proliferated in the American university system. We are offered a buffet of courses with few parameters for selection. In the Princeton English department, students are afforded almost complete liberty to chart a course through the major, save requirements that they complete courses in designated time periods or follow certain disciplinary approaches. Aside from independent work, only 9 courses are required to complete the degree. A Princeton diploma requires the completion of at least 33 courses. Therefore, scarcely 30% of an English major’s entire university education is necessarily dedicated to English coursework. Conversely, the British model of higher education is inflexible. Students receive admission to a specific degree program, lacking any formal coursework outside their specialized subject area. An English degree at Oxford is conducted over three years. The curriculum prescribes study of each major period of English literature and language, spanning from the 6th century to the early 20th century.
The earnest argument has been made that newer curriculum structures are more accessible and inclusive, but the current efforts toward this goal have come at the expense of preserving what makes degrees meaningful. Many critics of the contemporary humanities decry the new curricula’s constitutional erosion of rigor. While universities like Princeton still demand excellence, rigor attenuates if students do not gain true expertise—which involves a comprehensive, historicized understanding of the lineage of literary thought.
We therefore need some semblance of the canon back. But, it can only be implemented if we redefine what the “canon” means.
Harold Bloom and Toni Morrison each characterize the polarity of previous discourse on the “canon.” Bloom was the king of canonization, publishing extensive introductory volumes on western literature and poetry. His canons were founded on a principle of exclusivity, composed of works by those historically considered “The Greats” (i.e. books composed largely by white men). Bloom made unequivocal and tendentious judgements about good or bad texts and authors, which seem overly determined by his personal literary tastes. For example, when evaluating Edgar Allen Poe, one of the most well known and well regarded names in English poetry, Bloom said, “No reader who cares deeply for the best poetry written in English can care greatly for Poe’s verse.” Morrison, on the other hand, rejected the idea that the existing, strictly-outlined canon was necessary for a student to receive a meaningful literary education. For her, the canon resulted from historical exclusivity and subjugation, and she sought to include within it more diverse works (i.e. books by women and/or people of color).
Both these positions on the canon are flawed. Bloom’s view suffers from a tendency toward idolatry, deifying the Greats based on a subjective hierarchy of aesthetic sublimity. In contrast, total rejection of the canon in the name of inclusivity produces disparate, ahistorical chaos. Dismantling tradition has left students with their eyes wide shut, gaining knowledge of niche areas without fully recognizing literature’s contextual subtleties. To move forward, we must stop viewing the canon as a fixed gate and start viewing it as a dynamic lineage.
This shift requires us to move beyond the term’s political baggage and return to its functional essence. At its core, a canon is a group of texts that can be amalgamated into a single unified tradition, wherein reading earlier works enhances your ability to appreciate later texts. The fundamental crisis lies not in the concept of a canon itself, but in its institutional application. Historically, the academy championed a monolithic literary canon, an assembly of venerated texts whose exclusivity rendered adjacent traditions invisible. However, the concept of an all-encompassing literary canon or a “Western Canon” poses an issue because of its irreconcilable broadness of scope. Princeton’s year-long Western Humanities Sequence attempts to offer a survey of the western tradition’s greatest books. Each year, the coordinating professor must curate a reading list that attempts to bridge the unbridgeable. To map the Western tradition is to attempt to cage a storm. Even if one ignores the various calls for diversity and clings strictly to the European thread from Homer to Nietzsche, it remains an unnavigable task. The “tradition” has never been a single golden thread but a quilt of a thousand different fabrics stitching together disparate voices.
There cannot just be one canon, but many. Each must function as its own Hegelian Geist, a collective spirit or “mind” that realizes itself through history. A canon becomes the transcript of that spirit’s evolution. According to the outdated concept of the “Western Canon,” 3000 years could be spanned to create literary continuity between Homer and Joyce. But this attempt at a singular, all-encompassing canon fails because it is too broad to maintain a coherent pulse. The classical tradition and the canon of Greco-Roman antiquity radiated outward, not only to the literature and thought of Europe and the West, but also to Eastern cultures. If we are to follow the sequence of influence in order to compose a canon, we find that the Classics have breathed their impact on cultures across the globe. There is no feasible way to contain this expanse under the usual concept of a single canon. Instead, we should recognize that different traditions possess their own distinct historical consciousness.
By adopting a plurality of canons, we allow each tradition to be studied as a unified movement of mind. There should be an English canon, following the Oxford model, which tracks the specific Geist of the English language from the 7th-century forest to the 19th-century city. An American literary canon would differ, manifesting a spirit defined by its own unique collisions and contradictions. Books by Black authors merit inclusion in the American canon, while equally deserving canons of their own. The work of W.E.B. DuBois sails in the wake of Fredrick Douglass’ craft. A separate canon of diasporic thought and theories of colonialism may showcase the likes of Aimé Césaire and Franz Fanon. Yet, this grouping would not inhibit the belonging of Césaire of Fanon to a larger canon of continental philosophy.
Each humanities department could still offer students a degree of choice by allowing them to select a canonized path within their major. Many departments already have loosely outlined “tracks,” which could be reimagined as cohesive intellectual lineages. In this model, the English department might offer a canon for theatre, tracing the evolution of the stage from Shakespeare’s blood-soaked tragedies to Edward Albee’s modern grit. Similarly, the Classics department could offer a truly comprehensive canon of ancient Greek literature, from Homer to Pindar and the tragedians. A humanities degree would no longer be an amorphous assemblage of unrelated credits but reflect a purposeful pursuit of excellence.
The canon’s reinstitution is a prerequisite for the scholar’s survival. As Ralph Waldo Emerson observed in The American Scholar: “The next great influence into the spirit of the scholar is the mind of the Past,—in whatever form, whether of literature, of art, of institutions, that mind is inscribed. Books are the best type of the influence of the past, and perhaps we shall get at the truth,—learn the amount of this influence more conveniently,—by considering their value alone.” To Emerson, the “mind of the Past” is not a decorative accessory but an essential influence that inspires the scholar with spirit. To obtain a degree without engaging with the canon is to remain a spectator to the Geist rather than a participant in it.
A fragmented curriculum is a failure of the highest order. The “mind of the Past” is the very air students must breathe to achieve true expertise. When a curriculum allows for massive lacunae in a student’s knowledge, it denies them spirit. It produces graduates who possess a degree in name, but who lack the literary consciousness required to see their work as part of a continuous, unfolding tradition. We cannot expect a student to contribute to the mind of the Future if they have never been forced to reckon with the mind of the Past.
Image Credit: Princeton University Library (1903) – Wikimedia Commons
Copyright © 2026 The Princeton Tory. All rights reserved.