On the morning of my first day studying English Literature at university, at an induction seminar, the senior course tutor read Wordsworth's We Are Seven to us. Then, after a longish silence, long enough for us to begin feeling rather awkward, he asked us each in turn if we thought this was a religious poem. And then, as a stilted sort of debate started to evolve within the group, he began tossing us more subtle and challenging variations on his opening gambit. Could it be described in particular as a Christian poem? Could we assume that the narrator was Wordsworth himself rather than some poetic alter ego... and if so could we infer from the poem that he, Wordsworth the man, believed in God? Was there an assumption underlying the text that its readers would naturally, probably, hold Christian beliefs? Did we believe that the conversation with the child had actually taken place? Or had it grown organically in the poet's imagination? Or was there a third possibility - that the exchange had been contrived inorganically to facilitate a (perhaps, if we're being hypercritical, a somewhat superficial or sentimental) meditation on mortality?
   Well. I'm not going to tell you how the tutor wrapped up the session or try to convey the nature of powerful impression he made on me (and I'm assuming everyone in that room) except to say that. decades later, I still think back now and then to my first meaningful encounter with Wordsworth.
   More so than ever in the last few months... largely thanks to the fact that I've been stumbling upon digital snippets of Christopher Hitchens at the height of his rhetorical powers. When I'm confronted with the clarity of his thinking and his utter refusal to compromise, I'm immediately propelled back almost always to that university seminar room all those years ago.
   Hitchens is (was) a hard man to love in toto, of course. I find aspects of his Marxism (even in long retrospect) inexcusable.
   But his broadsides aimed at other forms of corrosive nonsense now make me wonder about why no-one has ever really written about the extent to which drama, poetry, the novel (and other forms of story-telling) leans on woo, woo-woo and metawoo...