Is Your Attention Span So Easy to Destroy?

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If I'm trying to read a Shakespeare sonnet this is a virtue of be a wolf by the way over Beowulf. The reason your attention span is so easy to destroy is just simply that. If you woke up at six in the morning and you said what would I have liked to have done with today you would never ever once say six hours of Instagram. But maybe that doesn't mean they want to learn Milton I think maybe they should.

Tolkien read it as a tale about mortality. The poet David Whyte said it was a metaphor for the psychological demons deep in our minds. And that, insists the cartoonist and writer Zach Weinersmith, is precisely Beowulf's appeal: Its richness opens the door to endless interpretation. Listen as the author of Bea Wolf, a graphic novel for children based on the Old English poem, speaks with EconTalk's Russ Roberts about poetry in general, Beowulf in particular, whether we should require students to memorize poems, and the value of stories for children even without a moral lesson.