College students don’t talk as much as they did decades ago. I’m not referring to class discussion, but to informal, casual talking before class begins, during breaks, and after it ends.

When my students arrive, usually they’re tapping and typing on their cell phones, and that’s where their focus continues to be as they slide into their seats and wait for class to get underway. When I teach a three-hour seminar, we pause in the middle. Some students check text-messages as they exit for the bathroom or stroll to the snack bar nearby. Others stay planted in their seats, heads down, fingers moving fast. The moment class concludes, everybody is quick to pounce on their phones.

It’s not easy, but I try to show students the interest and pleasure of good talk. I key everything in my classes to talking, and that’s something I stress even before the semester starts. In postings I send to students who have pre-enrolled, I say that our classroom will be a community where all are valued, every voice welcomed.

On the first day, I never open with announcements, nor do I “go over the syllabus.” I direct everyone to a passage, read it out loud, and we begin responding to it: I want voices resonating in the room. My class list includes thumbnail photos of the students. I memorize names and faces and, from the outset, I call on everyone by name. I don’t allow laptops. It’s discussion, face to face, about the writer’s words.

The conditions for learning, then, are a challenge. But I remain faithful to my goal: helping students to acquire important skills and enjoy the activity of reading, listening to, and speaking about literature. I’m constantly reminding them that each student has a distinctive voice and that their classmates do as well. I emphasize, too, that the writers we study have unique voices and, furthermore, that they create voices for speakers of poems and for characters in stories, novels, and plays.

Here’s the first stanza of a poem by Wilfrid Owen, titled “Exposure,” that I highlight when my Introduction to the Lyric course moves into the modern era. Owen was killed in action, age twenty-five, on November 4, 1918, a week before World War I came to a halt. It’s grim, tormented, and tragic, but I think students should learn about the literature of war and hear the expressive power of Owen’s voice in his writing. This isn’t print sitting silently on the page. It’s patterns and rhythms of sound coming from a speaker:

Exposure

Our brains ache, in the merciless iced east winds that knive us…
Wearied we keep awake because the night is silent…
Low drooping flares confuse our memory of the salient…
Worried by silence, sentries whisper, curious, nervous,
        But nothing happens.

“Exposure”: the state of being exposed to something; being outside in severe weather conditions without adequate protection. The troops Owen will describe are exposed to painfully cold winter wind, snow, and rain, and they’re at deadly risk from piercing enemy fire.

“Exposure” also means the revelation of an identity or fact, especially one that is concealed or likely to arouse disapproval. This is central to Owen’s mission: to expose for readers the realities of war. I encourage students to take in the manifold power of this word, its three syllables, with the firm first syllable, then the long “o,” and the slightly drawn-out final syllable with its fading “ur”: Ex-po-sure.

In the first line, Owen echoes Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale”: “My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains / My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk….” Keats is first-person singular; Owen is first-person plural. In class, we discuss the difference between a brain that aches and a heart that aches, and why Owen made the change he did.

The verb “ache” is emphasized, there’s a stop at the comma, and then the thrust of sound and sense in the next phrase with its sequence of “i” vowels: “Merciless iced east winds” and “knive.” Owen closes on another plural, “us,” and uses an ellipsis, which here and in subsequent lines lead us to slow down and think about the line we’ve just read and what it signifies.

Students take turns reading this first line out loud. I press them to apprehend in the words the bite and cut of the wind. It’s not just any wind, but one that Owen specifies comes from the east. The soldiers know how cruel and relentless this wind always is.

Line two: we vocalize the “w”s in “Wearied we keep awake,” which amplify the “w” in “winds.” There’s also the “i” in “silent,” which reaffirms the dominant register—all those “i” sounds—in line one.

The “o” sounds blur the words “low drooping,” followed by the counterpoint of “flares.” The memories of the men are confused in a scene that’s eerie and haunting. “Drooping flares” is a brilliant touch, for coincident with it, through the “fl” sound, is the image of a drooping flower. Owen is recalling Keats’s “Ode on Melancholy,” with its image of “droop-headed flowers.” We hear this phrase from Keats in the background even as Owen forms an image of his own.

Now, to line four: “Worried,” another “w” word. “Silence” reaches back to “silent,” which connects to the military term “salient,” line three. “Salient,” three syllables: a piece of land or section of fortification that juts out at an angle; an outward bulge in a line of military attack or defense. Silence, salient, sentries, and—a word we linger over—whispers: my students and I enunciate these “s”s and pick up the syllabic bond in “curious, nervous.”

In his first four lines, Owen establishes a momentum that carries us forward to a dispiriting surprise: “But nothing happens.” The mood is tense expectancy, exhausting monotony, fear and foreboding.

“Exposure” contains seven more stanzas, and my students and I locate ourselves aurally in each of them. We respond to a charged, intense voice informed by Owens’s own experiences of combat and shell shock. I want the students to realize that this poem is dramatic, full of sensation, heightened, so they know—so they feel—what it means for a writer to have a voice and use it.

We can’t stop the spread of cell-phone mesmerism and social media: they’re pervasive, alluring. But in the humanities, we should be a source of friction, a culture of resistance, making and embodying choices other than those that beguiling machines have conditioned us to take for granted. We demonstrate there’s an alternative, another way to think, act, and live. For me, it’s a small but significant victory when at the close of a class, a few students are talking to one another as they rise from their seats and move to the door.

William E. Cain is Mary Jewett Gaiser Professor of English at Wellesley College, where he enjoys teaching courses on Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and other American writers. His recent publications include essays on Edith Wharton and Ernest Hemingway.