This paper argues that the prevailing tendency in the teaching of literature today is to rely too heavily on secondary material. An approach to training English majors to explicate and evaluate literature on their own is described. Students should understand that literature is not often autobiographical, that the writer's original intent is not fundamental to the understanding of a work, and that writers are most often intelligent. Exercises that focus discussion on explication and evaluation should be offered to give students the challenge of spontaneous thinking and solving a given problem as a group. James Tate's poem "Dark Street" is used to illustrate the value to the approach described. (TS)