We look at Yeats a little more, then "Michael Field," and then Housman's poem about Wilde and other poems about his own sexuality, and about the intense, Horatian ephemerality of life. A class in part about why I hope poetry, or some poems, will matter to the students throughout their lives.
Wilde in prison, or in Dante's hell, and the differences and similarities between the grimness of "The Ballad of Reading Gaol" and the charming, dazzling self-delight of his earlier self-presentations, in a class guest-taught by Princeton's Professor Jeff Nunokawa.
Another Kipling poem -- "Danny Deaver" and the horror of hanging (in partial anticipation of Wilde's "Ballad of Reading Gaol"), and some discussion of Arnold, Pater, and Wilde as context for Lionel Johnson's "Dark Angel." Then two versions of Yeats's "Cradle Song."
We discuss one poem of Amy Levy in the context of her short and painful life, then look at Robert Bridges's version of sprung rhythm -- how it differs from his friend Hopkins's and then after a brief and fractional defense of Kipling from the worst that could be said about him, we consider his poem "In the Neolithic Age."
The way metaphor works in one of Stevenson's songs of travel, a little attention to George R. Sim's punning in one of his "lunatic laureate" poems, and then close reading of the amazing Alice Meynell, in particular "Renouncement," "A Cradle Song," "The Modern Mother," and "Parentage," with some attention to the experience of Catholic guilt.
We look at an interesting poem by Louisa S. Guggenberger, a very short poem by George MacDonald, and a couple of formal experiments by Stevenson, which mean the explanation of pantoum-like poems and triolets or rondeaux more generally -- examples of triolets from Hopkins and Chesterton. Then the sublime original envoy to A Child's Garden of Verses .
A lot of greats to do in a single day, and not wanting to miss Eliot we begin with a little contextualization of three of the sonnets from "Brother and Sister," then move on to a few grim Hardy poems, and then to Hopkins: "As kingfishers catch fire" compared with one of the "terrible sonnets," "I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day."
We discuss "The Garden of Proserpine" and the ways that it anticipates or instantiates Freud's idea of the death drive: all the repetitions in the poem. Then we turn to the poet most opposite in attitude: Hopkins, and talk briefly of "Pied Beauty" and "That Nature is a Heralcitean Fire." Discussion in Instress and the Duns-Scotian term haecicity that makes it possible, as opposed to Thomas Aquainas' universality. We'll finish considering Hopkins next class.
We have to abandon Fitzgerald because time is short, so mainly on to Modern Love , with some context, then Hopkins's "Binsey Poplars," Swinburne (and Buck Mulligan quoting The Triumph of Time in Ulysses ), and an intro to "The Garden of Proserpine," via Spenser's "Garden of Adonis" in The Faerie Queene (which I discussed a little while ago here ), and Milton's account of how Eden is even greater than the fair field of Enna where Persephone gathering flowers by gloomy Dis was gathered....
We talk about George Meredith for a while -- "Lucifer in Starlight" (and the 1882 transit of Venus) and his relation to his wife, Mary Ellen Nicolls, and the relationship of both of them to Henry Wallis who'd painted Meredith as Chatterton. We plan to return to Modern Love , but first we begin reading through Fitzgerald's Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam , after quoting him on its form and its moral: "Drink--for the Moon will often come round to look for us in this Garden and find us not."...
A couple of poems by Patmore, a somewhat tedious excursus into propositional attitudes and game theory, then the rest of "Goblin Market."
We conclude our discussion of D.G. Rossetti's "Blessed Damozel," paying particular attention to the passages in parentheses and the subtlety of what they suggest about the speaker's sense of the Blessed Damozel's perception of him. We then move on to begin reading "Goblin Market," trying not so subtle account of its subtle sexuality -- or maybe it would be better to say a subtle account of its not so subtle sexuality
A brief introduction to Pre-Raphaelite poetry and painting: the perceptual psychology that it brings us to notice. A close reading of Dante Gabriel Rossetti's amazing "Woodspurge." A little bit on his "Blessed Damozel," followed, via a Mr. Magoo-inflected reading of Lewis Carroll's "Mad Gardener's Song," by a more general consideration of rhyme and in Victorian poetry and the question of its prominence or lack thereof: important as well to "The Blessed Damozel," but we ran out of time and may no...
What amours de voyage are. What it means to idealize what Keats calls "The fair creature of an hour," as Claude does. How such idealizations derive from "Juxtapositions." What it means to see through one's own idealization, by understanding its biochemical substrate. What's wrong with seeing through that idealization. With examples from Proust (and his differences from Freud). All relevant tangents, or so I think. With some interesting information about Andrea Aguyor.
Mainly Clough, mainly a kind of intro to Amours de Voyage , with some historical (Mazzini, Garibaldi) and biographical context as well as context in narrative theory, especially of the epistolatory novel. Clough the atheist and port-Darwinian, and his views of nature. Then a quick and fun reading of "The New Decalogue," and a plan to return to Amours de Voyage next class.
Most of the class is on Edward Lear, and what his kind of nonsense poetry (very different from Carroll's) tells us about how poetry works in general. Then a return to Clare, to complete "The Winters Spring."
We begin talking about Carroll's "The Hunting of the Snark" and what makes comic poetry what it is -- making the arbitrary tight (the way OuLiPo does, so this is this semester's excursus on OuLiPo). Then a little about the plot that some of the students may have missed. Following which, an introduction to John Clare, and the first stanza of his poem "The Winters Spring," which we'll continue with next class.
Having considered the title in the last class, we do the whole of R. Browning's " ' Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came' " today, looking at how he (Browning/ Roland) undoes the difference between success and failure: "Just to fail as they seemed best, / And all the doubt was now - should I be fit?"
We start with a few lines from much later in EBB's Aurora Leigh (and their near explicit critique of Tennyson), then finish discussing "Development" (and its relation to modernity), then look at Pope's translation of the Thamyris passage in Book II of The Iliad , and the surviving fragments of Sophocles's play about him, and then spend the class on "Thamuris Marching," which has Aristophanes describing Sophocles's play in terza rima, and we end with the title of "'Childe Roland to the Dark Tower...
Feminism and poetry for EBB. Poetry as a counter to an industrialized world and the constraints its analysts try to put on poetry. We begin discussing Robert Browning's moving late poem "Development," which shows an attitude similar to EBB's.
A couple of great student modernizations of Barnes' "The Turnstile" (worth listening to! Don't fast forward) and then some discussion of the subtleties of Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh , and its relation to the rise of the 19th century novel ( Jane Eyre ), with some attention to just a few lines of Book 1 of the poem.
Poetry and nature as the surrounding world is industrialized; dialect and the local; experienced attitudes towards prior innocence; what "tomorrow" means in Brontë; dialect spelling; and then the amazing and heartbreakingly moving William Barnes, especially his poem "The Turnstile."
First some process shot accounts of 19th c. affiliations between a lot of the figures we're doing. Dialectic poetry. Rubaiyat stanzas. Then Tennyson's great "Tithonus" with some attention to its similarities and differences from "Ulysses"
A consideration of the opening of "The Lotos Eaters" and the amazing way Tennyson handles sound. Repetition. How he does something similar in some despairing stanzas from "In Memoriam."
One of Tennyson's epigraphs: "Astronomy and geology: terrible muses." The importance of Arthur Henry Hallam's death to Tennyson, especially because of his religious skepticism. Gibbon on St. Simeon Stylites. Dramatic Monologues. "Ulysses," in Carey's translation of Dante and then Tennyson's poem. The great Achilles = Hallam, but we know the ending from Dante -- he won't see him again.
First class on Victorian Poetry. The best and largest corpus of really good poetry in English -- really good because the novel is the bid for greatness now. But really good is really good. The Victorians' relationship to some modernists (just a little) and to the Romantics, especially Shelley and Wordsworth, illustrated in poems by Robert Browning, Beddoes, Patmore, Meynell, and Christina Rossetti. N.B. Text will be Christopher Ricks, ed. New Oxford Book of Victorian Verse....
After some last class paper topic business we spend most of the time finishing our discussion of Elisa Gonzalez's amazing "Notes Toward an Elegy" , and its relation to Bishop in particular (not only " Casabianca" but also "Love Lies Sleeping" ; cf. Gonzalez's "And now I lie awake pretending / everyone in the world lies still the way the living are still," which is a kind of summary of Bishop's poem). And so farewell to the class!...
People pretty punchy in penultimate palaver, especially when we have some discussion of Edward Gorey, whom almost no one had heard of! But we finish talking about Bishop, amidst lots of whackiness and then start Elisa Gonzales's great poem "Notes Towards an Elegy" from 2021 (published just before the murder of her brother) -- we are treating this poem (as will I hope become clearer next week in the last class) as the third in the line from Hemans through Bishop....
More on forms: in particular the ghazal, and the way poems quote, as in Shahid Ali's relineated quotations from Adrienne Rich, and Bishop's quotation from Hemans' "Casabianca." To be continued.
Understanding things (poems, songs, etc.) more deeply than their creators as an incentive for rewriting. How poets rewrite their precursors. Example: Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn" and Dickinson's "I died for Beauty."
