Pope's topicality, and its origins as recounted in the Horatian Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot . How poets become enmeshed in the world. Pope writing within the form of that enmeshment. His travails with Theobald. Excursus on Bentley and Theobald. Return to the Rape of the Lock and the brilliance of the reported speech.
More on Virgil's relation to Homer and the Aeneid as a response to Homer. Virgil's sublimity: sunt lachrymae rerum and facile descensus Averni . Descents into the underworld in Homer, Virgil, and Dante. The treacherous Sinon in Virgil and in the Inferno . Self division ubiquitous and deep in Virgil, whereas only found in this mode in Achilles in Homer. Three scenes of supplication from Aeneas's point of view as the one supplicated.
10/21/10 Conclusion of analysis of Pope's pyrotechnical mimesis in the Essay on Criticism ; exposition of the difference between rules (artificially formulated and imposed) and laws (discovered in nature and in the poets who discovered them in nature); consideration of the variety of his tones; analysis of the conclusion of Eloisa to Abelard with her describing how later people like Pope will write poems in her voice; beginning of an account of Rape of the Lock , including the relation of mock t...
An introductory class on Pope, in particular the Essay on Criticism . Pope's poetic mode compared to Dryden's. Some account of Pope's effects in the essay. The difference between judgment and creation; and the similarities between them: how Virgil was a great critic of Homer and had to be in order to use Homer as the model for the Aeneid . Pope's own critical theories and his holism.
A mixed class, with some more attention to Ovid, especially the myth of Narcissus and its way of thinking through mirror image representations and parallelism; and then some examination of both the parallels and the differences between Homer and Virgil -- what it was that Virgil was attempting to refigure within Homer and how. Consideration of the way Virgil likes to give Homeric scenes a perspective from the other important figure in the scene, reversing subject and object.
First class on Ovid -- Milton's versions of Ovidian creation (from Chaos and pure matter, not ab nihilo) and of Proserpine gathering flowers. Ovid's mythic consistency compared to Plato's theory of the consistency or coherence of truth. Brief account of the parable of the cave in the Republic,
Swift in a more serious mode: his honesty about himself as well as others. The verses on the death of Dr. Swift. His view of himself at the end. His praise of Pope. La Rochefoucauld on human folly. Swift's version of this. His lovely realism with respect to Stella.
Philosophy vs. comedy: this world and the world of forms. The competition between them. Theories of truth: coherence vs. correspondence. Philosophy wants consistency, whereas comedy isn't interested in consistency but simply in correspondence. Aristophanes and Jon Stewart: political commentary.
Second class on Plato: the through line in Socrates being his ambivalence about poetry: in the Republic, in the Ion, for example. His penchant for quoting Homer despite this. Compared to Hamlet quoting Aeneas's Tale to Dido. What threat does poetry represent to philosophy? Both seek the same ground as discourses of everything. The idea of divine inspiration: the magnetic influence of poetry. More on forms. The form of mud in the Parmenides.
FIrst (of two) classes on Swift. Swift's vividness compared to Rochester's. His misanthropy and also his sense of human wrong: how it's the fact that humans do wrong that makes them hateful, but the wrong they do is to humans. Corinna and Celia as human and as holding it together when everything is falling apart. Swift's sense of how hard aesthetic surface or "varnish" is. Virgilian description of a city shower.
Rochester's range, the beauty of some of his poems, their psychological acuity. His account of fear and the self-sustaining paradoxes of mutual fear, including the fear of being thought fearful. Dr. Johnson's quotation of his bon mot: "All men would be cowards if they durst." Obscenity of "The Imperfect Enjoyment" but even there Rochester's surprising acknowledgment of women's experience. Definitely not safe for work!
One Homer but many Socrateses. Early, Middle, and Late Dialogues, plus Xenophon. Ordering of the dialogues, ordering of Socrates's life. Mention of the Parmenides, purported to have occurred about a century before Plato wrote it. Zeno's paradoxes. Galileo's. Diogenes the Cynic's refutation of Zeno. Quick exposition of the Forms or Ideas.
First class on Rochester: Range of his poetry, his songs, his satire against reason and mankind; reflections on libertinage and philosophy; reflections on the skills that make a poem great: line, transition; architectonic. Dryden great at all three; Rochester extremely good at the first two.
Last class on The Odyssey : address between husband and wife. Lattimore's translation of the exchanged address between Odysseus and Penelope as δαιμονίη as "You are so strange." Homer (though Lattimore doesn't indicate this), has Hektor and Andromache also address each other this way. Address as well to strangers -- range from an affectionate "Silly" to a more existential "daimon-haunted." The two greatest similes in the Odyssey. Penelope's trick. Life defeats death.
This is the first lecture on Absalom and Achitophel, given on September 7. I just managed to recover it. It's largely about the meaning of and the political views evidenced by Dryden's claim that history repeats itself -- first in Biblical days, then in the late seventeenth century. Some context for the poem is given. We spend a fair amount of time exploring the anti-perfectibilian implications of historical repetition.
I figured out how to recover the file containing the first part of the first class on the Odyssey . Really this is about funeral games and why they had 'em. This introduces the theme of gift-giving and the potlatch which is explored in the later Odyssey classes.
DIgressive lecture focusing on Dryden's digressions and divigations about Chaucer and his openness to all the mores he writes and translates from. His beautiful translations of Horace. Alexander's Feast, and then the Secular Masque, written in the last fortnight of his life: his personal and the political farewell.
Odysseus as a different kind of hero from Achilleus: the trickster is not "character isolated by a deed," but someone who's character is elusive. How can he be a hero in epic circumstances? Homer and Shakespeare take on this problem respectively in Odysseus and Hamlet. The Ουτιs / Odysseus pun -- as a trickster he is no man, the reverse of Achilleus. His meeting with Aias in hell, and Aias's silence; Odysseus's meeting with his mother, who sends him home knowing what he knows about the dead, to ...
The subtlety of Dryden's verse, especially in forms other than the heroic couplet, particularly the Pindaric or irregular ode. His praise of Milton, his elegy on Anne Killegrew, his St. Cecilia's day poems. The novelty of the organ. Poetry and her subordinate sisters, viz. painting and music.
Difference between Iliad and Odyssey continued: the latter is about life and praises mortality; the former about death and laments it. Odysseus's preference for the mortal Penelope over Kalypso. Different views of hospitality as necessary, in the Iliad, and as life-affirming, in the Odyssey. Observations about the structure of oral verse, with respect to the research of Milman Parry. Formulae and multi-tasking. The connections they make possible: echoes and repetitions between different characte...
Conclusion of the classes on Absalom and Achitophel and Religio Laici. The difficulty of the middle way. Monarchy compared to Anglicanism. The idea of a center of perspective and understanding which comprehends all the different possibilities: how this belongs both to Anglicanism and monarchy, neither of which makes the part greater than the whole. Contrast with Lucretius, but acknowledgment of Dryden's appreciation of Lucretius, who is also part of the whole philosophical discourse.
The first part of this class was lost -- some glitch with the iPhone. But it was essentially an introduction to the issues continued in the part that starts here: the differences between the Iliad and the Odyssey in the kind of hero being depicted, and the goals of that hero, and especially how those differences are brought out in the various fates of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, Menelaus and Helen, and finally Odysseus and Penelope. Female characters. Hospitality depicted with respect to the sui...
The psychology of anger: its expressive drive. Anger acknowledges that it is self-defeating, and wants that acknowledgment to be expressive. "The fact that I am angry, when I know that self-restraint and not anger will command the respect I am justly owed, shows how angry I am at the injustice of the disrespect my anger aggravates." Anger as a social mode, a communicative relationship between people: so Homer always represents it as occurring within societies: Achaian, Trojan, Olympian. So that ...
Dryden as a strenuous advocate of the middle way. Relation of the interpretation of sacred texts to that of poetry. The expertise that thinking poetically, in particularly about poetic form, can claim on matters of politics, theology, and philosophy. Right and wrong ways of interpreting, and the extent to which interpretation is by its nature an appeal to the community norms that the interpreted works themselves have in view. The hermeneutic circle: how do you time flies? (The way you time arrow...
Again a somewhat delayed attack on Books 6 and 9 of the Iliad. Syncretism and varieties of divine power considered. Foreshadowing of the deaths of Patroklos and Hektor. Beginning of discussion of Homeric epithets. Set-ups of the climactic scenes: Honor vs. spoliation of the dead. Hospitality to ambassadors.
An introduction to the background of Absalom and Achitophel; its preface and the uses of antithetical style in Dryden's prose and his poetry compared.
Discussion of Book 6 of the Iliad: the difference between the existential threats faced by the Trojans, who nevertheless have the comforts of home, vs. the troubles faced by the Achaian expeditionary force; Achilles's killing of Andromache's family; the cowardice of the archers; Hektor and Aias as mothers.
Some more restrictions imposed by the heroic couplet, and the possibilities they engender. Dryden on Oldham; the subtlety of his versification and the reality of his praise; Oldham's obscene poem against the author of Sodom (who may have been Rochester, whom Oldham had once admired).
A lecture focused on Homeric simile in the Iliad, but with excursuses to Paradise Lost, and to a consideration of how different traditions meld in Homer, in Roman mythology, and in the Hebrew and Christian Bibles.
The first class in the Introduction to Restoration and Eighteenth Century Poetry. Considerations of poetic form: the intense restriction of poetic form demands a matching resourcefulness among its poets. The wit, poetry, obscenity, thoughtfulness of Restoration; it descends to things as they are. Rochester and Walpole. The beginning of Denham's "Cooper's Hill." Note: Apologies for lowish fi: will try to improve next time.
