Guyon vs. Britomart: why? How do chastity and temperance find difficulty harmonizing? Arthur and Guyon go chasing Florimel. What could that mean? Why is Timias the one figure who chases the Foster? Castle Joyous. Britomart's wound by Gardante. What is the meaning of that wound?
The Bower of Bliss. The lovely lay sung there. My discovery about its amazing formal properties, with gratifying cry of amazement from a student. How the Palmer and Guyon are able to ignore it. Preparation for Book III.
Guyon's self-temptation, as with Mammon. Why he does it -- his anorectic personality. Mirth as another who is not another. Guyon's view that everything is for him, contrasted with Red Crosse's view, or at least what he learns.
More on Guyon's priggishness; the relationship between temperance and self-certainty; why temperance is so stiff; a return to Despair in Book 1 and the beauty of his temptations; the tension between beauty and allegorical doctrine in Spenser.
More about Book I of the Faerie Queene, with some consideration of the relation of the externalization of allegory to the internal motives of character. Orgoglio, Arthur, Despair.
We continue talking about the relation of allegory to character, and also about the sin which most besets holiness -- pride -- and the context and ground for that sin: error. Why and how are those three things related? When and how should you read for the allegory, when for the plot? (Note that the class scheduled for today, January 27, has been canceled due to snow. Next update next week.)
We start with the structure of the Spenserian stanza, with special attention to the middle line. Then on to the first four cantos of Book 1, with some plot summaries and some general remarks of what happens when an allegorical figure shows up. How does that figure relate to the mind of the person for-whom that figure is?
This is the first real class of the semester. We think a little bit about what allegory would mean, for Spenser and for Milton, by starting out with a reading of Milton's Sonnet 23 ("Methought I saw my late espouséd saint") -- the allegorical appearance of love, sweetness, goodness in her person. In Spenserian and Miltonic allegory, it's not that figures who are present represent abstractions: it's that abstraction becomes present as and in the other person. Sort of Levinasian, though I don't sa...
A last, make-up class, notionally on the Essay on Man. Reconsideration of the heroic couplet after Smart, Blake, Wordsworth and Coleridge. Philosophical poetry and a return to the question of the sublime. Kantian idea of purposiveness without purpose in the well-ordered beautiful, and the contra-finality of the sublime: relation between the early and late eighteenth century as the sublime becomes of greater and greater interest. Some final observations about the brilliance of Pope's versificatio...
The beginning of Romanticism proper. The perceiving, half-creating consciousness in Coleridge and Wordsworth. Vicarious experience. Memory and memory of memory. Hartley and Dorothy to have different experiences. Loss and recompense. No recompense without loss. Meditative blank verse vs. the heroic couplet.
Paradise Lost concluded: Parallels and parodies: The Son, Sin, Eve as reflections of those they derive from. The great chain of being; angelic eating; angelic sex; requirements of justice according to God and according to Satan; Adam's self-sacrifice for Eve.
Freedom on conscience in Protestantism. How it plays out in Satan. His belief in his own conscience is what makes it possible for him to believe in his own guilt as well. The non-magical powers of the fruit. Milton's suggestion, in inviting us to judge him, that God is just because it's justice, not because he's God. The fiat preventing Adam and Eve from eating it considered in two possible lights: that God may dispose and bid what shall be right; or that it is right to show gratitude to God. Th...
Two Burns poems -- "A Poet's Welcome to his love-begotten Daughter; the first instance that entitled him to the venerable appellation of Father," and "To a Mouse, On turning her up in her Nest, with the Plogu, November, 1785." (This latter required some thought in class about what exactly was going on agriculturally. Feel free to comment on this [or anything] at amimetobios.com!) The shifts in Burns's language between Scots light and near-standard English. The distance therefore between speaker ...
Antecedents in Homer and Virgil: who they're antedents of. The Muse, Satan. Satan's relation to God far deeper in meaning and mode than any classical hero's to the gods. This is because of the importance of free will in loving or not loving God. Free will and its connection to freedom of thought and therefore the possibilities of nobility in the rebels. Singing and philosophizing in hell. Freedom = depth of character and experience.
Professional opportunities for female poets in the second half of the 18th century. ProtoRomanticism of Baillie and Barbauld. Question of description of human emotion. Baillie's interest in the passions. Comparison with and difference from Wordsworth. Barbauld's poem to Coleridge. Getting from Pope to Coleridge in two lines: "Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind" (Pope) to "Dreamy twilight of the vacant mind" (Barbauld, on Coleridge). Barbauld's and Baillie's progressivism. Their interest in vi...
Goldsmith and Cowper. Topicality of "The Deserted Village." Enclosures. Goldsmith compared to Gray: Fields beloved in vain. Country Churchyard, and the speaker's exile from the world he describes. The evanescence of that world that seemed timeless. Cowper: Sapphics in the "Lines written during a period of insanity." "The Castaway." Like Goldsmith and Gray, about vicarious experience.
A last class on Paradiso: its hallucinatory, Miyazaki-like quality. Paulo and Francesco return as Poverty and Francis. Typology and the trinity. Free will. Segue to Paradise Lost
A long perspective on the history of science, astronomy in particular. The different spheres, and distance from the empyrean. Satan the unmoving center of a universe whose every expression of love is motion.
More on proto Romanticism, this time through Christopher Smart. His Jobean catalogues. His sense of the infinite variety of the world, and the matching variety of language. David and his turning melancholy into poetry. Smart's version of doing the same. Relation to the sublime: the rhetorical sublime where the soul takes a proud flight (Longinus) as though it has written what it has only heard or read: Smart's relation to David's psalms the same. Hence the meaning of "for" in Smart, in Jubilate ...
Young and Gray as examples of the proto-Romantic subjectivity we began discussing in Collins and Thomson. Ideas of the sublime. Burke on delight vs. pleasure. Young on the creative power of the senses: what they "half create" as NIght VII puts it. "Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College" compared to "Cooper's Hill" and to Steely Dan (though no one caught the allusion). Why the alumni office doesn't want this poem taught: "Fields beloved in vain."
Paradiso and how it differs from what comes before. Leibnizian theodicy. The theory of light in the canti of the moon. Gravity, love, memory: motivated by a motion always beyond the present -- a vector. The earthly Paradise -- Eliot and Shelley's Dantesque examples.
The Contrapasso in Inferno vs. corrective punishment in Purgatorio. The proud bent down, the envious blinded. Sapia's guess that Dante can see: but she's not envious of him for it. Virgil's exposition of love at the very center of the Divine Comedy in Purgatorio 17. T.S. Eliot's Dantesque imitation in Little Gidding.
Proto-Romanticism: Thomson compared to Wordsworth. The idea of landscape in Thomson; the adverting mind in Wordsworth, which you don't quite begin to find in Thomson, who wishes a Newtonian view from nowhere (hence the verses in memory of Newton). Collins is far more about the experience of the experience of being a poet. The Ode to Fear.
More on the Inferno , and on Ulysses and Ugolina; Dante's attitude towards the damned compared with God's and with Virgil's. The naming of Ugolino's sons in his song. The relation of the seven increasing sins in Inferno and their reverse-order decrease in Purgatorio. The likewise increasing uncertainty of Virgil in Purgatorio. Ulysses on the short vigil of the senses. Merwin and Heaney as translators of Dante into a genuinely poetic vernacular.
Our one class on Johnson -- Johnson as a proto-Romantic, that is to say the first poet we're doing who really describes (in his poetry and in his essays) the experience of human subjectivity tout court , without (as opposed to Dryden or Pope or Swift) referring to particularities of time, place, religion, politics, etc. Rather he is the most transparent of the writers we have read so far, and is doing the kind of writing that will be associated with Romanticism. His signal accomplishments: the D...
The last class on Pope (except there'll be a makeup on the Essay on Man in December). The Dunciad and the reign of Dullness. Theobald as "hero" of first Dunciad , Cibber as hero of second. "Aristarchus" (i.e.: Pope) on the mock epic and its relation to the serious epic: how the parodic versions of wisdom, bravery, and love come to be vanity, impudence, and debauchery. Pope's debauchery in an anecdote in Cibber's letter to Pope: Cibber saves him from peril atop a large prostitute. Pope's cuttingn...
Some more on the Inferno: a descent into the world not only of history and of personal animus but also of the religious and most of all literary knowledge and background that form Dante. Eternal justice and its relation to God. The Euthyphro question in Dante and Milton: is something just because God says so, or is God just because in his goodness he will unwaveringly do what is just. What does Milton mean when he says that he intends to "justify the ways of God to men"? Dante has an easier way ...
Pope's style, speed, and compression. His dialogues with a friend in the Imitations of Horace. The psychological subtlety and beauty of his "Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady"
Introductory class on Dante -- the poet is the one who goes to the underworld this time, not only the hero. Sybil:Aeneas::Virgil:Dante. Terza rima and the advent of rhyme. Modernism: epic in a modern language that aims at the power and prestige of ancient epic. The topography of hell. Dante as science fiction writer.
Our last class on Virgil -- how he reimagines Homer. The wrath of Turnus compared to that of Achilles. Aeneas is as merciless as Achilles will become (though we didn't really discuss this). The tension between public and private virtue in Virgil, Dante, and Milton: no such tension in Homer (no difference between them, or almost none) and as for Ovid, the private is what matters. (Plato a harder case.) Love in VIrgil, and other Platonic subjects. Gates of ivory and horn: Penelope's dream and Aene...
