amimetobios

Last class of the term, on Keats.  Voyeurism in the Ode to Psyche.  The latest gods.  The faded Olympians like the faded Titans in the Hyperion poems.  The temple in the mind is for Psyche; the temple is the psyche.  Like the young Apollo, the new poet displaces the old tradition - the figure of youth as poet, as in Stevens.  Casements and other worlds in both poems.

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We conclude our read through of The Triumph of Life, considering its relation to Dante and the pessimism of its view of human freedom as always perverting itself into the freedom to oppress ("signs of thought's empire over thought").  The beauty of the rhymes and the evocations.  Rousseau as Wordsworth again, and the terza rima version of the Intimations Ode.  A quick consideration then of "Music when soft voices die," as a poem about the residue of experiences, as an intro to the Lines Written in the Bay of Lerici, with which we conclude.

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We go through about another 250 lines or so, discussing Rousseau's relation to Wordsworth and Vergil, and Shelley's to Dante; we consider what "Triumph" means, and who those nailed to the car are, starting with Napoleon and ending with Alexander the Great.

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Adonais and elegy.  The structure it shares with Lycidas: the world is "empty and poor" now.  The dead person's absence makes the world into a world of absence.  But this is not a world suitable to that person.  So he's in a better place.  But I am born darkly, fearfully afar.  Echoes of The Eve of St. Agnes at the end of Adonais.  Neoplatonism.  Dante.  And so to The Triumph of Life.  Terza rima.  The question of how Triumph would have ended.  Abrams's distortions.  The opening of the poem.

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Relation of The Fall of Hyperion to Hyperion.  Keats's narrator.  "When I have fears that I may cease to be."  His paralysis: overload.  Overload in "To Autumn."  Freedom into spareness and motion

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What Keats was trying to do in Hyperion.  The background of the story. Miltonic comparisons.  The young Apollo.  Mnemosyne.  More on synesthesia.

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Keats's characteristic style.  His synesthesia.  Related to his scopophilia.  Difference between Keats's looking and Shelley's.  Shelley always visionary in his looking; Keats always sensual.  Loading every rift with ore.  Sensuality of "The Eve of St. Agnes."  Brief look at "As Hermes Once."

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The politics of the poem: intense subjectivity as what can be shared or communicated to others as well.  Demogorgon and the difference between "Almighty God' and Jupiter.  The poet as a masterpiece of nature, adding thereby to the perceptive experience and potential freedom of the later poet.  Shelley's hardheadedness (Plato, not Aeschylus).

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More on Act I of Prometheus Unbound. Mercury's regret at his task.  Knuckling and buckling under power.  Power as corruption.  The dead and their language.  Earth as a character.  How she appears in "On hearing of the death of Napoleon."  The shade of Jupiter.

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The first speech of Prometheus Unbound.  Relation of exposition to imminence in Greek tragedy and in Shelley.  Prometheus's asking for exposition is the beginning of the action that will unthrone Jupiter.  Some background on the relation of Christian mythology to the mythology of classical antiquity.  Prometheus as Satan and Christ.  Landscape and subjectivity.  Return to Mont Blanc and a quick exposition (for more detailed expositions see older podcasts, especially from the close reading course).

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"The Two Spirits: An Allegory" as an intro to Prometheus Unbound and Mont Blanc. Prometheus Unbound as a "Lyrical Drama."  Relation to Goethe, and to the idea of Lyrical Ballads.  Lyrical vs. the public. Then on to the beginning of reading Mont Blanc once again.

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Last class on Frankenstein, with general consideration of relation of subjectivity to the outside world, and to other minds.  Satan's subjectivity: "We know no time when we were not as now."  The fact that the world is what subjectivity sees in it.  Making vs. finding.  The sublime.  The other as an object of thought, but also as another subject.  Shared scenes.  Bodies without heads.  Alastor, Frankenstein, Witch of Atlas, Mont Blanc, Childe Harold, Excersion, Intimations Ode. The monster's superior sense of subjectivity and of other minds as compared with Victor Frankenstein.

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Why "The Modern Prometheus"?  Satan and Prometheus.  Electricity and galvanism.  Ben Franklin.  Autobiographical excursus.  Clumsy elements of the novel.  Should Victor Frankenstein have known what "I will be with you on your wedding night" meant?  Should we have?

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First class on Frankenstein, but mainly via Byron (creating another being whom we endow with our own feelings' dearth) and The Witch of Atlas (Percy's creation of a visionary artificial person).  The preface to Frankenstein: writing about experiences that as of yet found no true echo in your heart.  (This is like Wordsworth in "Resolution and Independence" - the gladness of youth makes it possible to write well and deeply of despondency, because you're not destroyed by your own experience of it.  But I don't quote Wordsworth in the class.)  What it means that the moster has yellow eyes.

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The Witch of Atlas as a visionary rhyme.  How Percy Shelley's ottava rima differs from Byron's (we go to this late poem in his career in order to make the comparison).  Some attempt to understand the politics of the poem.  The sleepers.  The unimportance of reality when compared to vision.  What's Shelleyan about this.  What Empson calls the self-involved simile: moving in the light of its own loveliness; concealing only their scorn of all concealment; lying in her own shadow.  (Stevens: "Phosphor reading by his own light.")

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Last class on Byron. His letter to Kinnaird. Serious story of the commandant's assassination. "Here we are / And there we go." Napoleon of rhyme. Keats. Onwards to Shelley's Ottava Rima!

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Special bonus: I improvise an ottava rima stanza!  (Consolation prize would be I improvise two of them.) Cantos 3 and 4 of Don Juan, with some attention to poetic form and mainly reading with some commentary, which Don Juan really begs for.

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The grotesqueries and the  delights of Canto 2.  The narrator as delightful, inconsistent placeholder.  Juan as delightful, inconsistent placeholder.  The non-accretion of the past for both of them, as what makes the flexibility and radical openness of the poem possible.

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Dry Bob Southey; funniness of Don Juan; hudibrastic rhymes; brief discussion of the ottava rima stanza form; mercurial range of tone; Julia's struggle not to consent with herself, not with Juan; his Byronic passiveness.

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The Byronic hero; what others can say about him; what he can say about himself.  The coherence of writing poetry when your lacerated breast is no longer capable of feeling pleasure or pain, hope or fear.  Who should narrate the Byronic hero?  Milton's narrator? Julian?Lockwood?  The importance of seeing Byron's range, as given by Shelley in Julian and Maddalo (that unutterably wonderful poem), and by Byron in his own letters -- all this as the beginning of an introduction to Don Juan.  The perfection of the change of tone in the canceled stanza on the MS of Canto I: "I would to heaven I were so much clay," &c.

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Some discussion of what made Byron "mad, bad, and dangerous to know."  Letters to Lady Melbourne and to Thomas Moore.  Byron's sexuality.  His dog Boatswain.  ("His dog was dead" -- Julian and Maddalo)   Opening of Childe Harold III. Allegra.  Ada Lovelace. Julian and Julian the Apostate.  Shelley's characterization of Byron in Julian and Maddalo.

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A comparison of the Invocation to Book 3 of Paradise Lost and The Intimations Ode, which we complete reading.  Celestial light vs. the light of common day.  The mirror image similarities Wordsworth explores: he (now) sees only those things visible to mortal sight, in contrast to Milton.  Loss as gain and the fall from heaven in both poets.

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First class on Shelley's relation to Wordsworth.  An introduction about Romanticism and Milton.  The two Romantic generations.  Shelley's critical sonnet "To Wordsworth" and its relation to Wordsworth's Intimations Ode.

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Last class: a review of the irrationality of the square root of 2; and of Cantor's diagonalization proof.  How the difference between infinity by addition and by division corresponds to the difference between the infinity of natural numbers (which are all under the rubric of infinity by addition) and the reals between 0 and 1, all of which may be ranged under the rubric of infinity by division.  What makes one set "larger" than another.  The idea of a list as involving the concept of "next."  The non-denumerability of the reals means that the concept of next doesn't apply to them.  Zeno's paradoxes rely on the idea of the next: the next point on space, the next time slice.  The larger order of infinity that comprises the reals means that Achilles passes the tortoise at a point between two rationals, which are the only points Zeno considered, in considering the next rational point the tortoise gets to, while Achilles is still at a previous rational point.  A similar intuition applies to trying to come up with a commensurate scale for measuring hypotenuse and leg of an isosceles right triangle.  Whatever units you divide one line segment up into, there'll never be a point which is the exact passing point, so to speak, as you go from fewer of those units than you need to measure the other line segment to more of those units than you need that you'll have exactly the right number -- no point, you could say, where one line segment is passing another at a rationally measurable distance from its other endpoint.  And so farewell to this class. (I'm actually not sure why there are 24 and not 25 classes.  I may have miscounted somewhere)

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Some discussion of the nature of proof; listing rationals between 0 and 1; function vs. algorithm; question whether any list of irrationals is possible; Cantor's diagonalization proof that it isn't; discussion about 1-many correspondence between rationals and reals; approach to the idea that the power set of an infinite set is a higher order of infinity because you could do the diagonalization proof on binary expansions between 0 and 1, leading to the construction 2^n numbers not in the original set.  I am interested in what computer scientists make of the discussion we (Kenneth Foner and I in particular) had (and which I am not pretty but not fully confident about) concerning the difference between a function that picks out all primes (which would allow you to use the Sieve of Eratosthenes efficiently, in, um polynomial time [right?], and which we can't [right?]) and an algorithm which ultimately has to do it through a somewhat stream-lined brute force procedure.

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