amimetobios

Justice and Courtesy

The relation of justice to courtesy. The openmindedness of the latter. Beheadings everywhere. Arthegall vs. the leveling gyant, part I.

Varieties of justice

Adjudication in Book 5: Retributive vs. distributive justice. Some background on English-Irish strife. Revenge as wild justice. Can justice come into play between nations?

The Temple of Venus

Scudamor at the Temple of Venus. Jealousy and friendship. Love and hate. The relation of all to the idea of justice, broached in Book 5

The friend as second self in Book 4

The Aristotlean idea of friendship: the friend as second self. The nature of this combined subjectivity. Its relation to love, and jealousy. Siblings. Marriage. Weddings.

Faerie Queene, Book IV: Love and Friendship

The spectrum of virtues from private to social. Similarities and differences between love and friendship. Their relation to jealousy.

Matter and form in the Garden of Adonis

The philosophical relation of matter to form in the Garden of Adonis. The strange reversal in Spenser, whereby matter is eternal, but forms decay. What this has to do with poetry. Time the troubled. Jealousy vs. chastity.

What it's like to live in the Land of Faery

Living in the land of Faery, vs. living in reality, and vs. living in the world of Platonic forms. The proem to Book 6. The Garden of Adonis and what it was like to live there once -- the Wordsworthian strain in Spenser. Knowing what it was like "by tryall." Literary need: the creation and establishment of that kind of need.

Amoret and Belphoebe, and what the House of Busirane is for

Allegory for whom? Why the house of Busirane? Whom is it for? Britomart? Amoret? Scudamor? How does the House of Busirane work in each of these three cases?

More on Book 3

Allegory and human individuality. What it means to turn people into allegories. A version of road rage. Temporal fouls ups as Britomart wounds Marinell after she sees Florimel racing to aid the already-wounded Marinel. What Britomart's wound means. Her pleasure in her distress. Seeing and wounding. Adonis.

Faerie Queene III Britomart and allegory

Plot vs. allegory in Britomart. Allegory in the service of plot. Allegories about the primacy of plot, of human character to symbolization.

Faerie Queene, Book 3, beginning

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?

A lovely lay and the Bower of Bliss

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.

Temperance and self-restraint

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.

Temperance and certainty

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.

Spenser: allegory and character

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.

Allegory and character

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.)

Second class on Spenser: I. 1-4

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?

First real class on Spenser, with attention to Milton

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 say so in the Podcast.

Last 18th c poetry class: Pope and retrospective

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 versification.

Wordsworth and Coleridge in 1798: Frost at Midnight and Tintern Abbey

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.

Last class on Paradise Lost and of the Semester

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 of conscience and guilt in Paradise Lost

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.  The same situation in heaven when Satan rebels against what he regards as the arbitrary apotheosis of the Son.  (A difference, not mooted, is that the Son is a person, so in fact more liable to being talked about in inherent terms and not just in the arbitrary terms that the fruit requires on any interpretation the poem considers of the couple's sin.  But this may be clarified with respect to the difference between Adam's fall and Eve's.  Eve falls for a fruit, Adam for a person.)  Satan's nobility in hell.

Burns, Blake, and perspectives on the innocent

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 and poet.  Comparison to Wordsworth's writing in the "natural language of natural men."  Then Blake's "To the Evening Star" and a couple of Songs of Innocence and of Experience.  The title of "Songs of Innocence" considered as already impying duality.  The two Chimney Sweep poems.

Paradise Lost I: Antecedents

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.

Barbauld and Baillie

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 vicarious experience, especially their protoWordsworthian interest in the young.  Coleridge a youth too, to Barbauld.