amimetobios

Goldsmith and Cowper

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.

Paradiso and Paradise Lost

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

Paradiso and the universe and everything

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.

Christopher Smart: Prayer and Praise

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 Agno and in the "Song to David:" because of, and for the purpose of. Reversal of cause and effect, of final and efficient cause.  Prefiguration: Typology and fulfillment in the antitype: the relation to the rhetorical sublime and to the reversal of cause and effect, when poetry responds to the sublime and inspires it (compare Shelley's Defence of Poetry).  The amazing "For Adoration" sequence in the "Song to David."  B1 and B2 of Jubilate Agno.

Young, Gray, and the advent of Romanticism

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."

Purgatorio and beginning of Paradiso

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.

Purgatorio part two

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.

Thomson and Collins

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.

Inferno and start of Purgatorio 11-5-10

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.

Doctor Johnson

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 Dictionary and thus the alphabetical poem to Mrs. Thrale; his letter to Chesterfield ("Is not a patron, my lord..."); his definition of net; the dangerous prevalence of the imagination; the grimmest part of "The Vanity of Human Wishes."

Last class on Pope

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 cuttingness.  (The rhyme of "K *" and "sing".)  The fact that depth of soul goes with bitterness and despair, in both the Dunciad and in the amazing psychological acuity of Eloisa to Aberlard.

Second class on Dante: More on the Inferno

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 than Milton to solve the problem: he can make love the principle of the whole universe ("the love that moves the sun and other stars"), so that those in Hell are there by their own desire.  They get what they want.  Plato on love and desire and its mistaken objects.  Complexity of desire and its relation to its consequences (propositional attitudes), but still all in hell are where they desired to be, even if they hadn't thought those consequences through.

Pope's satires and To the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady

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"

First class on Dante -- 10/29/10

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.

Last class on Virgil - his versions of Homer

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 Aeneas's compared to Adam's and Milton's.  Exposition of Milton's Sonnet 23. Dr. Johnson's strictures on Virgil's imitation of Homer in the Rambler, and his preference for Ajax's silence to Dido's.

Third class on Pope: How pure poetry becomes topical

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.

2nd class on Virgil: his sublimity

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.

Pope: Essay on Criticism concluded, Eloisa to Abelard and Rape of the Lock begun

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 to serious epic as being in some ways like the relation between true criticism and poetry.

First class on Pope, 10/19/10

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.

Virgil and Homer. Ovid.

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.

Ovid and the Ovidian Milton

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 on himself, to Stella, and to the world, 10/12/10

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.

Plato's Socrates and Aristophanes's - 10/12/10

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 Cave, Socrates's argument with poetry early and late

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 Swift class-NSFW: very scatalogical

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.