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Episodes
New for 2023: Victorian Poetry Scroll back for previous courses on Shakespeare, Eighteenth Century Poetry, Close Reading, Various film genres, Film and Philosophy, the Western Canon, Early Romantics, 17th Century Poetry, etc.
Episodes
Wednesday Jan 18, 2023
Wednesday Jan 18, 2023
First class on Victorian Poetry. The best and largest corpus of really good poetry in English -- really good because the novel is the bid for greatness now. But really good is really good. The Victorians' relationship to some modernists (just a little) and to the Romantics, especially Shelley and Wordsworth, illustrated in poems by Robert Browning, Beddoes, Patmore, Meynell, and Christina Rossetti.
N.B. Text will be Christopher Ricks, ed. New Oxford Book of Victorian Verse.
Tuesday Dec 06, 2022
Tuesday Dec 06, 2022
After some last class paper topic business we spend most of the time finishing our discussion of Elisa Gonzalez's amazing "Notes Toward an Elegy", and its relation to Bishop in particular (not only "Casabianca" but also "Love Lies Sleeping"; cf. Gonzalez's "And now I lie awake pretending / everyone in the world lies still the way the living are still," which is a kind of summary of Bishop's poem). And so farewell to the class!
Friday Dec 02, 2022
Poetry course 23: kind of whacky but more on Bishop and then Elisa Gonzalez
Friday Dec 02, 2022
Friday Dec 02, 2022
People pretty punchy in penultimate palaver, especially when we have some discussion of Edward Gorey, whom almost no one had heard of! But we finish talking about Bishop, amidst lots of whackiness and then start Elisa Gonzales's great poem "Notes Towards an Elegy" from 2021 (published just before the murder of her brother) -- we are treating this poem (as will I hope become clearer next week in the last class) as the third in the line from Hemans through Bishop.
Wednesday Nov 30, 2022
Poetry: A Basic Course 22: Tennyson, Rich, Agha Shahid Ali, Hemans, Bishop
Wednesday Nov 30, 2022
Wednesday Nov 30, 2022
More on forms: in particular the ghazal, and the way poems quote, as in Shahid Ali's relineated quotations from Adrienne Rich, and Bishop's quotation from Hemans' "Casabianca." To be continued.
Thursday Nov 24, 2022
Poetry A Basic Course episode 21: Beauty and truth in Dickinson and Keats
Thursday Nov 24, 2022
Thursday Nov 24, 2022
Understanding things (poems, songs, etc.) more deeply than their creators as an incentive for rewriting. How poets rewrite their precursors. Example: Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn" and Dickinson's "I died for Beauty."
Thursday Nov 17, 2022
Poetry Episode 20: Chiefly ”The Emperor of Ice Cream”
Thursday Nov 17, 2022
Thursday Nov 17, 2022
A bit about forms and what they're metaphors for, and then mainly Stevens's "Emperor of Ice Cream," with other Stevens ("The Snow Man," "Auroras of Autumn") mentioned briefly.
Saturday Nov 12, 2022
Poetry a basic course episode 19: Some villanelles, mainly
Saturday Nov 12, 2022
Saturday Nov 12, 2022
Discussion of Ruskin's pathetic fallacy; the metaphor of the villanelle in Rowan Ricardo Phillips; some villanelles, by AE Stallings, Dylan Thomas, Elizabeth Bishop; Stevens's "Emperor of Ice Cream."
Thursday Nov 10, 2022
Poetry Episode 18 Mont Blanc Concluded
Thursday Nov 10, 2022
Thursday Nov 10, 2022
A quiz (not recorded) based on the set of poems the students could write about, and some discussion of the answers. Then the conclusion of Shelley's "Mont Blanc," with some discussion of the pathetic fallacy, to be continued.
Saturday Nov 05, 2022
Poetry Class Episode 17: Mont Blanc part 2
Saturday Nov 05, 2022
Saturday Nov 05, 2022
Some reminders about metaphor, and then more about the contest between mind and mountain in P.B. Shelley's "Mont Blanc." So far the mountain is like the Astros, leading the mind 3 games to 2, more or less. (This comparison is not going to have staying power, but there you go.)
Thursday Nov 03, 2022
Thursday Nov 03, 2022
Assignments for a paper on metaphor. Salty discussion of metaphors, of plagiarism, of past and future assassinations. Then (most of the class) a beginning of a discussion of Percy Bysshe Shelley's "Mont Blanc" and the contest to see what is metaphor and what is reality.
Saturday Oct 29, 2022
Class 15: More sonnets, and more on the relation of sonnet to metaphor
Saturday Oct 29, 2022
Saturday Oct 29, 2022
Metaphor: Ezra Pound (and Wordsworth). Some more consideration of sonnets and their relation to metaphor and simile: Alice Oswald, Elizabeth Bishop. Waley's translation of Tao Yuan-Ming and its similarity to Shakespeare's sonnet 73.
Wednesday Oct 26, 2022
Episode 14 -- some sonnets
Wednesday Oct 26, 2022
Wednesday Oct 26, 2022
Sonnets and metaphor: Wyatt and Surrey's translations of Petrarch, and then Some Shakespeare (with remarks about Starbuck)
Monday Oct 24, 2022
Poetry A Basic Course Episode 13 More Pope, Milton, Wyatt
Monday Oct 24, 2022
Monday Oct 24, 2022
Some more on Pope and how the sound seems to be an echo to the sense; another line of Milton's -- "Awake, arise, or be forever fallen" -- and how it divides; Wyatt's "They Fle From Me."
Monday Oct 17, 2022
Episode 12: Some Paradise Lost, some Pope, some more on meter, prime numbers
Monday Oct 17, 2022
Monday Oct 17, 2022
More on iambic pentameter. Examples from Milton and Pope. A bit on sonnets. Why poetry tends to flirt with prime numbers -- five feet per line, seven pairs of rhymes in sonnets, etc. Examples from Shakespeare.
Saturday Oct 08, 2022
More on the theology of Paradise Lost (Episode 11)
Saturday Oct 08, 2022
Saturday Oct 08, 2022
More on the theology of Paradise Lost; I keep wanting to get back to the formal surface but we talked a lot about content and context. Also: The thirteen men effect!
Wednesday Oct 05, 2022
A day that turned out to be an intro to Paradise Lost (Episode 10)
Wednesday Oct 05, 2022
Wednesday Oct 05, 2022
Not what I meant to be doing to day, but it turned out we talked about the opening of Paradise Lost, and certain theological issues about free will, temptation, judgment of God, and justification of his ways.
Thursday Sep 29, 2022
Different sorts of stresses (Episode 9)
Thursday Sep 29, 2022
Thursday Sep 29, 2022
Different sorts of stresses and their superposition. A lot on one line in Paradise Lost: "Is this the region, this the soil, the clime...?" And a bit on one line in Yeats: "Vain gaiety, vain battle, vain repose." And then the opening line of Paradise Lost: the stress in the word "first," the countervailing stress on the word "disobedience."
Sunday Sep 25, 2022
What all poems are always about; ”We are Seven” (Episode 8)
Sunday Sep 25, 2022
Sunday Sep 25, 2022
What every poem is about: its own form. Garden path sentences (e.g. "The old man the boat.") as showing how form is almost always announced. Speaker vs. poet. Dialogue that turns into one speaker taking charge. Wordsworth's "We Are Seven."
Wednesday Sep 21, 2022
More on lines
Wednesday Sep 21, 2022
Wednesday Sep 21, 2022
Ashbery's "Wrong Kind of Insurance" -- and how to read Ashbery. Dactylic ending of that poem (or, yes, anapestic; it can be a matter of choice how you time it): "Each night / Is trifoliate, strange to the touch." Then two Cummings poems. Hearing vs. seeing. Reading vs. seeing (how the intelligence agencies dope out people who claim they don't understand a language). (NOTE TO JEFF: I learned this from Goffman's Strategic Interaction. Text me as soon as you see this.) Brooks' "We Real Cool," and its line endings.
Monday Sep 19, 2022
What makes a line?
Monday Sep 19, 2022
Monday Sep 19, 2022
What is the most important criterion for a text's having a claim to being a poem? What if it's not a text? what if it's oral poetry, like Homer? What authorizes us to say that there are five feet in a pentameter line, or six in a hexameter, when Milton and Homer recite their verses orally, or Shakespearean actors utter blank verse soliloquies on stage? Are lines (unrhymed lines, anyhow) just artifacts of printing? Hint: no. Are they ever artifacts of printing? Hint: yes.
Thursday Sep 15, 2022
Rhyme. And dialogue -- alternation and conflict in ballads
Thursday Sep 15, 2022
Thursday Sep 15, 2022
Tennyson's "The Skipping Rope." Dialogue: dramatic conflict and rhyme. Ballad meter and alternation. A note on Lyrical Ballads.
Sunday Sep 11, 2022
Rhyme: Making the Arbitrary Make Sense
Sunday Sep 11, 2022
Sunday Sep 11, 2022
Cole Porter's "You're the Top." Eighteenth Century bouts-rimés. The poetic task of making arbitrary rhymes make sense. Jakobson on the poetic function of language.
Thursday Sep 08, 2022
More on rhyme and meter
Thursday Sep 08, 2022
Thursday Sep 08, 2022
How trochaic words overlap iambic feet. Loose onsets, strict endings. "Brought death inTO the world"? Or "Brought death INto the world"? Or both? "After great pain a formal feeling comes."
Saturday Sep 03, 2022
some more on ”b o d y” and then on Alice Notley’s ”The Comfort”
Saturday Sep 03, 2022
Saturday Sep 03, 2022
We talk about Merrill's "b o d y" and its relation to Macbeth and then the words et cetera = etc. et cetera, especially in Alice Notely's wonderful four line poem "The Comfort," with some attention to enjambment and end stop.
Tuesday Aug 30, 2022
First episode of Poetry: A Basic Course:James Merrill’s
Tuesday Aug 30, 2022
Tuesday Aug 30, 2022
This is actually the second class, since we had an introductory class last week. This is a course in the close reading of poetry. Today's class largely on James Merrill's poem b o d y, on the limits of close reading (if any), and on "Roses are red..."
Syllabus outline, to be updated periodically:
Topics
This syllabus is done by topics. In order to remain flexible I will update weekly with specific readings. Right now the syllabus is aspirational, and will give you a general sense of the order of topics and the issues we’ll discuss. But if, as is likely, we don’t get to everything, we’ll have to decide what to spend less time on.
Th Aug 25 Introduction, etc.
Handout, including:
“b o d y” (James Merrill)
“Easter Wings” (George Herbert)
“The Comfort” (Alice Notely)
Excerpt from Don Juan (Lord Byron)
“My sweet old Etcetera” (Cummings)
T Aug 30 Rhyme
Cole Porter: “You’re the top”
Skelton: “Tunning of Eleanor Rumming” (excerpts)
“Lullay lullay like a child”
Auden: “Lullaby”
Th Sept 1
T Sept 6
Th Sept 8
T Sept 13
Th Sept 15
T Sept 20 Meter
Th Sept 22
T Sept 27 NO CLASS
Th Sept 29 First Paper Due
T Oct 4
Th Oct 6
T Oct 11 Interplay between rhyme and meter
Th Oct 13 NO CLASS (“Brandeis Monday”)
T Oct 18 NO CLASS (“Brandeis Monday”)
Th Oct 20
T Oct 25
Th Oct 27 Metaphor
T Nov 1 Second Paper Due
Th Nov 3 More forms
T Nov 8
Th Nov 9
T Nov 15 Revisions
Th Nov 16
T Nov 22
Th Nov 24 NO CLASS
T Nov 29
Th Dec 1 Two extremes: free verse and hip hop
T Dec 6 Third Paper Due