amimetobios

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.

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!

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.  

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.

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."

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.

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."

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.

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.)

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.

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.   

Sonnets and metaphor: Wyatt and Surrey's translations of Petrarch, and then Some Shakespeare (with remarks about Starbuck)

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."

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.

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!

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.

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."

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."

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.

 

 

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.

Tennyson's "The Skipping Rope."  Dialogue: dramatic conflict and rhyme.  Ballad meter and alternation.  A note on Lyrical Ballads.

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.

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."

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.

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