amimetobios

"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.

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.

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?

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.

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.")

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.