amimetobios

A couple of great student modernizations of Barnes' "The Turnstile" (worth listening to!  Don't fast forward) and then some discussion of the subtleties of Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh, and its relation to the rise of the 19th century novel (Jane Eyre), with some attention to just a few lines of  Book 1 of the poem.

Poetry and nature as the surrounding world is industrialized; dialect and the local; experienced attitudes towards prior innocence; what "tomorrow" means in Brontë; dialect spelling; and then the amazing and heartbreakingly moving William Barnes, especially his poem "The Turnstile."

First some process shot accounts of 19th c. affiliations between a lot of the figures we're doing.  Dialectic poetry.  Rubaiyat stanzas.  Then Tennyson's great "Tithonus" with some attention to its similarities and differences from "Ulysses"

A consideration of the opening of "The Lotos Eaters" and the amazing way Tennyson handles sound.  Repetition.  How he does something similar in some despairing stanzas from "In Memoriam."  

One of Tennyson's epigraphs: "Astronomy and geology: terrible muses."  The importance of Arthur Henry Hallam's death to Tennyson, especially because of his religious skepticism.  Gibbon on St. Simeon Stylites.  Dramatic Monologues.  "Ulysses," in Carey's translation of Dante and then Tennyson's poem.  The great Achilles = Hallam, but we know the ending from Dante -- he won't see him again.  

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."