amimetobios

The Bower of Bliss. The lovely lay sung there. My discovery about its amazing formal properties, with gratifying cry of amazement from a student. How the Palmer and Guyon are able to ignore it. Preparation for Book III.

Guyon's self-temptation, as with Mammon. Why he does it -- his anorectic personality. Mirth as another who is not another. Guyon's view that everything is for him, contrasted with Red Crosse's view, or at least what he learns.

More on Guyon's priggishness; the relationship between temperance and self-certainty; why temperance is so stiff; a return to Despair in Book 1 and the beauty of his temptations; the tension between beauty and allegorical doctrine in Spenser.

More about Book I of the Faerie Queene, with some consideration of the relation of the externalization of allegory to the internal motives of character. Orgoglio, Arthur, Despair.

We continue talking about the relation of allegory to character, and also about the sin which most besets holiness -- pride -- and the context and ground for that sin: error.  Why and how are those three things related?  When and how should you read for the allegory,  when for the plot?

(Note that the class scheduled for today, January 27, has been canceled due to snow.  Next update next week.)

We start with the structure of the Spenserian stanza, with special attention to the middle line.  Then on to the first four cantos of Book 1, with some plot summaries and some general remarks of what happens when an allegorical figure shows up.  How does that figure relate to the mind of the person for-whom that figure is?

This is the first real class of the semester.  We think a little bit about what allegory would mean, for Spenser and for Milton, by starting out with a reading of Milton's Sonnet 23 ("Methought I saw my late espouséd saint") -- the allegorical appearance of love, sweetness, goodness in her person.  In Spenserian and Miltonic allegory, it's not that figures who are present represent abstractions: it's that abstraction becomes present as and in the other person.  Sort of Levinasian, though I don't say so in the Podcast.

A last, make-up class, notionally on the Essay on Man.  Reconsideration of the heroic couplet after Smart, Blake, Wordsworth and Coleridge.  Philosophical poetry and a return to the question of the sublime.  Kantian idea of purposiveness without purpose in the well-ordered beautiful, and the contra-finality of the sublime: relation between the early and late eighteenth century as the sublime becomes of greater and greater interest.   Some final observations about the brilliance of Pope's versification.

The beginning of Romanticism proper.  The perceiving, half-creating consciousness in Coleridge and Wordsworth.  Vicarious experience.  Memory and memory of memory.  Hartley and Dorothy to have different experiences.  Loss and recompense.  No recompense without loss.  Meditative blank verse vs. the heroic couplet.

Paradise Lost concluded: Parallels and parodies: The Son, Sin, Eve as reflections of those they derive from.  The great chain of being; angelic eating; angelic sex; requirements of justice according to God and according to Satan; Adam's self-sacrifice for Eve.