amimetobios

Freedom on conscience in Protestantism.  How it plays out in Satan.  His belief in his own conscience is what makes it possible for him to believe in his own guilt as well.  The non-magical powers of the fruit.  Milton's suggestion, in inviting us to judge him, that God is just because it's justice, not because he's God.  The fiat preventing Adam and Eve from eating it considered in two possible lights: that God may dispose and bid what shall be right; or that it is right to show gratitude to God.  The same situation in heaven when Satan rebels against what he regards as the arbitrary apotheosis of the Son.  (A difference, not mooted, is that the Son is a person, so in fact more liable to being talked about in inherent terms and not just in the arbitrary terms that the fruit requires on any interpretation the poem considers of the couple's sin.  But this may be clarified with respect to the difference between Adam's fall and Eve's.  Eve falls for a fruit, Adam for a person.)  Satan's nobility in hell.

Two Burns poems -- "A Poet's Welcome to his love-begotten Daughter; the first instance that entitled him to the venerable appellation of Father," and "To a Mouse, On turning her up in her Nest, with the Plogu, November, 1785."  (This latter required some thought in class about what exactly was going on agriculturally.  Feel free to comment on this [or anything] at amimetobios.com!)  The shifts in Burns's language between Scots light and near-standard English.  The distance therefore between speaker and poet.  Comparison to Wordsworth's writing in the "natural language of natural men."  Then Blake's "To the Evening Star" and a couple of Songs of Innocence and of Experience.  The title of "Songs of Innocence" considered as already impying duality.  The two Chimney Sweep poems.

Antecedents in Homer and Virgil: who they're antedents of.  The Muse, Satan.  Satan's relation to God far deeper in meaning and mode than any classical hero's to the gods.  This is because of the importance of free will in loving or not loving God.  Free will and its connection to freedom of thought and therefore the possibilities of nobility in the rebels.  Singing and philosophizing in hell.  Freedom = depth of character and experience.

Professional opportunities for female poets in the second half of the 18th century.  ProtoRomanticism of Baillie and Barbauld.  Question of description of human emotion.  Baillie's interest in the passions.  Comparison with and difference from Wordsworth.  Barbauld's poem to Coleridge.  Getting from Pope to Coleridge in two lines: "Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind" (Pope) to  "Dreamy twilight of the vacant mind" (Barbauld, on Coleridge).  Barbauld's and Baillie's progressivism.  Their interest in vicarious experience, especially their protoWordsworthian interest in the young.  Coleridge a youth too, to Barbauld.

Goldsmith and Cowper.  Topicality of "The Deserted Village." Enclosures.  Goldsmith compared to Gray: Fields beloved in vain.  Country Churchyard, and the speaker's exile from the world he describes.  The evanescence of that world that seemed timeless.  Cowper: Sapphics in the "Lines written during a period of insanity." "The Castaway."  Like Goldsmith and Gray, about vicarious experience.

A last class on Paradiso: its hallucinatory, Miyazaki-like quality.  Paulo and Francesco return as Poverty and Francis.  Typology and the trinity.  Free will.  Segue to Paradise Lost

A long perspective on the history of science, astronomy in particular.  The different spheres, and distance from the empyrean.  Satan the unmoving center of a universe whose every expression of love is motion.

More on proto Romanticism, this time through Christopher Smart.  His Jobean catalogues.  His sense of the infinite variety of the world, and the matching variety of language.  David and his turning melancholy into poetry. Smart's version of doing the same.  Relation to the sublime: the rhetorical sublime where the soul takes a proud flight (Longinus) as though it has written what it has only heard or read: Smart's relation to David's psalms the same.  Hence the meaning of "for" in Smart, in Jubilate Agno and in the "Song to David:" because of, and for the purpose of. Reversal of cause and effect, of final and efficient cause.  Prefiguration: Typology and fulfillment in the antitype: the relation to the rhetorical sublime and to the reversal of cause and effect, when poetry responds to the sublime and inspires it (compare Shelley's Defence of Poetry).  The amazing "For Adoration" sequence in the "Song to David."  B1 and B2 of Jubilate Agno.

Young and Gray as examples of the proto-Romantic subjectivity we began discussing in Collins and Thomson.  Ideas of the sublime.  Burke on delight vs. pleasure.  Young on the creative power of the senses: what they "half create" as NIght VII puts it.  "Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College" compared to "Cooper's Hill" and to Steely Dan (though no one caught the allusion).  Why the alumni office doesn't want this poem taught: "Fields beloved in vain."

Paradiso and how it differs from what comes before.  Leibnizian theodicy.  The theory of light in the canti of the moon.  Gravity, love, memory: motivated by a motion always beyond the present -- a vector.   The earthly Paradise -- Eliot and Shelley's Dantesque examples.