Dr. Bordelon's Introduction to Poetry

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Greek/Latin | Tamil | Chinese | Haiku | Marlowe | Shakespeare | Donne | Marvell | Wordsworth/Blake | Keats

Beginnings

Focus: Discussion of introduction (and list on page 15); practice analyzing poetry; writing about poetry

  • Writing - pulling out a quote or phrase (see nex tbullet for point)
  • Introduction
    • Three quotes (could be a word, phrase, or entire sentence) from the general introduction to poetry that surprised/interested/made you think
  • Page 15
  • Discussion of "How do I Love Thee" and "Tally Stick"

"How Do I Love Thee"

  • Okay, you all knew the first line or two: disappointed by the rest? Excited?
  • Why repetition?
  • how doe the metaphors connect in individual lines (for example, "I love thee freely, as men strive for Right")

"Tally Stick"

  • Definitions: What is a tally stick? Why/how is it important?  Why use this instead of writing? How does it connect to "How do I Love Thee?"
  • What's the situation of the poem? Who's in it? What's being discussed?
  • Notches? Grain?

 

Getting Our Thoughts On Paper

For these writings, work on choosing specific words/phrases from the the poem and explaining how it proves your point. The key here is to keep asking "how" and "why" as in "how does this word support what I'm arguing?" and/or "why is this word/phrase so important?"

You should both set up your quote and then comment on it afterward.

  • Looking over the poems we've read, choose one, and write a paragraph or two explaining what it is saying about love. First, write out your claim -- "_____" suggests love is _____ -- then explain how your argument is valid.

 

Circa 630/60? B.C.E.

Greek and Latin Poets

Our focus today will be on how these Greek and Roman poets seem rooted in the past . . . and how they seem our contemporaries.  We'll also continue out look at how different ways of addressing love.

Saphho and Catullus in the 19th century

Sappho

"Throned in splendor"

  • Who's talking here?
  • Who's being addressed?
  • What's the situation?
  • What does the "not with griefs and bitterness" get at?
  • Why the fluttering and trembling in the third stanza?
  • Why "again"?
"Like the very gods"
  • Situation is crucial here: where are we?
  • What's the important imagery in stanzas two and four?  Why?
  • How can ears be "muted in thunder"? Explain.
"Some there are who say"
  • How is this a feminist poem?
  • What's up with Helen?  Who's she?  Why bring her up?
  • How do the first and last stanzas inform each other?

Catullus

5
  • why counting again?
  • What's the dominant metaphor here? Why?  How is it effective for a love poem?  What does it say about the lover and the . . . is it love?
51
  • Hey . . . this looks familiar . . . what does this say about Sappho?
  • A stretch, but connect to Hip Hop.
  • What's so bad about leisure? 
83
  • What's happened to the love?
  • How is this a love poem?
  • What's with the animal imagery?
72
  • It's the last two lines that make this poem work: why?
8
  • First person, here and in other poems, but especially here: why?  What's the rhetorical purpose of this self-reference?
  • And what's with the "we"?
  • And what does that last line suggest?

Getting Our Thoughts On Paper

For these writings, work on choosing specific words/phrases from the the poem and explaining how it proves your point. The key here is to keep asking "how" and "why" as in "how does this word support what I'm arguing?" and/or "why is this word/phrase so important?"

You should both set up your quote and then comment on it afterward.

  • _____ also makes Catullus' poetry seem contemporary.
  • Additionally, _____ shows the ______ of Catullus'/Sappho's love/anger.

Circa 750+ and echoes
Chinese poetry handout Pound “In a Station in the Metro” (567)

The Solitude of Night

  • Why solitude?
  • Why drinking?
  • Why alone?
Zazen
  • What's happened to the fauna?
  • Why the clouds?
  • What happens to mountain and the man?
A Poem of Changgan
  • What's the difference b/t this  and Pound's version
Madly Singing
  • What does he call poetry?
  • What's the connection between madness and poetry?
Rising Late
  • What's the subject/theme of this poem?
After Getting Drunk, Becoming Sober in the Night
  • Nature and drinking again: what's the connection?
  • What's with the animals?
Pruning Trees
  • Why does his mind need to be eased?
  • What about the remarks a the end on the branches and "good with ill"?

Getting Our Thoughts On Paper

For these writings, work on choosing specific words/phrases from the the poem and explaining how it proves your point. The key here is to keep asking "how" and "why" as in "how does this word support what I'm arguing?" and/or "why is this word/phrase so important?"

You should both set up your quote and then comment on it afterward.

  • The water imagery in the Chinese poem _____ relates to the overall theme of _____.
  • The _____ imagery in the Chinese poem _____ relates to the overall theme of _____.

Circa 1600-1700 and echoes
Haiku: past and Present (391-396); Buson and “Japan” handout or Course Documents>Readings #1

General questions about Haiku - how do they achieve their effect?  The power of individual words.  That's what we'll work on.

We'll focus on the pond and frog poems. Frogs=spring, good luck, kaeru – also means return. What are they meant to convey?

Ponds: significance? Yin and yang with earth

temple bell

Moon Moth

Image result for traditional japanese garden

 

Getting Our Thoughts On Paper

Collins also echoes Buson's haiku on the temple bell through _____.

The ___ imagery/word/s in _(name of poem)____ convey spirituality/tranquility/_____/meditative mood/theme/tone.

Camp out on a word or two and pull out how its associations/connotations connect with the overall mood/tone/theme of the poem.

1600s and echoes

Translations; Conventions/context of Marlowe; Artificiality; Irony/commentary

Marlowe “The Passionate Shepard to His Love” (390); Ralegh “The Nymph’s Reply” (397); Williams “Raleigh Was Right” (398); Ginsberg “A Further Proposal” (399)

These poems seem much older than our previous, much earlier, poems.  Why?  The power of a translation.

Who was Marlowe?  A college educated playwright, poet, man about town, friend/acquaintance of Shakespeare, who died in a bar fight.  That's right: an author in your poetry collection died in a bar fight.  More in class.

Background info on the pastoral from the wonderful meditation on poetry, goats, and cheese, Goat Song by Brad Kessler.

IN HIS SEMINAL CLASSIC ON THE NUER OF SUDAN, THE anthropologist E. E. Evans-Pritchard writes: "The Nuer, like most pastoral peoples, are poetic and most men and women compose songs which are sung at dances and concerts or are composed for the creator's own pleasure and chanted by him in lonely pastures and amid the cattle in camp kraals."

The generalization is a bit startling-Like most pastoral people the Nuer are poetic-coming from such an esteemed anthropologist of the twentieth century. For Evans-Pritchard seems to assert that the majority of people who herd animals have a "poetic" frame of mind and their daily involvement with domestic ungulates somehow makes them burst into song.

The idea of the poetic herder-the singing cowboy, the flute-tooting shepherd boy-has always been a staple of pastoral mythology; and a quick survey of the world's pastoral people does, indeed, reveal an odd penchant for poetry and song: The Kalasha herdsmen of the Hindu Kush have special poems of praise-ispadek--for their favorite goats. Sarni reindeer herders once sang yoik to their reindeer. Basque shepherds engage in bertsolari singing and poetry competitions both in Spain and North America, where they emigrated to work sheep in the West. Poetry is held in high regard among Somali camel herders, who have different songs for driving camels, loading camels, and bringing them back to the corral (poetry competitions are also a staple of Somali pastoral life). In the Andes, herding songs reach back all the way to the Incas, who developed their own pastoral poetry. Swedish cowherds, Armenian shepherds, Sicilian, Bulgarian, Indian herders-the list goes on of pastoral people who composed verse in the course of their work. So if Evans-Pritchard was right, what makes herders seemingly inclined to song?

If the human voice proved such an effective tool to the herder, why not ornament it with song or verse? Or why not take the unconscious beauty of a herding song and turn itinto a literary piece? Pastorals and bucolics were originally herding songs (pastoralis means "shepherd"; boukolos, "cowherding song"). Professional poets, from antiquity onward,appropriated herders' songs and transformed them into literary art. Pastorals became songs sung about herders, not by them. Already by the Middle Ages, shepherds and goatherds became romanticized figures in poems written by people who had little sense of what it was actually like to herd sheep. Pastorals became a literary trope of the leisure class. Literary pastorals first appeared in Mesopotamia, yet probably existed thousands of years earlier. The psalms of the shepherd-king David followed in the pastoral tradition--The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures. So did verses in later books of the Bible (Proverbs and Song of Solomon, among others). The Syracuse poet Theocritus wrote his Idylls about Sicilian shepherds and goatherds in the third century B.c. They became the model for Virgil, who reset the poems for a Roman audience three centuries later and named them Eclogues. More polished and self-conscious than Theocritus' rustic originals,Virgil's Eclogues employed the same characters and themes: unrequited love, an obsession with lactating animals, the challenging poem, the longing for a golden age. These subjects became the staples of literary pastorals that followed. In the Middle Ages, French troubadours composed pastourelles. In the Italian Renaissance, Dante and Petrarch wrote eclogues. Pastoral narrative romances of the late Renaissance were, arguably, the first novels ever written (and the model for Cervantes' Don Quixote). In England, John Donne and Edmund
Spenser wrote eclogues (Spenser called eclogues "Goteheard Tales," but the word means "little sketch"). The English Romantic poets Wordsworth, Keats, and Coleridge recapitulated the wandering work of the shepherd with their famous walking tours. The only things missing were the sheep.

One of the touchstones of literary pastorals is the "singing competition," or the "poetic challenge." Two or more herders gather at noon under a tree and exchange verses-and often insults-in a cutting competition, like "playing the dozens" or the Scottish fiyting. The tradition lives on today in rap and hip-hop as well as in the Arabic zajal. But you find it alive also among Bedouin and Somali herders and a few decades ago among Greek and Sicilian herders. The social anthropologist Sandra Ott describes the poetic challenge as perfectly preserved among Basque shepherds in the Pyrenees as late as the 1940s. Xikito was a form of ritual verbal dueling conducted by men on transhumance. Two shepherds stood apart on a mountainside and hurled rhymed four-line verses at each other. They did this, Ott explains, "until their anger was spent." One typical insult was to accuse your adversary in verse of having sex with a sow.

Poetry is often the making not of sense but nonsense. Good poetry bypasses the head and enters the heart without the gray matter getting in the way. Poetry must resist logic, as Wallace Stevens said, "almost completely." The English words chant and incant and enchant all derive from the same word for "song."

As the text book notes, Marlowe is writing out of the pastoral tradition.  The Oxford Companion to English Literature defines the pastoral as: 

A form of literature that celebrates in conventionally idealized terms the innocent loves and musical pleasures of shepherds and shepherdesses, usually in a mythical Arcadian ‘Golden Age’ of ease and harmony. Pastoral writing spans the genres of poetry, drama, and prose fiction. Despite its extreme artificiality, it is often capable of oblique or overt social criticism, in which rural harmony is contrasted with the corruptions of court or city.

Birch, Dinah. "pastoral." The Oxford Companion to English Literature: Oxford University Press, 2009. Web. Oxford Reference. 2009.  2 Feb. 2015.

""The Passionate Shepherd" frequently appeared in anthologies, some of the earliest in English, and the poem was parodied almost as frequently. And who wasn't talking about Ovid's Elegies, those jubilant, Cambridge-undergrad versions of Ovid's randy Latin Amores? Marlowe's English translations, memorable for pointing out the energetic possibilities of heroic couplets, were publicly burned in 1599 by orders of the bishop of London and archbishop of Canterbury. 'Poetry makes nothing happen,' says Auden. Someone try telling that to Christopher Marlowe, or to that bishop" (Foster). 

Foster, Brett. "Reading Marlowe again." The Kenyon Review 31.4 (2009): 179+. Literature Resource Center. Web. 5 Feb. 2015.

Marlowe “The Passionate Shepard to His Love” (390)
words: passionate

  • Given the definition above, what makes this poem "pastoral"?
  • How does this work as a love poem?  
  • Why "Passionate" shepherd? OED
  • Why write such an obviously artificial poem?  Any contemporary analogs (not just in poetry, but obvious artificial yet appealing mythic versions of life)?
Bed of roses? Uh . . . no thanks

Ralegh “The Nymph’s Reply” (397)
words: wanton

  • Why a "Nymph"?  Why not a maid or shepherdess? 
  • How could the poem be considered an "oblique or overt social criticism "?  What is he criticizing?

Williams “Raleigh Was Right” (398)


Ginsberg “A Further Proposal” (399)

Group work
For your answers, find quotes to support your arguments and then follow the format below
Introduce quote (Who's talking? What do you want readers to focus on?): "insert quote" (cite line). Explain quote format when answering the questions,

  1. How do Marlowe's and Ralegh's poems echo earlier poetic styles/approaches?  Compare to the Greek, Roman, and Chinese poetry we've read.  What connections can you make?
  2. How are these poetic traditions different?
  3. How do the poems show the "corruptions of court or country"?
  4. What do the more modern poets -- Williams and Ginsberg -- add to Marlowe and Ralegh?

Circa 1600 and today

Shakespeare and the sonnet: 255-259; “Let Me Not” (19) “Shall I Compare” (173); “My Mistress’s Eyes,” Addonizio “First Poem for You”  “Not Marble” (389) Gilbert “Sonnet” (306)

Terms again: we knew of Haiku and pastoral from previous readings.  What did we add for today?  What is a ballad stanza?  Iambic meter? Pentameter? Sonnet? Italian/Petrarchan sonnet? Shakespearean sonnet?

Learning the Sonnet -- great short article that describes the basic features of the poetic form.

Shakespeare's sonnets: meant for private consumption, but 154 were published in 1609.  Critics note that some were addressed to a young man, and others to a "Dark Lady."  They do not ascribe any as addressed to his wife who, in his will, received his "second best bed."

The sonnet sequence was one of the most popular poetic forms in the early 1590’s; modeled originally on works by Dante Alighieri and Petrarch, the genre developed in sixteenth century France and Italy and quickly reached England. Sir Philip Sidney’s Astrophel and Stella (1591), written a few years before the poet’s death in 1586, is a demonstration of how quickly the sonnet cycle achieved excellence in English. Edmund Spenser, Samuel Daniel, Michael Drayton, and many other well-known Elizabethan men of letters followed Sidney’s example, paying tribute to the idealized ladies who inspired their almost religious devotion. 

Shakespeare’s poems, probably composed at intervals during the decade between 1590 and 1600, differ radically from the sonnets of his contemporaries in several ways. They are not based on the traditional Petrarchan theme of a proud, virtuous lady and an abject, scorned lover, and there is in them relatively little of the platonic idealism that fills such works as Spenser’s Amoretti (1595), in which the poet’s love for his lady lifts him above human weakness to contemplation of the divine. Shakespeare records a strangely ambiguous, tortured affection for a young nobleman; the emotions he expresses in his sonnets have a depth and complexity, an intensity, that can be encountered elsewhere only in the speeches of some of his greatest dramatic creations.

"Sonnets Of Shakespeare." Masterplots, Fourth Edition (2010): 1-4. Literary Reference Center. Web. 1 Feb. 2015.

“Let Me Not” (19) 

  • What's meant by the "alter" and "bends" lines (3-4)? Why repeat "alters" (11)? 
  • What kind of compass is referred to in the poem?  How can you tell?  Why use this one?
  • Helen Vendler, one of the most respected poetry critics, argues that this poem is "an example not of  definition but of refutation or rebuttal" (488).  What in the poem suggests this?
  • Vendler paraphrases the poem as so:  is this reading valid?
    • You would like the marriage of minds to have the same permanence as the sacramental marriage of bodies.  But this is unreasonable -- there are impediments to such constancy. After all, persons alter; and when one finds alteration, one is himself bound to alter as well; and also, people (or some qualities in them) leave, and one's love is bound to remove itself when the qualities of one's lovers remove.  I did love you once; but you have altered, and so there is a natural alteration in me."

“Shall I Compare” (173); 

  • Why "temperate"?
  • How does time function in this poem?
  •  How does the footnote ruin the challenge and fun of the poem?

“My Mistress’s Eyes,” 

  • "belied"?
  • What's meant by "rare"?
  • Why mention her breath?

Addonizio “First Poem for You”  

  • Obvious but necessary: why a tattoo?
  • Why touch them in darkness?
  • Tell me about the person with the tattoo?  An accountant?  Biker?  What's suggested in the poem?
  • Describe their relationship.  Length? Status? Desire? Chance (as it does it have a)?
  • Time again?
  • "Leave the Biker" Fountains of Wayne

“Not Marble” (389) 

  • Why marble and stones?
  • Why wars?
  • Time again?

Gilbert “Sonnet” (306)

  • What are the connotations of Ladies' Home Journal?
  • Why "mashed potatoes"?
Christian Dior

Christian Dior Black and White Houndstooth Sweater Jacket

https://www.1stdibs.com/fashion/clothing/sweaters/christian-dior-black-white-houndstooth-sweater-jacket/id-v_125623/

Group questions
Remember to use the introduce quote (Who's talking? What do you want readers to focus on?): "insert quote" (cite line). Explain quote format when answering the questions,

  1. "Spring Break" and irony: first define irony then decide how the form, in its tone and structure, contribute to the meaning of the poem.
  2. Choose one of the other poems in the readings, determine its theme, and then expain how the poem supports that theme: extra points for explaining how the sonnet form contributes to that theme.

Circa 1600s and echoes
Donne “Batter My Heart” (174); “The Flea” (97); “Song” (513); Rich “Two Songs” (171)

What could be happening that would make so much poetry deemed worthy of inclusion in a limited anthology? What's the cultural background here?

Metaphysical poets
"the features their work is generally taken to display are sustained dialectic, paradox, novelty, incongruity, ‘muscular’ rhythms, giving the effect of a ‘speaking voice’, and the use of elaborately extended metaphors, or ‘conceits’" (Birch).
Birch, Dinah. "metaphysical poets." The Oxford Companion to English Literature. Oxford University Press, 2009. Oxford Reference. 2009. Web. Date Accessed 23 Feb. 2015.

St. Theresa

The Ecstasy of St. Theresa
Bernini 1647-52
Where could we go for a definition of ecstasy -  besides the OED (hint -- it still contains Oxford)?



In Donne's poems, work on tracing out the rich metaphors: he stretches them to their limits.  

Keep in mind the two parts of a metaphor: the tenor -- the idea/person/object being compared; and the vehicle -- the image or idea used to make the comparison.

“Batter My Heart” (174);

  • Who's talking?  Why would the speaker feel so . . . is it guilty? Threatened? Fearful? Bold?
  • Why a sonnet form?
  • What is the rising referred to in line 3?
  • Why the violent imagery? How can a nominally Christian poem be so violent?
  • How does the "usurp'd town" ripple through the poem?  What's meant by a "usurp'd town"?
  • chaste and ravish? OED these words.

“The Flea” (97);

  • What's the situation? Who is speaking?  Who is (probably) he speaking to?
  • Why a flea? How does it make a good vehicle for ____? What's the tenor?

“Song” (513);

  • Connections to our buddy Cattulus?

Rich “Two Songs” (171)

  • How do the metaphors work here?
  • Are they similar in reach to Donne's?
  • What's a metaphysical poet doing in 20th century America?

Group work

  1. Work out "My Mistress' Eyes" -- what's the main theme?  How does the poem support/advance it?

 

Circa 1600s and echoes
Marvell “To His Coy Mistress” (106); MacLeish “You, Andrew Marvell”(403); Linda Pastan “Marks” (168); Millay’s poems 269.  

Biography
A few notes on Marvell's life

he is a fitting symbol for England's transformation in the seventeenth century from what was still largely a medieval, Christian culture into a modern, secular society. In his subtle, ironic, and sometimes mysterious lyrics, apparently written just at the middle of the century, we have one of our finest records of an acute, sensitive mind confronting the myriad implications of that transformation.  (Young)

Son of a reverend (there were many reverends in England at the time -- it was more of a job and less of a calling for many).

Young, R. V. "Andrew Marvell." Seventeenth-Century British Nondramatic Poets: Third Series. Ed. M. Thomas Hester. Detroit: Gale Research, 1993. Dictionary of Literary Biography Vol. 131. Literature Resource Center. Web. 6 Mar. 2015.

One of the best known lyric poets.  Speaking of which, definition time:

Lyric poetry
"In the modern sense, any fairly short poem expressing the personal mood, feeling, or meditation of a single speaker (who may sometimes be an invented character, not the poet). In ancient Greece, a lyric was a song for accompaniment on the lyre, and could be a choral lyric sung by a group (see chorus), such as a dirge or hymn; the modern sense, current since the Renaissance, often suggests a song-like quality in the poems to which it refers. Lyric poetry is the most extensive category of verse, especially after the decline—since the 19th century in the West—of the other principal kinds: narrative and dramatic verse. Lyrics may be composed in almost any metre and on almost every subject, although the most usual emotions presented are those of love and grief. Among the common lyric forms are the sonnet, ode, elegy, haiku, and the more personal kinds of hymn. Lyricism is the emotional or song-like quality, the lyrical property, of lyric poetry. A writer of lyric poems may be called a lyric poet, a lyricist, or a lyrist. In another sense, the lyrics of a popular song or other musical composition are the words as opposed to the music; these may not always be lyrical in the poetic sense (e.g. in a narrative song like a ballad). For a fuller account, consult Scott Brewster, Lyric (2007)."

Baldick, Chris. "lyric." The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. Oxford Reference. 2008. Web. 4 Feb. 2015.

Epic poetry
"A long narrative poem celebrating the great deeds of one or more legendary heroes, in a grand ceremonious style. The hero, usually protected by or even descended from gods, performs superhuman exploits in battle or in marvellous voyages, often saving or founding a nation—as in Virgil's Aeneid (30–20 bce)—or the human race itself, in Milton's Paradise Lost (1667). Virgil and Milton wrote what are called ‘secondary’ or literary epics in imitation of the earlier ‘primary’ or traditional epics of Homer, whose Iliad and Odyssey (c.8th century bce) are derived from an oral tradition of recitation. They adopted many of the conventions of Homer's work, including the invocation of a muse, the use of epithets, the listing of heroes and combatants, and the beginning in medias res (for other epic conventions, see epic simile, formulaic, machinery). The Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf (8th century ce) is a primary epic, as is the oldest surviving epic poem, the Babylonian Gilgamesh (c.3000 bce). In the Renaissance, epic poetry (also known as ‘heroic poetry’) was regarded as the highest form of literature, and was attempted in Italian by Tasso in Gerusalemme Liberata (1575), and in Portuguese by Camoėns in Os Lusiadas (1572). Other important national epics are the Indian Mahābhārata (3rd or 4th century ce) and the German Nibelungenlied (c.1200). The action of epics takes place on a grand scale, and in this sense the term has sometimes been extendeded to long romances, to ambitious historical novels like Tolstoy's War and Peace (1863–9), and to some large-scale film productions on heroic or historical subjects. For a fuller account, consult Paul Merchant, The Epic (1971)."

http://www.auburn.edu/~downejm/hyperepos.html Hyperepos: a resource for the study of epic.
Baldick, Chris. "epic." The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. Oxford Reference. 2008. Web. 4 Feb. 2015.

Ballad
"A folk song or orally transmitted poem telling in a direct and dramatic manner some popular story usually derived from a tragic incident in local history or legend. The story is told simply, impersonally, and often with vivid dialogue. Ballads are normally composed in quatrains with alternating four-stress and three-stress lines, the second and fourth lines rhyming (see ballad metre); but some ballads are in couplet form, and some others have six-line stanzas. Appearing in many parts of Europe in the late Middle Ages, ballads flourished particularly strongly in Scotland from the 15th century onwards. Since the 18th century, educated poets outside the folk-song tradition—notably Coleridge and Goethe—have written imitations of the popular ballad's form and style: Coleridge's ‘Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ (1798) is a celebrated example. The art of composing ballads is called balladry, as is any large corpus of ballads. For a fuller account, consult G. Malcolm Laws, The English Literary Ballad (1972)."

Baldick, Chris. "ballad." The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. Oxford Reference. 2008. Web. 4 Feb. 2015.
 
Dramatic poetry/monologues
"A kind of poem in which a single fictional or historical character other than the poet speaks to a silent ‘audience’ of one or more persons. Such poems reveal not the poet's own thoughts but the mind of the impersonated character, whose personality is revealed unwittingly; this distinguishes a dramatic monologue from a lyric, while the implied presence of an auditor distinguishes it from a soliloquy. Major examples of this form in English are Tennyson's ‘Ulysses’ (1842), Browning's ‘Fra Lippo Lippi’ (1855), and T. S. Eliot's ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ (1917). Some plays in which only one character speaks, in the form of a monologue or soliloquy, have also been called dramatic monologues; but to avoid confusion it is preferable to refer to these simply as monologues or as monodramas. For a fuller account, consult Elizabeth A. Howe, The Dramatic Monologue (1996)."

Baldick, Chris. "dramatic monologue." The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. Oxford Reference. 2008. Web. 4 Feb. 2015.

carpe diem
"A quotation from Horace's Odes (I, xi) meaning ‘seize the day’, in other words ‘make the best of the present moment’. A common theme or motif in European lyric poetry, in which the speaker of a poem argues (often to a hesitant virgin) that since life is short, pleasure should be enjoyed while there is still time. The most celebrated examples in English are Marvell's ‘To His Coy Mistress’ (1681) and Herrick's ‘To the Virgins, To Make Much of Time’ (1648), which begins ‘Gather ye rosebuds while ye may’. In some Christian poems and sermons, the carpe diem motif warns us to prepare our souls for death, rather than our bodies for bed."

Baldick, Chris. "carpe diem." The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. Oxford Reference. 2008. Web. 4 Feb. 2015.

Marvell “To His Coy Mistress” (106)
  • What's the situation?
  • Who's talking to who?
  • What convention is at play here?
  • Why "coy"?
  • What might be persuasive to a woman here?
  • What would be a major turn off?
  • Which predominates?
  • What's your favorite line?
  • In later years, Marvell was known as a satirist.  Can this poem be read as a satire? Is any of it ironic?
MacLeish “You, Andrew Marvell”(403)
  • What's the situation?
  • Who does the speaker seem to be?
  • Rhyme scheme?
"The chief effect of the poem's grammatical indeterminacy is to give the impression of continuous, unstoppable motion. Other grammatical devices reinforce this impression. The poem opens with a conjunction and ends with an ellipsis; it has no definite beginning or ending."

"The opposition of dark and light in the poem reminds one of the basic principle of the two great dualistic religions, Zoroastrianism and Manicheanism: the continual struggle between good or light and evil or darkness. Unlike Christianity both religions regard evil as coeternal with God, although Zoroastrianism predicts the eventual triumph of the light. Both Zoroastrianism and Manicheanism originated in Persia, where night, in the poem, begins its progress. All of the places mentioned in the poem are associated with non-Christian--pagan or Islamic--civilizations. Ecbatan was the capital of the Median empire. Kermanshah was a commercial city at the Persian end of the pass that connected Persia with Mesopotamia. Baghdad was the birthplace of Mani and later the capital of the Abbasid caliphs. Palmyra, in Syria, was an important trading center under the Roman empire. Lebanon and Crete were the centers of the Phoenician and Minoan cultures Sicily was the site of wealthy Carthaginian and Greek colonies. Spain and North Africa were parts of Islamic empires. Darkness engulfs all of them, but the Judeo-Christian Holy Land is not mentioned. Has Christendom been spared?"

"Commentators who have read "You, Andrew Marvell" in light of MacLeish's version of its background have taken it to be about the speaker's new awareness of his mortality. They have assumed that MacLeish had Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress" in mind, in particular its famous image of "Time's wingčd chariot." Laurence Perrine's interpretation is typical: "Marvell's poem is primarily concerned with the swift passing of man's life; and the word night ... is a natural and traditional metaphor or symbol for death." MacLeish's speaker, according to Perrine, "is at present 'upon earth's noonward height'--in the full flush of manhood--but he is acutely conscious of the declining years ahead and of 'how swift how secretly' his death comes on" (Perrine 634). According to Perrine, the geographical references, the sites of vanished or declining civilizations, are meant to suggest the passing of time on the historical level as well as on the level of the individual--a view supported by MacLeish's claim that the speaker's location is in Illinois. Perrine concludes that "the poet's own country--the United States--now shines 'upon earth's noonward height' as a favored nation in the sun of history, but its civilization too, will pass" (634)."

"MacLeish had been to Bermuda--he and Ada had honeymooned there in 1916. But the significance of Bermuda to MacLeish was literary, not sentimental. MacLeish placed his speaker in Bermuda in order to associate his poem with a poem of Marvell's. The poem he had in mind was not "To His Coy Mistress," however, but "Bermudas." In "Bermudas" a group of English Puritans approach one of the Bermuda islands in a longboat. As they row, they sing a hymn of thanksgiving to God for delivering them "safe from the storms and prelate's rage" and leading them "unto an isle so long unknown / And yet far kinder" than the England they left. Both poems are written in the same meter and are about the same length. They are similar in structure: both open with a preposition that connects the poem to a particular place ("Where the remote Bermudas ride"; "And here face down beneath the sun"), and both have a central section framed by introductory and concluding passages. They both depend on exotic place names for their color. Finally, in both poems the speakers are looking back at the Old World from the New. Marvell's Puritans would have been facing east as they rowed west, and MacLeish's speaker feels the night rising out of the east."

Marvell's Bermudas
Hendricks, T. W. "Archibald MacLeish in Bermuda: Geography and Grammar in 'You, Andrew Marvell.'." The CEA Critic 65.2 (Winter 2003): 10-20. Rpt. in Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism. Ed. Kathy D. Darrow. Vol. 276. Detroit: Gale, 2013. Literature Resource Center. Web. 1 March 2015.
Linda Pastan “Marks” (168)
  • How does this inform our understanding of "Coy Mistress"?
  • What's clever about the last line?  Note the last word.
Millay’s poems 269. 

"What lips"
  • Beautiful sad poem: great use of the sonnet form
"I shall forget"
  • What's the situation?
  • Who's the speaker? Who is he/she speaking to?
  • What is "biologically speaking" at the end of the poem?
Is time a leitmotif or metaphor in this poem?
Leitmotif: "A frequently repeated phrase, image, symbol, or situation in a literary work, the recurrence of which usually indicates or supports a theme. The term (German, ‘leading motif’) comes from music criticism, where it was first used to describe the repeated musical themes or phrases that Wagner linked with particular characters and ideas in his operatic works. The repeated references to rings and arches in D. H. Lawrence's novel The Rainbow (1915) are examples of the use of a leitmotif; the repetition of set phrases in the novels of Muriel Spark is another example. See also motif."
Baldick, Chris. "leitmotif." The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. Oxford Reference. 2008. Web. 8 March. 2015.

Metaphor: "The most important and widespread figure of speech, in which one thing, idea, or action is referred to by a word or expression normally denoting another thing, idea, or action, so as to suggest some common quality shared by the two. In metaphor, this resemblance is assumed as an imaginary identity rather than directly stated as a comparison: referring to a man as that pig, or saying he is a pig is metaphorical, whereas he is like a pig is a simile. Metaphors may also appear as verbs (a talent may blossom) or as adjectives (a novice may be green), or in longer idiomatic phrases, e.g. to throw the baby out with the bath‐water. The use of metaphor to create new combinations of ideas is a major feature of poetry, although it is quite possible to write poems without metaphors. Much of our everyday language is also made up of metaphorical words and phrases that pass unnoticed as ‘dead’ metaphors, like the branch of an organization. A mixed metaphor is one in which the combination of qualities suggested is illogical or ridiculous (see also catachresis), usually as a result of trying to apply two metaphors to one thing: those vipers stabbed us in the back. Modern analysis of metaphors and similes distinguishes the primary literal term (called the ‘tenor’) from the secondary figurative term (the ‘vehicle’) applied to it: in the metaphor the road of life, the tenor is life, and the vehicle is the road. For a fuller account, consult David Punter, Metaphor (2007)."
Baldick, Chris. "metaphor." The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. Oxford Reference. 2008. Web. 8 March 2015.

Group Work
Remember to use the introduce quote (Who's talking? What do you want readers to focus on?): "insert quote" (cite line). Explain quote format when answering the questions.

  1. How does Marvell's poem connect with Donne's "The Flea"?
  2. How does Millay's "I shall forget" answer or speak to "Coy Mistress"?
  3. What's the best line in "Coy"?  Why?

Circa Late 1700 Early 1800s and echoes
Wordsworth “It is a Beauteous Evening” “The World is Too Much With Us” “The Tables Turned”; Blake “London” (33), “The Lamb” (385) “The Tyger” (56) (>Course Documents>Readings #4)

Focus today: Moving from the Enlightenment to the Romantic period - What makes a poem "romantic"?  How do we see poetry developing in this period?

First off: contextual background -- English Romanticism
A profound transformation in artistic styles, in cultural attitudes, and in the relations between artist and society evident in Western literature and other arts in the first half of the 19th century. In Britain, a stark contrast appears between representative works of the preceding Augustan age and those of leading figures in what became known as the Romantic movement or ‘Romantic Revival’ in the period from about 1780 to about 1848: William Blake, Robert Burns, Charlotte Smith, William Wordsworth, S. T. Coleridge, Mary Robinson (1757/8–1800), Robert Southey, Walter Scott, Lord Byron, P. B. Shelley, John Keats, William Hazlitt, Thomas De Quincey, Thomas Carlyle, Emily Brontė, and Charlotte Brontė.

In the most abstract terms, Romanticism may be regarded as the triumph of the values of imaginative spontaneity, visionary originality, wonder, and emotional self-expression over the classical standards of balance, order, restraint, proportion, and objectivity. Its name derives from romance, the literary form in which desires and dreams prevail over everyday realities.

Romanticism arose from a period of turbulence, euphoria, and uncertainty. Political and intellectual movements of the late 18th century encouraged the assertion of individual and national rights, denying legitimacy (forcibly in the American and French revolutions) to kings and courtiers. In Britain, the expansions of commerce, journalism, and literacy had loosened the dependency of artists and writers upon noble patrons, releasing them to discover their own audiences in an open cultural market-place—as Scott and Byron did most successfully—or to toil in unrewarded obscurity, like Blake. Nourished by Protestant conceptions of intellectual liberty, the Romantic writers tended to cast themselves as prophetic voices crying in the wilderness. The Romantic author, unlike the more socially integrated Augustan writers, was often seen a sort of modern hermit or exile, who usually granted a special moral value to similar outcast figures in his or her own writing: the pedlars and vagrants in Wordsworth's poems, Coleridge's Ancient Mariner, Mary Shelley's man-made monster, and the many tormented pariahs in the works of Byron and P. B. Shelley. Although some (notably Keats and Shelley) continued to employ elements of Greek mythology and to adapt the classical form of the ode, they scorned the imitation of classical models as an affront to the autonomy of the all-important creative imagination. Well above Horace or Juvenal they revered Shakespeare and Milton as their principal models of the sublime embodied in the poet's boundless imaginative genius. In this, they took the partly nationalistic direction followed by Romantic poets and composers in other countries, who likewise rediscovered and revalued their local vernacular traditions.

Although inheriting much of the humane and politically liberal spirit of the Enlightenment, the Romantics largely rejected its analytic rationalism; Wordsworth warned against the destructive tendency of the ‘meddling intellect’ to intrude upon the sanctities of the human heart, and he argued that the opposite of poetry was not prose but science. The Romantic revolt against scientific empiricism is compatible with the prevailing trend of German philosophy, notably Immanuel Kant's ‘transcendental’ idealism, of which Coleridge and Carlyle were dedicated students.

In reaction against the spiritual emptiness of the modern calculating age, Romanticism cultivated various forms of nostalgia and of primitivism. The imaginative sovereignty of the child, in the works of Blake and Wordsworth, implicitly shames the inauthenticity of adulthood, while the dignified simplicity of rural life is more generally invoked in condemnation of urban civilization. The superior nobility of the past tends also to be, as we now say, ‘romanticized’ for its imaginative conceptions of the ideal and the heroic, as reflected in Shakespeare, in chivalric romance, and in balladry. Antiquaries of the 18th century, notably Thomas Percy in his Reliques and James Macpherson in his Ossianic poems, had won a new respect for the older forms of popular or ‘folk’ poetry and legend.

Romantic writing exhibits a new emotional intensity taken to unprecedented extremes of joy or dejection, rapture or horror, and an extravagance of apparently egotistic self-projection. As a whole, it is usually taken to represent a second renaissance of literature in Britain, especially in lyric and narrative poetry, which displaced the Augustan cultivation of satiric and didactic modes. The prose styles of Hazlitt, De Quincey, Charles Lamb, and Leigh Hunt also show a marked renewal of vitality, flexibility, subjective tone, and what Hazlitt called ‘gusto’. The arts of prose fiction were extended by Scott's historical novels, by the sensational effects of Gothic fiction, and by the emergence of the short story form in the Edinburgh and London magazines. Although Byron, Shelley, and others wrote important dramatic poems, drama written for the theatres is not seen as the strongest aspect of Romantic literature. On the other hand, alongside the often vituperative and partisan conduct of reviewing in Blackwood's Magazine and other periodicals, this was a great age of literary criticism and theory, most notably in the writings of Coleridge and Hazlitt, and in major essays by Wordsworth and Shelley.

Simplified accounts of Romanticism in Britain date its arrival from the appearance in 1798 of the Lyrical Ballads or in 1800 of Wordsworth's preface (effectively a manifesto) to that collection. ‘Pre-Romantic’ currents have been recognized in the latter part of the 18th century, however, including ‘graveyard poetry’, the novel of sentiment, the cult of the sublime, and the Sturm und Drang phase of German literature in the 1770s led by Schiller and the young Goethe.

Romanticism flourished in the United States somewhat later, between 1820 and 1860, with James Fenimore Cooper's historical romances, Ralph Waldo Emerson's essays, Herman Melville's novels, Edgar Allan Poe's tales and poetry, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Walt Whitman, and the nature writings of Henry Thoreau.

The convenient and conventional divisions of literary history into distinct ‘periods’ may obscure the extent to which the Romantic tradition remains unbroken in the later 19th century and beyond. The work of John Ruskin, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and the Victorian advocates of the Gothic Revival, displays Romantic attitudes in its nostalgia and its opposition to an unpoetical modern civilization; and the same might be said of W. B. Yeats and D. H. Lawrence in the early 20th century.

Critical opposition to the Romantic inheritance, in the name of ‘classical’ ideals, was advanced by Matthew Arnold in the 1850s, and by some later critics under his influence, including the American scholar Irving Babbitt, whose book Rousseau and Romanticism (1919) condemned the Romantic movement as an irresponsible ‘pilgrimage in the void’ that had licensed self-indulgent escapism and nationalist aggression, and his student T.S. Eliot.

"Romanticism." The Concise Oxford Companion to English Literature. Eds. Birch, Dinah, and Katy Hooper. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. Oxford Reference. 2013. Web. 6 March 2015.

Cf. Wordsworth from Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1798): "For all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: and though this be true, Poems to which any value can be attached were never produced on any variety of subjects but by a man who, being possessed of more than usual organic sensibility, had also thought long and deeply."

And consider the following quick mnemonic for remembering the basic tenets of Romanticism

The 5 I's

  • Imagination: imagination should stem from nature. And instead of trying to change or control nature, a la' the Enlightenment, Romantics believed we should look to and imitate nature whenever possible because we can only prosper in our natural state. This meant that both art and religion were closely allied with nature.
  • Intuition: instead of reason as the standard (as in the Enlightenment), Romantics believed that our instincts and emotions should determine our actions.
  • Innocence: this picks up on the notion that man is corrupted by experience. Instead of a Calvinist "we're born in sin," the Romantics believed we're born in innocence, and through experience with the sordid world, we become tainted. Thus, the child is exalted as a vessel of innocence and purity.
  • Iconoclasm: not following tradition -- in fact, often used to define a movement that deliberately breaks with perceived ideas.
  • (anti-)Industrialism: tied to the embrace of nature, this view looks at the rise of industry as promoting everything (control, group over the individual, wordliness, materialism) that the Romanticists rejected.

Wordsworth
“It is a Beauteous Evening” 

  • Who is "the mighty Being"?  Why is he awake in the evening?
  • Who's Abraham?

“The World is Too Much With Us” 

  • What does he mean by "The World"? 
  • How does this poem touch on economics?

“The Tables Turned”

  • Why are books bad?
  • Why mention birds singing?
  • What do the "barren leaves" refer to?

William Blake

“London” (33)

  • Industrial revolution?  How does that figure here?

“The Lamb” (385)

  • Why a lamb? Religious connotations?

“The Tyger” (56)

  • Why a tiger?
  • What do you make of the change between the first and last stanza?
  • Pronouns rule in this poem: figure them out and the poem is much easier to understand.

Selections from A Visit to William Blake's Inn: Poems for Innocent and Experienced Travelers (>Course Documents>Readings #4)

  • How do the illustrations contribute to the meaning?
  • What's the tiger doing in the picture?

Group Work
Remember to use the introduce quote (Who's talking? What do you want readers to focus on?): "insert quote" (cite line). Explain quote format when answering the questions.

  1. Trace the religious connotations in Wordsworth's poems: how does he characterize religion?  Where is it located? Given these connotations, what is Wordsworth "saying" about religion?
  2. What is the role of nature in Wordsworth's poems?  What does it symbolize.
  3. Okay, so Wordsworth and Blake are Romantic poets.  How are they related?  What makes them Romantic as opposed to poets of the Enlightenment?
  4. Take out syllabus: how are these works different than earlier works?  Similar?

Circa Early 1800s
Keats: 342-356, especially “On Seeing the Elgian Marbles” and “Ode on a Grecian Urn”

Ode

An elaborately formal lyric poem, often in the form of a lengthy ceremonious address to a person or abstract entity, always serious and elevated in tone. There are two different classical models: in Greek, the epinicion or choral ode of Pindar devoted to public praise of athletes (5th century bce), and Horace's more privately reflective odes in Latin (c.23–13 bce). Pindar composed his odes for performance by a chorus, using lines of varying length in a complex three-part structure of strophe, antistrophe, and epode corresponding to the chorus's dancing movements (see pindaric), whereas Horace wrote literary odes in regular stanzas. Close English imitations of Pindar, such as Thomas Gray's ‘The Progress of Poesy’ (1754), are rare, but a looser irregular ode with varying lengths of strophes was introduced by Abraham Cowley's ‘Pindarique Odes’ (1656) and followed by John Dryden, William Collins, William Wordsworth (in ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’ (1807), and S. T. Coleridge, among others; this irregular form of ode is sometimes called the Cowleyan ode. Odes in which the same form of stanza is repeated regularly (see homostrophic) are called Horatian odes: in English, these include the celebrated odes of John Keats, notably ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ and ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ (both 1820). Adjective: odic. For a fuller account, consult Carol Maddison, Apollo and the Nine: A History of the Ode (1960).

Baldick, Chris. "ode." The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. Oxford Reference. 2008. Web. 15 Mar. 2015.


Elgin Marbles
Originally part of the Parthenon and other monuments in Greece, these were removed by the Earl of Elgin in the early 1800s and brought to England where they were put on display.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/ff/Elgin_marbles_frieze.jpg
Part of a frieze from the Elgin Marbles
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/ff/Elgin_marbles_frieze.jpg

Parthenon

Statues from the Parthenon
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parthenon#/media/File:Elgin_Marbles_east_pediment.jpg for larger size

The Elgin Marbles

  1. Why would he be writing about these anyway?  What would draw him to them?
  2. What contrast is set up in the first line?
  3. How does "unwilling sleep" (line 2) work with the first line?
  4. Okay, these marbles are a thing of beauty.  What words do you see that are positive?  Which words are negative? Which predominate?
  5. Why a "sick eagle"?
  6. What's the "feud" in line 10?
  7. How does the sonnet form fit here?
  8. Why the pain (line 11)?
  9. How could looking at Greek statuary and/or stone work make you think of death?

Ode on a Grecian Urn

http://www.schillerinstitute.org/biographys/memorial/Gary_John/images/keats_ode_grecian_urn.jpg
http://www.schillerinstitute.org/biographys/memorial/
Gary_John/images/keats_ode_grecian_urn.jpg

http://britlitwiki.wikispaces.com/file/view/Urn_1_by_Richard_Oldfield.jpg/31746221/Urn_1_by_Richard_Oldfield.jpg
http://britlitwiki.wikispaces.com/file/view/Urn_1_by_Richard_Oldfield.jpg
/31746221/Urn_1_by_Richard_Oldfield.jpg

  1. Why a "bride of quietness"?
  2. Who (or what) is the "Sylvan historian"?  And why sylvan?
  3. What's the end punctuation of all sentences in the first stanza?  Why?
  4. What's "our rhyme"?
  5. Why are "unheard" melodies "sweeter"?  How can a melody that's not heard be better than one that's heard?  How can a melody even be "unheard"? How does this connect to a "spirit ditties of no tone"?
  6. Why can't the lovers kiss?  That would seem to be a bummer, but it's not so for the speaker of the poem.
  7. Why are the boughs "happy" -- in fact, doublely happy?
  8. Of course, what does he mean by the famous ending lines: how is "Beauty" "truth"?  And why the reversal?  And why is that all we need to know?

Ode to a Nightingale

Link to its song: what a range of sounds . . .

Not much to look at

http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Observer/Columnist/Columnists/2011/4/22/1303503343216/NIGHTINGALE-001.jpg
http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Observer/Columnist/Columnists/2011/4/22/1303503343216/NIGHTINGALE-001.jpg

  1. How is a birdsong like a poem?
Letters

Death on a Pale HorseDeath on a Pale HorseDeath on a Pale Horse

Group Questions
Remember to use the introduce quote (Who's talking? What do you want readers to focus on?): "insert quote" (cite line). Explain quote format when answering the questions.
  1. What lines/ideas/words from Endymion connect with "Ode on Grecian Urn"?
  2. Find at least two connections from the letters (351-355) to Keats' poetry.
  3. If he's a Romantic poet, what connects in his poetry to Wordsworth or Blake?  Any connections to earlier poets?  

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© David Bordelon 2015