amimetobios (Amimetobios)

A class on doubling, literal and metaphorical, e.g. Lady Macbeth and Lady Macduff, Hecate, etc.  The meaning of doubling.  The conglomeration and dissolution of social groups.  Simmel (of course!) on spatial relations as both the condition and the symbol of human relations.  The quickness of friends (in anticipation of Antony and Cleopatra).  Miscellaneous digressions, not all my fault.

Tennyson's "The Skipping Rope."  Dialogue: dramatic conflict and rhyme.  Ballad meter and alternation.  A note on Lyrical Ballads.

Different sorts of stresses and their superposition.  A lot on one line in Paradise Lost: "Is this the region, this the soil, the clime...?"  And a bit on one line in Yeats: "Vain gaiety, vain battle, vain repose."  And then the opening line of Paradise Lost: the stress in the word "first," the countervailing stress on the word "disobedience."

Cole Porter's "You're the Top."  Eighteenth Century bouts-rimés.  The poetic task of making arbitrary rhymes make sense. Jakobson on the poetic function of language.

How trochaic words overlap iambic feet.  Loose onsets, strict endings.  "Brought death inTO the world"?  Or "Brought death INto the world"?  Or both? "After great pain a formal feeling comes."

Wilde in prison, or in Dante's hell, and the differences and similarities between the grimness of "The Ballad of Reading Gaol" and the charming, dazzling self-delight of his earlier self-presentations, in a class guest-taught by Princeton's Professor Jeff Nunokawa.

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.  

We finally really begin Antony and Cleopatra, discussing Plutarch's interest in character, and Shakespeare's, and what makes a tragic character interesting since we know what the plot will be.  Aristotle on pity and terror again: usually the protagonist or main is someone innocent or at worst someone like ourselves: not so in Macbeth.  After which we start analyzing the opening scene, with comparisons to Lear and to Hamlet as well (on the quantification of love).  Many corny jokes.

Holinshed, Knocking at the gate, Banquo, self-fulfilling prophecies, as psychological and causal, subjectivity: who in the story is the story for?  Who is real in the story?

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."

A bit about forms and what they're metaphors for, and then mainly Stevens's "Emperor of Ice Cream," with other Stevens ("The Snow Man," "Auroras of Autumn") mentioned briefly.

Assignments for a paper on metaphor.  Salty discussion of metaphors, of plagiarism, of past and future assassinations.  Then (most of the class) a beginning of a discussion of Percy Bysshe Shelley's "Mont Blanc" and the contest to see what is metaphor and what is reality.

Coleridge on puns in Shakespeare.  Aristotelean unities and how Shakespeare violates them.  Doctor Johnson's bad conjectural emendation.  The great line he wishes to emend: "Time and the hour runs through the roughest day."

First class on Zoom.  I recorded the class as though in class but I was sitting at my computer.  That means there's more me and less them, alas. 

Anyhow: we talked about being Mark Antony (cf. Being John Malkovich) and the odd phrase "an Antony."  Comparing that to the king's two bodies.  And we talked about time frames again: how Octavian is always the age he is at the beginning, and Antony and Cleopatra always the ages they are at the end.

We talk about George Meredith for a while -- "Lucifer in Starlight" (and the 1882 transit of Venus) and his relation to his wife, Mary Ellen Nicolls, and the relationship of both of them to Henry Wallis who'd painted Meredith as Chatterton.  We plan to return to Modern Love, but first we begin reading through Fitzgerald's Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam, after quoting him on its form and its moral: "Drink--for the Moon will often come round to look for us in this Garden and find us not."

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."  

More on iambic pentameter.  Examples from Milton and Pope.  A bit on sonnets.  Why poetry tends to flirt with prime numbers -- five feet per line, seven pairs of rhymes in sonnets, etc.  Examples from Shakespeare.

What is the most important criterion for a text's having a claim to being a poem?  What if it's not a text? what if it's oral poetry, like Homer? What authorizes us to say that there are five feet in a pentameter line, or six in a hexameter, when Milton and Homer recite their verses orally, or Shakespearean actors utter blank verse soliloquies on stage?  Are lines (unrhymed lines, anyhow) just artifacts of printing?  Hint: no.  Are they ever artifacts of printing? Hint: yes.

A couple of poems by Patmore, a somewhat tedious excursus into propositional attitudes and game theory, then the rest of "Goblin Market."

We conclude Act III, and discuss how well people know Antony, and how well Antony can know Cleopatra.  His anger at her, and his recovery from that anger.  Enobarbus' loyalty, and then his planned defection.  Enobarbus compared with Horatio, Kent, and Banquo.

We look at Yeats a little more, then "Michael Field," and then Housman's poem about Wilde and other poems about his own sexuality, and about the intense, Horatian ephemerality of life.  A class in part about why I hope poetry, or some poems, will matter to the students throughout their lives.

We start with a few lines from much later in EBB's Aurora Leigh (and their near explicit critique of Tennyson), then finish discussing "Development" (and its relation to modernity), then look at Pope's translation of the Thamyris passage in Book II of The Iliad, and the surviving fragments of Sophocles's play about him, and then spend the class on "Thamuris Marching," which has Aristophanes describing Sophocles's play in terza rima, and we end with the title of "'Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came'" the poem to which we'll return next class.

We conclude our discussion of D.G. Rossetti's "Blessed Damozel," paying particular attention to the passages in parentheses and the subtlety of what they suggest about the speaker's sense of the Blessed Damozel's perception of him.  We then move on to begin reading "Goblin Market," trying not so subtle account of its subtle sexuality -- or maybe it would be better to say a subtle account of its not so subtle sexuality 

A brief introduction to Pre-Raphaelite poetry and painting: the perceptual psychology that it brings us to notice.  A close reading of Dante Gabriel Rossetti's amazing "Woodspurge."  A little bit on his "Blessed Damozel," followed, via a Mr. Magoo-inflected reading of Lewis Carroll's "Mad Gardener's Song," by a more general consideration of rhyme and in Victorian poetry and the question of its prominence or lack thereof: important as well to "The Blessed Damozel," but we ran out of time and may not get to discuss this next class, when we will certainly do Christina Rossetti.

Beginning of Act IV.  More on Antony vs. "an Antony."  The latter is an object in the world, has worldly being.  The former is the extravagant, isolated subjectivity which is the tragic waywardness which is more and more where he is: in "the heart of loss." If extravagance -- waywardness, wandering outside of any world which is one's own, Binswanger's Verstiegenheit -- weren't more intense than worldliness, if things didn't get more intense as one loses everything, tragedy would be of no aesthetic interest.  A brief adumbration of the difference between daemonization (for Macbeth) and extravagance (for Antony).

We start with Coleridge's insight (followed by Bloom) that Macbeth confuses his own pangs of conscience with imaginative fear.  Then some discussion of remorse vs. repentance as analogous to that confusion.  A couple of jokes, and then a close reading of the line "Which of you have done this" when Macbeth sees Banquo.

Metaphor: Ezra Pound (and Wordsworth). Some more consideration of sonnets and their relation to metaphor and simile: Alice Oswald, Elizabeth Bishop.  Waley's translation of Tao Yuan-Ming and its similarity to Shakespeare's sonnet 73.   

A quiz (not recorded) based on the set of poems the students could write about, and some discussion of the answers.  Then the conclusion of Shelley's "Mont Blanc," with some discussion of the pathetic fallacy, to be continued.

Mainly about witches: Reginald Scott's skepticism, James's motivated belief in them, the King's touch, the relation of witches to the soothsayer in A&C (vs. the one in JC), and some attention (again, as in other courses) to Dan Decker's Anatomy of a Screenplay and the insights it affords into Shakespeare's construction of scenes: the way soothsayers and messengers are similar and the way they differ.  At the end a brief consideration of what De Quincey means by sympathy.

We continue reading through the play: Pompey disappoints Menas; Ventidius comments on who gets credit; Menas, Agrippa, Ventidius, and Enobarbus are represented as belonging to the same type (so that Menas's turn away from Pompey will adumbrate a very intense later scene); the love between Octavian and Octavia; her contrast with Cleopatra; Cleopatra's news management; Charmian's encouragement.  Alexandrian vs. Roman Feasts.  We're now well into Act III.

Mainly Clough, mainly a kind of intro to Amours de Voyage, with some historical (Mazzini, Garibaldi) and biographical context as well as context in narrative theory, especially of the epistolatory novel.  Clough the atheist and port-Darwinian, and his views of nature.  Then a quick and fun reading of "The New Decalogue," and a plan to return to Amours de Voyage next class.

Another Kipling poem -- "Danny Deaver" and the horror of hanging (in partial anticipation of Wilde's "Ballad of Reading Gaol"), and some discussion of Arnold, Pater, and Wilde as context for Lionel Johnson's "Dark Angel."  Then two versions of Yeats's "Cradle Song."

Sonnets and metaphor: Wyatt and Surrey's translations of Petrarch, and then Some Shakespeare (with remarks about Starbuck)

We talk about Merrill's "b o d y" and its relation to Macbeth and then the words et cetera = etc. et cetera, especially in Alice Notely's wonderful four line poem "The Comfort," with some attention to enjambment and end stop.

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."

The way metaphor works in one of Stevenson's songs of travel, a little attention to George R. Sim's punning in one of his "lunatic laureate" poems, and then close reading of the amazing Alice Meynell, in particular "Renouncement," "A Cradle Song," "The Modern Mother," and "Parentage," with some attention to the experience of Catholic guilt.

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.

Not what I meant to be doing to day, but it turned out we talked about the opening of Paradise Lost, and certain theological issues about free will, temptation, judgment of God, and justification of his ways.

After a 15 minute discussion of Covid-19 (not recorded here) we talk about the actual ages of various characters, and the ages that Shakespeare wanted them to be: not only in A & C but in Richard II, 1 Henry IV and the romances: the idea that you can go from the start of adulthood (Octavius) to the maturity that makes you fit for tragedy and old enough to have lived long enough (Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra) within 16-18 years or so.  Shakespeare's highly skillful stage setting in scene 1.  Too all over the place, but I am hoping that if classes aren't canceled as they're being at many of our sister institutions, we'll settle down in to focused discussion.

Elements in Macbeth that were more or less likely to come from elsewhere.  Who played whom.  Robert Armin (and Will Kemp).  Johnson on whether the reference to Antony and Cleopatra (Macbeth's genius overmatched by Banquo's as Antony's is by Caesar) is an interpolation.  De Quincey on the knocking at the gate, and the effect that the juxtaposition of scenes has.

Some more on Pope and how the sound seems to be an echo to the sense; another line of Milton's -- "Awake, arise, or be forever fallen" -- and how it divides; Wyatt's "They Fle From Me."

A student brings up Banquo and tries to relate the line of kings to the edge of doom to Dante's Inferno.  Which leads to a discussion of Banquo and the more general tension in Shakespeare between friendship and love, solved in the comedies but always part of the loss in the tragedies.  Considerations of this issue in Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Merchant of Venice, Hamlet, King Lear, and of course Macbeth and Antony and Cleopatra.

We have to abandon Fitzgerald because time is short, so mainly on to Modern Love, with some context, then Hopkins's "Binsey Poplars," Swinburne (and Buck Mulligan quoting The Triumph of Time in Ulysses), and an intro to "The Garden of Proserpine," via Spenser's "Garden of Adonis" in The Faerie Queene (which I discussed a little while ago here), and Milton's account of how Eden is even greater than the fair field of Enna where Persephone gathering flowers by gloomy Dis was gathered. 

We continue going through the play, to Antony's loss of himself ("the heart of loss"), his botched suicide, and his reunion with Cleopatra.

Why editors change the originals -- canonical words and lines, as we now know them. Theobald on Autumn/Antonie.  Theobald on "this bank and shoal of time"

We look at an interesting poem by Louisa S. Guggenberger, a very short poem by George MacDonald, and a couple of formal experiments by Stevenson, which mean the explanation of pantoum-like poems and triolets or rondeaux more generally -- examples of triolets from Hopkins and Chesterton.  Then the sublime original envoy to A Child's Garden of Verses.

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.

A class I actually liked some of: on daemonization (Lionel Abel's term in his article "Daemons true and false") and character.  How the most practical matters of representing character on stage (what we hear about Macbeth vs. what we see) give insight into the deepest existential-psychological.  This is me essentially trying to turn aspects of Macbeth into L'attente l'oubli. With digressions and a digression on digressions.

The last class this semester. Cleopatra and her dreams of Antony.  Her death.  Ass unpolicied vs. lass unparalleled.

Some reminders about metaphor, and then more about the contest between mind and mountain in P.B. Shelley's "Mont Blanc."  So far the mountain is like the Astros, leading the mind 3 games to 2, more or less.  (This comparison is not going to have staying power, but there you go.)

We begin talking about Carroll's "The Hunting of the Snark" and what makes comic poetry what it is -- making the arbitrary tight (the way OuLiPo does, so this is this semester's excursus on OuLiPo).  Then a little about the plot that some of the students may have missed.  Following which, an introduction to John Clare, and the first stanza of his poem "The Winters Spring," which we'll continue with next class.

We continue with Act II.  The treaty between Pompey and the Triumvirate.  Cleopatra and the messenger who reports Antony's marriage.  I should have said that her relation to the messenger is a version of the third person imperative force of the play: she demands what can't be demanded, that the truth be different from what it is.

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.  

Having considered the title in the last class, we do the whole of R. Browning's " ' Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came' " today, looking at how he (Browning/ Roland) undoes the difference between success and failure: "Just to fail as they seemed best, / And all the doubt was now - should I be fit?"

Cleopatra's character.  Antony and Cleopatra as, essentially, the one life-affirming tragedy: the tragedy that does what comedies do.  "Strong as death is love."  Versions of the verb "to bear." Jokes at Mardian's expense.  Apostrophes to Antony.  How they are together in separation.  What I didn't quite say is that Rome and Alexandria are established as social spaces, while Antony is between them and so gone during the period of his transition from one to the other,.  More uses of the word where: Where is Antony? Where he is asking, Where is Cleopatra?

What every poem is about: its own form.  Garden path sentences (e.g. "The old man the boat.") as showing how form is almost always announced.  Speaker vs. poet.   Dialogue that turns into one speaker taking charge. Wordsworth's "We Are Seven."

Most of the class is on Edward Lear, and what his kind of nonsense poetry (very different from Carroll's) tells us about how poetry works in general.  Then a return to Clare, to complete "The Winters Spring."

 A class where we finally talk about the whole soliloquy, with which I am obsessed, in which Macbeth calls or Seyton and considers how his way of life is fallen into the sere, the yellow leaf."  We get there by means of Sonnet 12, but that means talking about the sonnets: first the nature of sonnet sequences from Petrarch through Wyatt to Sidney and Shakespeare, then of course (via Wyatt) about Tottel's miscellany, and then a discussion of Sonnet 73 and its echoes of Macbeth's soliloquy, and ultimately about the nature of interruption, here as well as in Lear:

Prithee, go in thyself: seek thine own ease:

This tempest will not give me leave to ponder

On things would hurt me more. But I'll go in.

To the Fool

In, boy; go first. You houseless poverty,--

Nay, get thee in. I'll pray, and then I'll sleep.

Fool goes in

Poor naked wretches, whereso'er you are,

That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,

How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,

Your loop'd and window'd raggedness, defend you

From seasons such as these? 

Macbeth interrupts himself to call for his last loyal servant; Lear to dismiss him.

We continue our close reading, especially of the clash of mood or tone between characters in scenes 2 and 3, in the way Shakespeare is representing people trying to set the dominant mood of the scene: Antony and Enobarbus, and then Antony and Cleopatra.  Some attention to the extremely subtle foreshadowing and creation of perspective in those scenes.  Similarities and differences between Antony's relation to Enobarbus and his relation to Cleopatra.  

Introductory class in this course on Macbeth and Antony and Cleopatra.  Punning and equivocation.

We continue close reading of Act III, but then the last half hour, in response to a series of questions, is about how to interpret drama: what freedom and what constraints are there on how actors interpret? How should we interpret? Taking Dworkin's dictum that we should interpret in a way that makes the work the best possible work it can be, how does that apply to Shakespeare?  What is the meaning of canonicity?  Something like: a work that is open to lots of possibility for great interpretation. I thought that last half hour or so was interesting.

We discuss one poem of Amy Levy in the context of her short and painful life, then look at Robert Bridges's version of sprung rhythm -- how it differs from his friend Hopkins's and then after a brief and fractional defense of Kipling from the worst that could be said about him, we consider his poem "In the Neolithic Age."

Antony's insistence on fighting by sea: his loss, and anger at Cleopatra

"I am so lated in the world that I..."

("Have lost my way forever.")

"Fall not a tear, I say."

This is where the play starts getting to be Shakespeare's greatest play.

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!

A class which first is about Protestantism and Catholicism in Shakespeare, and the idea in Protestantism that theological issues take on a psychological air.  That is, they are interiorized.  Then a digressive account of time in Shakespeare (and many others, including Ashbery and Kafka), with the idea being that as you get older -- as the Macbeths get older -- time is interiorized.

This is actually the second class, since we had an introductory class last week.  This is a course in the close reading of poetry.   Today's class largely on James Merrill's poem b o d y, on the limits of close reading (if any), and on "Roses are red..."

Syllabus outline, to be updated periodically:

Topics

This syllabus is done by topics.  In order to remain flexible I will update weekly with specific readings.  Right now the syllabus is aspirational, and will give you a general sense of the order of topics and the issues we’ll discuss.  But if, as is likely, we don’t get to everything, we’ll have to decide what to spend less time on.

Th        Aug 25             Introduction, etc.

                                    Handout, including:

 “b o d y” (James Merrill)

“Easter Wings” (George Herbert)

“The Comfort” (Alice Notely)

Excerpt from Don Juan (Lord Byron)

“My sweet old Etcetera” (Cummings)                                  

T          Aug 30             Rhyme

                                    Cole Porter: “You’re the top”

                                    Skelton: “Tunning of Eleanor Rumming” (excerpts)

                                                  “Lullay lullay like a child”

                                    Auden:  “Lullaby”

Th        Sept  1            

T          Sept  6            

Th        Sept  8

T          Sept 13

Th        Sept 15

T          Sept 20            Meter

Th        Sept 22           

T          Sept 27            NO CLASS    

Th        Sept 29            First Paper Due                    

T          Oct  4             

Th        Oct  6             

T          Oct 11             Interplay between rhyme and meter

Th        Oct 13             NO CLASS (“Brandeis Monday”)                

T          Oct 18             NO CLASS (“Brandeis Monday”)    

Th        Oct 20            

T          Oct 25                        

Th        Oct 27             Metaphor

T          Nov  1             Second Paper Due

Th        Nov  3             More forms

T          Nov  8            

Th        Nov  9            

T          Nov 15             Revisions                                           

Th        Nov 16           

T          Nov 22           

Th        Nov 24             NO CLASS                

T          Nov 29           

Th        Dec  1              Two extremes: free verse and hip hop

T          Dec  6              Third Paper Due

Ashbery's "Wrong Kind of Insurance" -- and how to read Ashbery.  Dactylic ending of that poem (or, yes, anapestic; it can be a matter of choice how you time it): "Each night / Is trifoliate, strange to the touch."  Then two Cummings poems. Hearing vs. seeing.  Reading vs. seeing (how the intelligence agencies dope out people who claim they don't understand a language). (NOTE TO JEFF: I learned this from Goffman's Strategic Interaction.  Text me as soon as you see this.) Brooks' "We Real Cool," and its line endings.

More on the theology of Paradise Lost; I keep wanting to get back to the formal surface but we talked a lot about content and context.  Also: The thirteen men effect!

A lot of greats to do in a single day, and not wanting to miss Eliot we begin with a little contextualization of three of the sonnets from "Brother and Sister," then move on to a few grim Hardy poems, and then to Hopkins: "As kingfishers catch fire" compared with one of the "terrible sonnets," "I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day."

In particular "The Garden of Love" and "London," "To the Evening Star," and a touch of The Book of Thel

A last class on Blake's Book of Thel, with much attention given to the Clod of Clay's line: "I ponder and I cannot ponder."

NB: February vacation next week, so no new episodes till the week after.

With a quotation from Blake's description of his (lost) painting "A Vision of the Last Judgment":

We try to sort out some preliminary confusions about who's who in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.  I try -- stumblingly -- to give an account of the Romantic idea that loss is (as Harold Bloom puts it) "shadowed gain."

We discuss Blake's mythology in general, then his America, fairly briefly, and then some of The Book of Urizen, in particular the coming into separate being of Urizen, the coming into being of Los as the allegory of Urizen's separation from him, and the binding of Orc with the chains of jealousy.

After a snow day, a special guest leads a class on Blake's Milton and the dynamics of the relations among the Immortals.  We focus in particular on Milton himself and Urizen and how Milton overcomes his own spectre.

More about ballads and their relation to the supernatural, in a discussion of Wordsworth and Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads.   Some exemplary ballads. "Goody Blake and Harry Gill" as an example of an apparently supernatural ballad which isn't one.  Beginning of "We are Seven," with Coleridge's collaborative first stanza.

Mostly Wordsworth and the mysterious power of the absurdly great "We Are Seven," as well as a consideration of "Lines Written in Early Spring" and "Two April Mornings."

We go back briefly to the intimations ode and to Montaigne's that philosophy is learning how to die -- intimations of mortality.   All philosophy is.  Then we knock around The Prelude -- recumbent o'er the surface of past time, the two consciousnesses, and some of the boat-stealing scene, with a digression on metaphor: sex as a vehicle in that scene about vehicles.

Wordsworth on Gray in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads.  Like Blake he channels Milton's view that poetry is something other than artifice, and like Blake he corrects the Miltonic example.  Home at Grasmere vs. Paradise Lost.

Basically a class where we rush through "A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal," with a little reference to a couple of Shakespeare sonnets Wordsworth was probably thinking of -- 73 and 104.

We start with the Intimations Ode, which means we really start with "My Heart Leaps Up" -- and after the fourth stanza, which is where Wordsworth broke it off, we go to the glad preamble of The Prelude.  Some attention to echoes between Coleridge and Wordsworth.

Blake's view of Wordsworth, as reported by Henry Crabb Robinson in a letter to Dorothy Wordsworth and in his reminiscences.  Robinson on Wordsworth's technical death in 1814: his indifference to tyranny after the fall of Napoleon.  Return to the Intimations Ode and the subtle new start manifested in stanza 5.

More about the Prelude -- the skating scene, the boat-stealing scene, Wordsworth's later revisions for accuracy but against memory or wishful memory or the superpositions of memory.  Shades of the prison house in the Intimations Ode.  The child and its two worlds.

Echoes of Milton in Wordsworth.  More of the Intimations Ode with a detour through Tintern Abbey.  The shockingness of "O joy!"

We finally get to the end of The Intimations Ode, after detours again through "Frost at Midnight" and the nature of nature in The Prelude and the relation of nature to death.  

Powerful anticlimaxes.  How being estranged from childhood, and then recognizing that childhood is already the beginning of estrangement, is to achieve the destiny of being at home in homelessness.  [Wild turkey flies into a window across the quad and freaks us all out, one way or another.]  Mention of Frankenstein.  Some of Book VI of The Prelude.

A lot of stuff on rhyming, on emic and etic understanding, on phonemes, before we finally get back to Wordsworth, in particular Simplon Pass and what follows: the strange melancholy mansion they stay in; then the Winander Boy: all about estrangement from nature, and being at home in that estrangement, at home in homelessness.

The structure of The Prelude.  The amazing way, in Wordsworth, that we get to now in the absence of some connection to then.  The way then is always retrospective.  The spots of time.

We complete our discussion of the Prelude by looking at the Snowdon scene in Book XIII, with a lot of comparison to the unfortunate and enfeebling revisions Wordsworth made in Book XIV of the 1850 version.  One student reads Oppen's "The Forms of Love" as a kind of pendant to the Snowdon scene.  I notice a bunch of things that I don't think I ever did before a connection to King Lear for example, and something about Wordsworth's prosody in the 1805 version.  

A long class, chiefly on Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla Kahn.  I think I realized some things about the latter worth realizing.  (N.B. I repeat a mistake I made earlier: the apparently supernatural episode that isn't isn't in "Michael," as I misremembered, but in "Peter Bell.")

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.

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"

An introductory class for a course on the early Romantics.  Today we talked about the oxymoronic title of Lyrical Ballads, more about ballads than about lyrics; about Milton; about Blake's describing him as being of the devil's party without knowing it.  Syllabus TK -- watch this space.

Second class: mainly an intro to Paradise Lost, followed by a return to the two versions of Blake's "Nurses Song."  Blake's illustrations here.

News for Pompey.  Characterization of Antony in his absence, again.  Delicate negotiations.  Octavia.  Enorbarbus predicts what Antony will do: his amazing description of Cleopatra.  Antony confirms that he'll go back to Alexandria. 

We discuss "The Garden of Proserpine" and the ways that it anticipates or instantiates Freud's idea of the death drive: all the repetitions in the poem. Then we turn to the poet most opposite in attitude: Hopkins, and talk briefly of "Pied Beauty" and "That Nature is a Heralcitean Fire." Discussion in Instress and the Duns-Scotian term haecicity that makes it possible, as opposed to Thomas Aquainas' universality. We'll finish considering Hopkins next class.

Since we're now online, and since it is Antony and Cleopatra, we're going to go through the play scene by scene.  Here we looked at the clash of tonalities between the soothsayer and Cleopatra's women, in 2.1, and also the way Antony treats the messengers from Rome.  

Discussion of Ruskin's pathetic fallacy; the metaphor of the villanelle in Rowan Ricardo Phillips; some villanelles, by AE Stallings, Dylan Thomas, Elizabeth Bishop; Stevens's "Emperor of Ice Cream."

Feminism and poetry for EBB.  Poetry as a counter to an industrialized world and the constraints its analysts try to put on poetry.  We begin discussing Robert Browning's moving late poem "Development," which shows an attitude similar to EBB's.

What amours de voyage are.  What it means to idealize what Keats calls "The fair creature of an hour," as Claude does.  How such idealizations derive from "Juxtapositions."  What it means to see through one's own idealization, by understanding its biochemical substrate.  What's wrong with seeing through that idealization.  With examples from Proust (and his differences from Freud).  All relevant tangents, or so I think.  With some interesting information about Andrea Aguyor.