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EN 52, English Poets, 2012
EN52: The Impersonal and Personal Lyric: Shakespeare, Herbert, BLAKE, Keats
Helen Vendler Assistant: Kristin Lambert
Barker Center 205 Barker Center 160
6-6028 (office) 6-6022 (office)
(617) 547-9197 (home)
Office Hours, T
3-4 and by app’t. TF: Annie Wyman:
Today the lyric is often thought of as a vehicle for a first-person “confession.” But over the course of the English lyric, poets have made rich use of lyrics that have no “I”—but rather are spoken in an impersonal or “universal” voice. We’ll consider the advantages of both kinds, as you become acquainted with some of the varied genres of the European lyric--song, sonnet, ballad, elegy, ode, prayer, shaped poem, etc.--that we find in English poetry.Perennial lyric themes--love, religion, nature, politics, and tragedy--are approached newly by each of our four poets. You’ll also encounter distinct changes in taste, audience, level of address, and tone, suggesting that each major poet invents an idiosyncratic style, and that the concerns of each century demand a new manner.
Poems are art-works (comparable to pieces of music, painting, sculpture, or dance), and in discussing them we use the word “style” to mean content-as-deployed (in what orders of time and space, in what proportions, in what syntax, etc.),. In your writing, you are expected to integrate aspects of style with the thematic concerns of the poem. Especially for those of you who have not studied poetry seriously before, I’ve provided a handbook (Poems, Poets, Poetry) to aid you in understanding the nature of lyric and I’ve added Abrams’ Dictionary of Literary Terms to give you an idea of some terms that critics have found useful in commenting on poetry. (These terms are mostly a form of convenient literary shorthand for effects that can also be described in ordinary language: we can say “a kind of verse written in five-beat lines without rhyme” or we can say “blank verse.”) The assigned chapters of Poems, Poets, Poetry are to be read before coming to class in the week for which they are assigned; they will help orient you to the genre of poetry, and will aid you in the writing of your papers and in discussion of the poems.
We will read in the work of four poets:
Selections from Shakespeare’s Sonnets (1609), songs from the plays, and “The Phoenix and Turtle”;
Selections from Herbert’s The Temple (1633, posthumously published);
Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience; and
Selections from Keats’s poetry.
See the list of readings for each individual author at the end of this syllabus. You are responsible for reading all the poems assigned, whether they are formally taken up in lecture and section, or not.
There are prompt for each lecture and for each section. You are to prepare informal but serious answers to the questions on the prompts before you come to class, so I can feel free to call on anyone to respond to one of the questions. Sometimes instead of questions I’ll ask you to memorize a poem, which you should be ready to recite in class or section. Your responses in class and section will comprise 20% of your final grade.
Let me remind you that it is expected that you will spend 3 study hours for each of our 3 class hours. If you find you are spending more than 9 hours per week on the work for the course, please see me or your section leader to discuss your difficulties.
TEXTS, all available at the Coop:
Shakespeare ’s Sonnets , ed Mowat & Werstine (Simon & Schuster, 2009)
George Herbert, The Complete English Poems , ed Tobin (Penguin Classics, 2005)
William Blake, Songs of Innocence and Experience
John Keats, The Complete Poems , ed. Barnard (Penguin Classics)
Helen Vendler, Poems, Poets, Poetry (Bedford / St. Martin’s)
Meyer Abrams, A Dictionary of Literary Terms
There will be 2 short papers (4-6 pages, each worth 20% of the grade) and one longer paper on a single poet (7-10 pages, 40% of your grade). For particulars and dates, see schedule below. Grading of papers is based on your depth of understanding of the poems you treat, on your ability to integrate observations on style and form with thematic concerns; and your ability to give an account of the poems in evocative and accurate language.
There are no examinations, midterm or final, in this course. Poetry is not an apt subject for examination; but our standards for concentrators are high, and expectations in the course will be demanding. Your final paper determines 40% of your grade; each of the other papers determines 20%; and your section participation determines 20%. Participation in class means preparing the class prompts for each class meeting and each section , being able to use the terms assigned for the week, reciting a memorized poem when one is assigned, and having read, before class meeting, all the assigned poems for that day as well as the other assigned material in PPP and Literary Terms . Not all assigned poems will be commented on in class and section, but you are responsible for reading and thinking about all of them on the authorial list.
If you wish to see me, please schedule an appointment (see me before or after class to arrange the time), to avoid waiting. If you have a standard fixed engagement at the time of my office hour, we can arrange a different time at our mutual convenience.
We will meet at Houghton for one of the section hours, so that you can see some first editions, manuscripts, association copies (copies owned by other writers or friends of the poet), etc.
Schedule of Meetings:
All meetings take place on Wednesdays 1-3, but see Oct 31st, when sections will be held in the Houghton Library on Friday, November 2: one section at 1 p.m., one section at 2 p.m. Please insert these anomalous section times in your calendar now.
September
5: The Lyric: Read , for next week, the examples of sonnets (see b elow) by 3 of our 4 poets: Choose one to learn by heart by the 12 th ; be ready t o recite your poem on that day . As you memorize, say the poem aloud, speaking it “naturally,” as something you might actually be saying inwardly to yourself.
A lyric poem is not (in most cases) a dramatic soliloquy, to be spoken from the stage to an audience; it is a series of interior responses that you (stepping into the mind and voice of the poet) are enunciating to yourself. In a lyric, there is never anybody in the room with the speaker, although the speaker may be addressing the utterance to someone not in the room (God, a beloved). Because that other person is not physically present during the poem, and because lyric voicing is private, not spoken aloud, you do not, as you recite a poem, throw your voice outward to an actual listener or a public audience, but rather imagine to yourself what you are thinking to make you utter these words: “The poem is the cry of its occasion” (Stevens). Sometimes a lyric does address itself directly to an envisaged historic person (as Wordsworth cries out “Milton! Thou shouldst be living at this hour!”) or to a local or national public audience (Emerson to citizens of Massachusetts on “Old Ironsides”: “Aye, tear her tattered ensign down”). In such cases, we see the lyric harking back to its beginnings in oratory (rather than to its beginnings in song or ritual).
Consider, when memorizing your lyric, how you (as a stand-in for the speaker) are feeling about what you are saying, and modulate your tone accordingly when you recite the poem. All of these sonnets use a five-beat line; make sure you see, when memorizing, where the five strong beats fall, so someone listening to you hears the line as a pentameter line. Notice whether there is a pause at the end of any given line or whether the line “runs over” into the next.
Shakespeare: Sonnet 144, “Two loves have I” (the central predicament of the implied narrative of the sonnets);
Herbert: “Redemption” (a moral allegory with surprising diction);
Keats: “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” (encountering a great poet; successive similes).
12: Shakespeare: (today you recite your poem)
*Reading to have been done before coming to class:
A) Poems, Poets, Poetry: Chapter I, “The Poem as Life” and Chapter II, “The Poem as Arranged Life.” Be ready to explain how “life” has been “arranged” in the sonnet you have memorized.
B) Terms: Alliteration, Assonance, Antithesis, Bowdlerize, Conceit, Conventions, Prosody, Sonnet. You don’t have to memorize what is said about each of these words--you just have to know what they mean and be able to use them. You will know many of them already.
C) The following sonnets by Shakespeare, with the implied narrative concerning—to give them their conventional names--the Poet, the Young Man, and the Rival Poet. Some brief indications of aspects of the sonnet are indicated to give you something to aid your reading.
1: From fairest creatures we desire increase, 21
Diction of the ideal and of the actual; the couplet as prophecy.
18: Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? 55
Hyperbole--the ladder of praise--and paradox--“thy eternal summer.”
20: A woman’s face with Nature’s own hand painted, 59
A myth of origin. Frustration and desire. Sexual punning. “Feminine” rhymes throughout.
33: Full many a glorious morning have I seen, 85
Analogy: “Even so my sun,” etc. Two tellings of the “same” story. Proverb as excuse.
36: Let me confess that we two must be twain, 91
Undivided loves, separable lives; rationalization of rejection.
48: How careful was I, when I took my way, 115
Analogy denied; free will of beloved; excuse of infidelity as thievery.
54: O how much more doth beauty beauteous seem, 127
Sensuality and fidelity; beauty and truth/troth; appearance and character, show and substance.
86: Was it the proud full sail of his great verse, 191
What caused the poet’s silence in the face of his rival’s expansive verse? Suspense and questions.
87: Farewell, thou art too dear for my possessing (193)
Valediction, excusing the beloved; feminine rhymes; gerunds, participles.
19: Shakespeare:
Reading to have been done before coming to class:
Poems, Poets, Poetry: Chapter III, “Poems as Pleasure” and Chapter IV, “Describing Poems.” Be ready to point out the kinds of pleasure aimed at in the language of sonnet 29, which you will have memorized.
Terms: Fiction and truth, Figurative Language, Form and Structure, Rhetorical Figures, Rhyme
Memorize sonnet 29 for section meeting this week.
Implied narratives (I I): The Poet and the Dark Lady; the Dark Lady and the Young Man
130: My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun, 281
Parody; “false compare” vs. authenticity and sincerity.
132: Thine eyes I love, and they, as pitying me, 285
Plea for eyes and heart to be in accord; “black” beauty; sublimity of comparison.
138: When my love swears that she is made of truth, 297
“Simple truth” bursting in; justification of mutual lying; grim comic irony.
144: Two loves I have, of comfort and despair, 309 (read in first assignment)
The medieval stage: vice and virtue; rewriting the medieval plot of Everyman and his end
147: My love is as a fever, longing still, 315
Love vs. Reason; desire as death; despair at self-deception.
151: Love is too young to know what conscience is, 323
Sexuality and consciousness; imitative sound (“point,” “prize,” “proud,” “pride”).
SECTION 1:
Internal sonnet structure in Shakespeare’s sonnets: Prepare the following sonnets:
a) classic 4-part structure: 3 quatrains and a couplet (73, “That time of year thou may’st in me behold”)
b) “Italian” structure: octave and sestet (29, “When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes”)
c) anomalous structure: one-line prelude and coda, twelve-line body (66, “Tired with all these”)
26: Shakespeare:
Reading to have been done before coming to class:
Poems, Poets, Poetry: Chapter V, “The Play of Language” and Chapter VI, “Constructing a Self.” Be ready to discuss how the self of the speaker is constructed in an impersonal poem.
Terms: Hyperbole and understatement, Imagery, Irony, Lyric, Metaphor, Platonic love.
Memorize sonnet 97 for section.
Impersonal sonnets, some using the collective “we,” others without a personal speaker,
others reserving a personal pronoun till the end, others departing from the personal
into generalization, and sometimes reverting to the personal at the end
60: Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore, 139
65: Since brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless sea, 149
94: They that have power to hurt and will do none, 207
116: Let me not to the marriage of true minds, 251
129: Th’expense of spirit in a waste of shame, 279
SECTION 2:
Exploration of feeling, consciousness, and attitudes; their concomitant styles:
23: As an unperfect actor on the stage, 65
97: How like a winter hath mine absence been, 213
104: To me, fair friend, you never can be old, 227
October:
3: Herbert: The Temple and its structure
Reading to be done before coming to class
Poems, Poets, Poetry: Chapter IX, “Attitudes, Values, Judgments.” Suggest, with respect to “Affliction (I),” its values, its attitudes, and its judgments.
Terms: Allegory, Allusion, Didactic Literature, Genres, Hymn
Memorize “Heaven , ” 177, and “Love (III) ,” 178 for recitation
NOTE: FIRST PAPER DUE NEXT WEEK; See Instructions for October 10
Poems of affliction:
Affliction (I), 41; The Flower, 156; Discipline, 168;
Last Things: Death, Judgment, Heaven.
Death , 175
Heaven, 177
Love (III) , 178
SECTION 3: Shaped poems: the aesthetic of imitative shape
Discuss the function of the shape as a deployment of the theme of the poem. Which shape seems most felicitous? Which most resistant? (Or any other such questions that open up Herbert’s attraction to shape.)
Does the shape affect the meter? The rhyme? Could “Paradise” be rewritten without its element of shape?
Why is that poem called “Paradise”—how does the title illuminate the poem? Compare the relation of this title to its poem with the relations of the other titles to their poems. (See also “A Wreath,” 174 and “Sorry I am,” 113