Some notes on the New York School Poets

Though they themselves never called themselves by the name, Koch, Ashbery, Schuyler, and O'Hara have become known as the nucleus of poets that fall under the umbrella of NY School.

Frank O'Hara's work seems so effortless and spontaneous - almost as if he is improving. Though the poems are often coming straight from his life, the banal details are usually compiled in order to highlight some sort of larger "truth" - in this way they are not poems of spontaneous combustion, though they do resemble that type of consciousness. Like the others, O'Hara owes much to painting, specifically abstract-expressionism.

Main subjects of all the NY Poets in some form are Time and Mutability, or, how can we represent a aubject statically (in poetry or painting) when it is always moving through time. that is, by the time you have rendered your subject, it is no longer the same as it was when you began. The break down of the body over time, from disease and age, is also tied to that ideas. The perishability of emotions.

Wit, humor, irony, openness -- these are all aspects of all four of these poets' work.

Ashbery is a bit more sophisitcated and less accessible than O'Hara, but he is interested in many of the same themes. Ashbery also likes to play out the idea of whether or not language can ever really represent experience.

John Berryman, Allen Ginsberg, Wallace Stevens, Walt Whitman, French Art (specifically dada and surrealism), are artists/movements that have significance for these poets.

Kenneth Koch might be the most playful of all the NY School poets. His poems have an exuberance that the others don't carry with the same degree. Schuyler is the most obscure of the NY School. He wrote extensive diaries and letters that are interesting as part of a glimpse into the creative process and how art springs forth from the artist.

Personism: A Manifesto

As Manifestos go, this one by Frank O'Hara is ultimately funny, readible, and actually full of really good ideas. If you get past the smarmy jokiness of the piece, you start to get at some smart poetic philosophies -- things like going on feel, trusting instinct, and not taking oneself too seriously. there is also the same attention to voice that separates O'Hara (and the rest of the NY School poets, and many of the Beats, too) from the Modernism of Stevens, Williams, Pound, Eliot, etc.

Please Enjoy!
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FRANK O’HARA
from PERSONISM: A MANIFESTO

Everything is in the poems, but at the risk of sounding like the poor wealthy man’s Allen Ginsberg I will write to you because I just heard that one of my fellow poets thinks that a poem of mine that can’t be got at one reading is because I was confused too. Now, come on. I don’t believe in god, so I don’t have to make elaborately sounded structures. I hate Vachel Lindsay, always have, I don’t even like rhythm, assonance, all that stuff. You just go on your nerve. If someone’s chasing you down the street with a knife you just run, you don’t turn around and shout, "Give it up! I was a track star for Mineola Prep."
That’s for the writing poems part. As for their reception, suppose you’re in love and someone’s mistreating (mal aimé) you, you don’t say, "Hey, you can’t hurt me this way, I care!" you just let all the different bodies fall where they may, and they always do ‘flay after a few months. But that’s not why you fell in love in the first place, just to hang onto life, so you have to take your chances and try to avoid being logical. Pain always produces logic, which is very bad for you.
I’m not saying that I don’t have practically the most lofty ideas of anyone writing today, but what difference does that make? they’re just ideas. The only good thing about it is that when I get lofty enough I’ve stopped thinking and that’s when refreshment arrives.
But how can you really care if anybody gets it, or gets what it means, or if it improves them. Improves them for what? for death? Why hurry them along? Too many poets act like a middle-aged mother trying to get her kids to eat too much cooked meat, and potatoes with drippings (tears). I don’t give a damn whether eat or not. Forced feeding leads to excessive thinness (effete). Nobody should experience anything they don’t need to, if they don’t need poetry bully for them, I like the movies too. And all, only Whitman and Crane and Williams, of the American are better than the movies. As for measure and other technical apparatus, that’s just common sense: if you’re going to buy a of pants you want them to be tight enough so everyone will want to go to bed with you. There’s nothing metaphysical about it. Unless of course, you flatter yourself into thinking that what You’re experiencing is "yearning."
Abstraction in poetry, which Allen recently commented on in It is, is intriguing. I think it appears mostly in the minute particu1ars where decision is necessary. Abstraction (in poetry, not in painting) involves personal removal by the poet. For instance, the decision involved in the choice between "the nostalgia of the infinite" and "the nostalgia for the infinite" defines an attitude toward degree of abstraction. The nostalgia of the infinite representing the greater degree of abstraction, removal, and negative capability (as in Keats and Mallarmé). Personism, a movement which I recently founded and which nobody yet knows about, interests me a great deal, being so totally opposed to this kind of abstract removal that it is verging on a true abstraction for the first time, really, in the history of poetry. Personism is to Wallace Stevens what la poésie pure was to Béranger. Personism has nothing to do with philosophy, it’s all art. It does not have to do with personality or intimacy, far from it! But to give you a vague idea, one of its minimal aspects is to address itself to one person (other than the poet himself), thus evoking overtones of love without destroying love’s life-giving vulgarity, and sustaining the poet’s feelings towards the poem while preventing love from distracting him into feeling about the person. That’s part of personism. It was founded by me after lunch with LeRoi Jones on August 27, 1959, a day in which I was in love with someone (not Roi, by the way, a blond). I went back to work and wrote a poem for this person. While I was writing it I was realizing that if I wanted to I could use the telephone instead of writing the poem, and so Personism was born. It’s a very exciting movement which will undoubtedly have lots of adherents. It puts the poem squarely between the poet and the person, Lucky Pierre style, and the poem is correspondingly gratified. The poem is at last between two persons instead of two pages.

[9/3/59]

(Frank O’Hara "Personism: A Manifesto" from Yugen #7, copyright © 1961.)

Modernism fractures into Contemporary/Post WWII poetry

One things we will see in the coming weeks is how Modernism gave way to a more contemporary poetics. And when that happened many styles and movements emerged simultaneously--from the Beats and New York School to Confessional Poetry, Surrealism, The Black Mountain Poets, The Fugitives, Deep Image Poetry, The Black Arts Movement, etc. there were even what were called "The Anthology Wars," in which there was much infighting between academic poets and non-academic poets. To kick off this section of our course I give you an essay by Tina Cane. there will be much more to come, so stay tuned.

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The Raw and the Cooked: Robert Lowell and the Beats
by Tina Cane



"The best obfuscation bewilders of meaning while reflecting
or intimating or creating a structure of a beauty that we know."
—Bernadette Mayer

"The raw and the cooked" is how Robert Lowell characterized the state of American poetry in 1960 when he accepted the National Book Award for his collection, Life Studies. With its intense emphasis on the personal and its shorter, free verse lines, Life Studies was a departure for the poet. Something less fettered was happening in Lowell’s poetry, and as he saw it, that something was cleaving the genre of poetry in two.

"Cooked" poetry, he contended, was "marvelously expert and remote... constructed as a sort of mechanical or cat-nip mouse for graduate seminars." Poets like Donald Hall and Louis Simpson were among its chefs. In contrast, Lowell regarded the "raw" as "jerry-built and forensically deadly...often like an unscored libretto by some bearded but vegetarian Castro." Lowell’s image of a barbed Communist was meant to conjure a vision of Allen Ginsberg, whose Howl had, fours years earlier, reinvigorated poetry for a younger generation. Ginsberg and other Beat poets, like Gregory Corso and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, were emerging from the margins, armed with open, jazz-infused songs of a whole new timbre. Champions of Whitman, the Beats celebrated themselves and their everyday lives, and took poetry from the podium to the street. By virtue of pitting the Beats against "cat-nip" academics, Lowell was publicly declaring them to be a force.

Although a descendant of the "cooked" tribe of meter and rhyme, Lowell had been writing in an increasingly confessional vein. At a crossroads in his own work, he was riled by the Beats’ "raw" sensibilities. "Hanging like a question mark" between the two camps, "I don’t know if it is a death-rope or a life-line," he wrote in a draft of his now famous acceptance speech.

While Lowell’s characterization may strike us today as somewhat dramatic, it aptly captured the creative and cultural tensions of the time. There was a palpable "us vs. them" climate that pervaded poetry and many other aspects of the larger post-fifties society. It was optimism vs. skepticism, complacency vs. complaint, sweetness vs. dissention. The polarity between the establishment and those who opposed it intensified and culminated in the social revolutions of the sixties. By then, the Beats would be lauded as heroes of the counter-culture and legitimized as luminaries of a literature in flux.

Seventeen years after his "raw" and "cooked" proclamation, Lowell did a joint reading with Allen Ginsberg at New York’s St. Marks-in-the-Bowery. The poets shared a podium—a hint that, in the interim, the battlelines had blurred. Gregory Corso rambunctiously heckled Lowell as he read his poem, "Ulysses and Circe." "Robert, you left out that great line about paranoid," Corso called out. Lowell responded with a quick "Point taken" and continued. "You treat us like a classroom," Corso shouted. Lowell responded that he, in fact, was a teacher and tried to let it go at that. The event was shaping up like a lopsided showdown when Ginsberg finally stepped forward and proposed that the crowd collectively invite Corso to "shut up." They did and Corso amicably exited, boots in hand, wife and baby at his side. To Lowell, the reading had turned into a veritable "happening." In retrospect, it signaled a reprieve. The "raw" and the "cooked" were no longer warring, and the tribes needed new names.

So what happened between 1960 and 1977? In one sense, the outsiders made it inside and the whole culture got "rawified." The media, as arbiter of popular culture, brought the Beats and the sixties’ movements to the fore. "Raw" writers challenged the establishment, changed it, and then became part of it. They taught university, went on television and became counter-culture celebrities. They didn’t so much as "sell out," as did the broader culture "buy in"—not necessarily to a new crop of values, but shrewdly to the appeal of those values. Popular stereotypes alternately romanticized, trivialized or criminalized the Beat lifestyle and sensibility. Still, their edgy creativity was in step with the changing times in a way that the blue-blooded Bostonian Lowell’s was not. Marketers capitalized on the cultural trickle-down of the Beat image to hawk everything from peace to personal computers. Years after Jack Kerouac appeared on The Steve Allen Show in 1974, Nike would recruit William Burroughs and Ginsberg would endorse Apple Computers. Consumption is cutting edge, we all learned, if you package it as such.

You can’t, however, judge a book by its cover and good literature stands the test of time. The true legacy of the raw and the cooked divide (and what Robert Lowell foresaw) is that tension forced the canon to open up and accomodate a broader range of work. Poetry is, as a result, more vigorous and varied today than it was in 1960. Any contemporary American poetry course worth its salt today will include Ginsberg, Corso, and Lowell, alongside Lucille Clifton, Richard Wilbur and John Ashbury. Split factions persist, but in civil coexistence.

Harlem Renaissance

The following is taken from poets.org, which has a wonderful section on the Harlem Renaissance.

A Brief Guide to the Harlem Renaissance



In the decades immediately following World War I, huge numbers of African Americans migrated to the industrial North from the economically depressed and agrarian South. In cities such as Chicago, Washington, DC, and New York City, the recently migrated sought and found (to some degree) new opportunities, both economic and artistic. African Americans were encouraged to celebrate their heritage and to become "The New Negro," a term coined in 1925 by sociologist and critic Alain LeRoy Locke in his influential book of the same name.

No place embodied this new aesthetic more than Harlem, home to a thriving artistic scene of literary magazines like The Crisis (published by the newly established NAACP), cafes, jazz clubs, and scores of reading venues. The major figures of this movement, known as the Harlem Renaissance, were enlightened by education and nourished by folk sources such as black music and the black church. More than a literary revolution or social activism, the Harlem Renaissance extolled African American culture and celebrated its singular, unique expression.

In 1922, James Weldon Johnson's anthology, The Book of American Negro Poetry (Harcourt, 1922), introduced a national audience to those who would become the voices of the movement: Claude McKay, Jessie Fauset, and Paul Lawrence Dunbar. Other influential figures included Gwendolyn Bennett, Countee Cullen, Georgia Douglas Johnson, Arna Bontemps, and Jean Toomer.

Langston Hughes, often referred to as the "unofficial Poet Laureate of the race," remains the central figure of the Harlem Renaissance. In his essay, "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain," he proclaimed his lifelong calling: "to explain and illuminate the Negro condition in America." His achievements in poetry, fiction, drama, and nonfiction, as well as his role as editor of several collections of African American literature, produced a body of work that endures and offers a powerful portrait of the twentieth century artist.

James Weldon Johnson was both the elder statesman and the Renaissance Man of the Harlem Renaissance: in addition to his successful literary life as a poet, novelist, and editor, he served as secretary general of the NAACP and as a consul in the U.S. Diplomatic Corps. His God's Trombones, a sequence of sermons, captures the generic and at the same time highly individual voice of the Negro preacher. His "Lift Every Voice And Sing" was sung every morning by generations of children in segregated schools as "The Negro National Anthem."

Countee Cullen thought long and hard in his poems about his own and collective African-American identity. Some of his strongest poems question the benevolence of a Creator who has bestowed a race with such mixed blessings. Claude McKay, born and raised in Jamaica, wrote of the immigrant's nostalgia and the American negro's pride and rage. Jean (Eugene) Toomer remains a mystery. Light enough to "pass" and alone constituting the generation's Symbolist avant-garde, he appeared briefly on the Harlem Renaissance scene, became a follower of the mystic Gurdjieff, and disappeared into the white world.

Sterling Brown, for many years a professor at Howard University, emerged in the thirties with sometimes playful, often pessimistic poems in standard English and black vernacular and in African American and European forms. In many of Brown's poems strong men and women resist the oppression of racism, poverty, and fate.

The legacy of the Harlem Renaissance opened doors and deeply influenced the generations of African American writers that followed, including Robert Hayden and Gwendolyn Brooks. In the forties, fifties, and sixties, Hayden taught at Fisk University and the University of Michigan and served two terms as the Consultant in Poetry at the Library of Congress. Since the publication in 1945 of her first book, A Street in Bronzeville, Brooks has combined a quiet life with critical success. Her second book, Annie Allen, won the 1950 Pulitzer prize, the first time a book by a black poet had won that coveted distinction, and the last time until Rita Dove's Thomas and Beulah, almost forty years later. Brooks was a virtuoso of technique, her exquisite poems exploring, for the first time, the interior lives of African American individuals. Brooks' perspective shifted mid-career, her later work influenced by the politically and socially radical Black Arts Movement of the sixties.

Black Arts Movement (BAM)

A movement originating in the sixties by African American artists (Amiri Baraka, among many others). there has often been criticism of the Harlem Renaissance for being too reliant upon establishment patrons to fuel it. This makes the Black Arts Movement different from the Harlem Renaissance.

In a 1968 essay, "The Black Arts Movement," Larry Neal proclaimed Black Arts the "aesthetic and spiritual sister of the Black Power concept." As a political phrase, Black Power had earlier been used by Richard Wright to describe the mid-1950s emergence of independent African nations. The 1960s' use of the term originated in 1966 with Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee civil rights workers Stokely Carmichael and Willie Ricks. Quickly adopted in the North, Black Power was associated with a militant advocacy of armed self-defense, separation from "racist American domination," and pride in and assertion of the goodness and beauty of Blackness.

the following is an excerpt from an article, written by Kalamu ya Salaam, and originally published in The Oxford Companion to African American Literature (New York, Oxford University Press, 1997)

Both inherently and overtly political in content, the Black Arts movement was the only American literary movement to advance "social engagement" as a sine qua non of its aesthetic. The movement broke from the immediate past of protest and petition (civil rights) literature and dashed forward toward an alternative that initially seemed unthinkable and unobtainable: Black Power.

In a 1968 essay, "The Black Arts Movement," Larry Neal proclaimed Black Arts the "aesthetic and spiritual sister of the Black Power concept."
Although often criticized as sexist, homophobic, and racially exclusive (i.e., reverse racist), Black Arts was much broader than any of its limitations. Ishmael Reed, who is considered neither a movement apologist nor advocate ("I wasn't invited to participate because I was considered an integrationist"), notes in a 1995 interview,

I think what Black Arts did was inspire a whole lot of Black people to write. Moreover, there would be no multiculturalism movement without Black Arts. Latinos, Asian Americans, and others all say they began writing as a result of the example of the 1960s. Blacks gave the example that you don't have to assimilate. You could do your own thing, get into your own background, your own history, your own tradition and your own culture. I think the challenge is for cultural sovereignty and Black Arts struck a blow for that.

Related Authors:
Amiri Baraka
Mari Evans
Nikki Giovanni
Gil-Scott Heron
Haki Madhubuti
Ishmael Reed
Kalamu ya Salaam
Sonia Sanchez
Ntozake Shange
Askia M. Toure
Marvin X
History and Context.
The Black Arts movement, usually referred to as a "sixties" movement, coalesced in 1965 and broke apart around 1975/1976. In March 1965 following the 21 February assassination of Malcolm X, LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka) moved from Manhattan's Lower East Side (he had already moved away from Greenwich Village) uptown to Harlem, an exodus considered the symbolic birth of the Black Arts movement. Jones was a highly visible publisher (Yugen and Floating Bear magazines, Totem Press), a celebrated poet (Preface to a Twenty-Volume Suicide Note, 1961, and The Dead Lecturer, 1964), a major music critic (Blues People, 1963), and an Obie Award-winning playwright (Dutchman, 1964) who, up until that fateful split, had functioned in an integrated world. Other than James Baldwin, who at that time had been closely associated with the civil rights movement, Jones was the most respected and most widely published Black writer of his generation.

While Jones's 1965 move uptown to found the Black Arts Repertory Theatre/School (BARTS) is the formal beginning (it was Jones who came up with the name "Black Arts"), Black Arts, as a literary movement, had its roots in groups such as the Umbra Workshop. Umbra (1962) was a collective of young Black writers based in Manhattan's Lower East Side; major members were writers Steve Cannon, Tom Dent, Al Haynes, David Henderson, Calvin C. Hernton, Joe Johnson, Norman Pritchard, Lenox Raphael, Ishmael Reed, Lorenzo Thomas, James Thompson, Askia M. Touré (Roland Snellings; also a visual artist), Brenda Walcott, and musician-writer Archie Shepp. Touré, a major shaper of "cultural nationalism," directly influenced Jones. Along with Umbra writer Charles Patterson and Charles's brother, William Patterson, Touré joined Jones, Steve Young, and others at BARTS.

Modernism continued

Modernism, like any largescale poetry movement is chock full of a vast array of different styles. With the imagists we saw poets who stressed a breal from Romanticism (as evidenced by Pound's poem "The Pact," in which he begrudgingly acknowledges Whitman's importance).

With Wallace Stevens, D. H. Lawrence, and Hart Crane (and to a lesser extent, Moore, MacLeish and Auden) we see a questioning attitude, especially toward Nature and God/divinity, a more "Modern" doubt, but nonetheless we can trace these poets' lineage back to Whitman, Dickinson, and also Wordsworth, Coleridge, Blake and other Romantic poets.

In fact, Pound and Stevens, though both Modernist poets, were at opposite poles in the era, and neither seemed to particularly like/respect the other poet. As Marjorie Perloff writes in Pound/Stevens: Whose Era--

"On October 26 1955 William Carlos Williams wrote to Ezra Pound at St. Elizabet's, asking him if he would care to comment on the obituary essay he had just written on Wallace Stevens, then two months dead, for Poetry Magazine. Pound replied:

. . .as to yr/ pal/ Wally S/ . . .it wd/ be highly improper for
me to have opinions of yr/ opinion of a bloke I haven't read
and DOUBT like all hell
that yu will be able to PURR-suade me to venture on
with such a
hellUVAlot I don't know and WANT to find out.


If this sounds unnecessarily dismissive, compare it to Stevens' curiously similar response to Pound. In 1947 Theodore Weiss invited Stevens to write something for a special Pound issue of the fledgling Quarterly Review of Literature. Stevens replied curtly: "Nothing doing about Pound. I should have to saturate myself with the work and I have not the time."
Time for you and time for me--it seems that neither Pound nor Stevens could allow for it. We, reading these two great Modernists in the late decades of the twentieth century, tend to ignore such mutual distrust, positing that of course Pound and Stevens are among the four or five great American poets of the century."


As you can see, these poets, and others of the time, did not always see eye to eye when it came to ideas of poetry.

Stevens, besides his poems, wrote many essays about the Nature of poetry, and of writing poetry--being very very opinionated on the subject.

"In poetry, you must love the words, the ideas and the images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all."

"The poet is the priest of the invisible."

"Accuracy of observation is the equivalent of accuracy of thinking."

"The most beautiful thing in the world is, of course, the world itself."

Here are links to some Brief guides from Poets.org from the Academy of American Poets.


A Brief Guide to Modernism


A Brief Guide to Imagism

Modernism (The Imagists and more)

As you have seen with some of this initial reading, Modernism ushers in a style of poetry and thinking that sought, actively in some cases, to erase or turn a back on many of the main philosophies of the Romantic Tradition. This can be evidenced in the Ezra Pound poem "The Pact," which was written to Walt Whitman, whom Pound often criticized. Pound along with others (H. D. among them) championed a "school" of poetry known as imagism. The following excerpt from some of Pound's essays dictates three of the main philosophies of imagism (see bolded portion of the essay). Pound, as well as being a strong poet, was a figure that was not only important in scholarship/criticism, and for championing a poetic style/"school", but he was also responsible for discovering poets and helping gain them noteriety and furthering their careers. Famously, Pound severely edited T. S. Eliot's "The wasteland," a poem that has become "THE" poem that is associated with Modernism as a movement - it is the public face of Modernism, as it were.

The Modern period was also known as being a period in which radical experimentation takes place, with kanguage, syntax, the primacy of the self as represented by the poet's various speakers'. Think of the vast array of styles we've seen, just in the last week--from WCW's "no ideas but in things," to Stein's language object experiments, to Pound and Eliot's highly and densely Allusive collage-style poems, to Pound's one-image poem "In a Station of the Metro." And this is just the beginning; we'll see more variances as we stay with the Moderns for a couple more weeks.


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Ezra Pound - "A Retrospect"

[A group of early essays and notes which appeared under this title in Pavannes and Divagations (1918). 'A Few Don'ts' was first printed in Poetry, I, 6 (March 1913).

There has been so much scribbling about a new fashion in poetry, that I may perhaps be pardoned this brief recapitulation and retrospect.

In the spring or early summer of 1912, 'H.D.', Richard Aldington and myself decided that we were agreed upon the three principles following:

1. Direct treatment of the 'thing' whether subjective or objective.
2. To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation.
3.As regarding rhythm: to compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome.

Upon many points of taste and of predilection we differed, but agreeing upon these three positions we thought we had as much right to a group name, at least as much right, as a number of French 'schools' proclaimed by Mr Flint in the August number of Harold Monro's magazine for 1911.

This school has since been 'joined' or 'followed' by numerous people who, whatever their merits, do not show any signs of agreeing with the second specification. Indeed vers libre has become as prolix and as verbose as any of the flaccid varieties that preceded it. It has brought faults of its own. The actual language and phrasing is often as bad as that of our elders without even the excuse that the words are shovelled in to fill a metric pattern or to complete the noise of a rhyme-sound. Whether or no the phrases followed by the followers are musical must be left to the reader's decision. At times I can find a marked metre in 'vers libres', as stale and hackneyed as any pseudo-Swinburnian, at times the writers seem to follow no musical structure whatever. But it is, on the whole, good that the field should be ploughed. Perhaps a few good poems have come from the new method, and if so it is justified.

-------

As to Twentieth century poetry, and the poetry which I expect to see written during the next decade or so, it will, I think, move against poppy-cock, it will be harder and saner, it will be what Mr Hewlett calls 'nearer the bone'. It will be as much like granite as it can be, its force will lie in its truth, its interpretative power (of course, poetic force does always rest there); I mean it will not try to seem forcible by rhetorical din, and luxurious riot. We will have fewer painted adjectives impeding the shock and stroke of it. At least for myself, I want it so, austere, direct, free from emotional slither.

What is there now, in 1917, to be added?

WebCT Access Issues

Due to the Issues everyone has had (including myself) with the access to WebCT and other UH websites, I will be extending the deadlines for this week's Blog and discussion for an extra 48-hours.

The due date for the first Paper will not be affected.

Victorians to Modern

Just a few brief statements regarding the Victorians/Early Moderns--as we've been exploring, with passing generations the poetic climate changes, sometimes on a large scale, sometimes on a smaller scale. At times the change is a continuation of past philosophies and techniques, while at other times we a see a sort of erasure--a turning away from precursors. These zigs and zags happen not only as reactions to precursor-poets/poetry, but also as a result of outside cultural/historical influences.

For the Victorian Era (commonly marked out by Queen Victoria's rule of England from 1837-1901), we see a literature that is at least partly affected by changes in technology, which affected Industry (this is after all the height of the Industrial Revolution in Britain); changes also in the sciences, notably the publication of The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin in 1859, which had an effect, among other things on the way people began to view organized religion. Not to say that this applies to all poets, but you can see the questioning of faith in the poems by Hopkins (a Jesuit Minister) and Thomas Hardy (see "Hap" among other poems). The poems of E. A. Robinson also seem to deal with an increasingly urban and industrial England, and the down-trodden characters associated with it.

These are just a few examples-- of course others exist in the poems by Hardy, Yeats and others that deal with War (WW I was obviously a major cultural/historical event that happened at the end of the Victorian era and helped usher in the Modernism (which we will visit in the coming weeks)). As it stands, one contrast to take is the contrast between the lush landscapes of the Romantics and the ones detailed by the poets we read for this week.

A letter from Dickinson to Thomas Wentworth Higginson

Higginson was a a Unitarian minister, an abolitionist, and a well-known literary critic at the time. Dickinson wrote him a letter, accompanied by four of her poems, asking Mr. Higginson to comment on them and tell her if her "Verse is alive." This sparked a correspondence that lasted over 20 years. One thing this goes against is the idea that was once pervaded that Dickinson was hermetic, that she wrote in near-total isolation.

Higginson wrote her back after her initial letter and asked Dickinson to tell him about her background. What follows is Dickinson's response, which, though cryptic and elusive, offers some insight into her make-up as a poet.

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25 April 1862


Mr Higginson,

Your kindness claimed earlier gratitude-but I was ill-and write today, from my pillow.

Thank you for the surgery- it was not so painful as I supposed. I bring you others-as you ask-though they might not differ-

While my thought is undressed-I can make the distinction, but when I put them in the Gown - they look alike, and numb.

You asked how old I was? I made no verse-but one or two-until this winter - Sir-

I had a terror-since September-I could tell to none-and so I sing, as the Boy does by the Burying Ground-because I am afraid- You inquire my Books-For Poets-I have Keats-and Mr and Mrs Browning. For Prose - Mr Ruskin - Sir Thomas Browne - and the Revelations. I went to school-but in your manner of the phrase-had no education. When a little Girl, I had a friend, who taught me Im- mortality-but venturing too near, himself-he never returned-Soon after, my Tutor, died - and for several years, my Lexicon - was my only companion-Then I found one more-but he was not contented I be his scholar-so he left the Land.

You ask of my Companions Hills- Sir-and the Sundown-and a Dog-large as myself, that my Father bought me-They are better than Beings-because they know-but do not tell-and the noise in the Pool, at Noon - excels my Piano. I have a Brother and Sister - My Mother does not care for thought-and Father, too busy with his Briefs - to notice what we do - He buys me many Books - but begs me not to rcad thcm-because he fears they joggle the Mind. They are religious-except me-and address an Eclipse, every morning-whom they call their "Father." But I fear my story fatigues you-I would like to learn-Could you tell me how to grow-or is it unconveyed- like Melody-or Witchcraft?

You speak of Mr Whitman-I never read his Book-but was told that he was disgraceful-

I read Miss Prcscott's "Circumstance," but it followed me, in the Dark-so I avoided her-

Two Editors of Journals came to my Father's House, this winter- and asked me for my Mind-and when I asked them "Why," they said I was penurious - and they, would use it for the World -

I could not weigh myself-Myself-

My size felt small- to me- I read your Chapters in the Atlantic- and experienced honor for you-I was sure you would not reject a confiding question-

Is this- Sir-what you asked me to tell you?

Your friend,
E - Dickinson.

Whitman - A National Poet

For the most part, Whitman wrote one book of poems, Leaves of Grass, which he revised and published in multiple editions throughout the course of his life. With Whitman, whom you just got done reading, we see a lot of the philosophies of the British Romantics given an American twist. By American I mean the kind of Manifest Destiny, conquering the untold wilds of a young and idealistic nation. Whitman felt that "In poems, the young men of The States shall be represented, for they out-rival the best of the rest of the earth." Whitman wrote this in a letter to Emerson in 1856, as a prefatory correspondence to Leaves of Grass.

Following are some of Whitman's own comments concerning his poetry (excerpted from the Norton Critical Edition of Leaves of Grass (pp. 763-770))--

"My poems when complete should be a unity, in the same sense that the earth is, or that the human body, (senses, soul, head, trunk, feet, blood, viscera, man-root, eyes, hair) or that of a perfect musical composition is."

"Indeed, the qualities which characterize "Leaves of Grass" are not the qualities of a fine book or poem or any work of art but the qualities of a living and full-blooded man, amativeness, pride, adhesiveness, curiosity, yearning for immortality, joyousness and sometimes uncertainty."

"Even as a boy, I had the fancy, the wish, to write a piece, perhaps a poem, about the seashore--that suggesting, dividing line, contact, junction, the solid marrying the liquid--that curious, lurking something (as doubtless every objective form finally becomes to the subjective spirit) which means far more than its mere first sight, grand as that is--blending the real and ideal, and each made portion of the other. Hours, days, in my Long Island youth and early manhood, I hunted the shores of Rockaway or Coney Island, or away east to the Hamptons or Montauk. Once, at the latter lace (by the old lighthouse, nothing but sea-tossings in sight in every direction as far as the eye could reach), I remember well, I felt that I must one day write a book expressing this liquid, mystic theme. Afterward, I recollect, how it came to me that insead of any special lyrical or epical or literary attempt, the seashore should be an invisible influence, a pervading gauge and tally for me, in my composition."

"I will not reject any theme or subject because the treatment is too personal. As my stuff settles into sae, I am told (and sometimes myself discover, uneasily, but feel all right abut it in calmer moments) it is mainly autobiographic, and even egotistic after all--which i finally accept, and am contented so."

Not-so-Random Thoughts About English Romanticism

Hi everyone. I wanted to give you some context and background on the English Romantic poets--since we'll be spending two weeks with the movement. They are, in effect, our starting point; consider Alexander Pope a prelude, a prequel, something of a small dabble into the Neo-Classical poets (or Augustans as they are also known). In some ways, the Romantics are direct contrast to Neo-Classicism, a negative result of sorts, from diction to politics to state of mind to the idea that, as Blake puts it, "where man is not, nature is barren." Blake also said, "There is no natural religion." His enemy is the organized church, not religion itself (or spirituality or whatever one wants to call it).

Anyway, in 1798 Wordsworth and Coleridge collaborated on Lyrical Ballads (which included some of the two poets' most famous work, including Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey" and Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner"), and in 1802, for the second edition, Wordsworth wrote a preface stating their aims for the poetry (think of it as a manifesto). The poetry was actually fairly experimental for the time, seeing as how it was much more personal/autobiographical (much of it anyway) than the Augustans, and actually in a more plain style (for the time) In fact, in his Preface Wordsworth wrote,

"The principle object, then, proposed in these Poems was to choose incidents and situations from common life, and to relate or describe them, throughout, as far as was possible in a selection of language really used by men, and, at the same time, to throw over them a certain coloring of imagination, whereby ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an unusual aspect; and, further, and above all, to make these incidents and situations interesting by tracing in them, truly though not ostentatiously, the primary laws of our nature: chiefly, as far as regards the manner in which we associate ideas in a state of excitement. Humble and rustic life was generally chosen . . . Accordingly, such a language, arising out of repeated experience and regular feelings, is a more permanent, and a far more philosophical language, than that which is frequently substituted for it by Poets, who think that they are conferring honor upon themselves and their art, in proportion as they separate themselves from the sympathies of Men, and indulge in arbitrary and capricious habits of expression."

Wordsworth and others were rebelling in a sense against the imitation of the Greeks and Romans by the Neo-Classicists, and were looking to forge something new, a new expression, something more in line with their own ideas about truth, as well as the ability of the singular person to interact with Nature, which, for the Romantics, was where God/Spirituality resided (thus the idea of Pantheism. Remember the late 1700's and early 1800's was a time of much turmoil, revolution, political upheaval--The French Revolution as well as the American Revolution come to mind.

Having said all of that, I would add that the romantics were not completely radical/experimental--they owed their creative debts to Shakespeare, Milton and others, and they were not without their own conventions. The great scholar M.H. Abrams explores two of those conventions (continuing on work done by G. M. Harper in 1925). Abrams writes two very influential essays: "Structure and Style in the Greater Romantic Lyric" (a truly groundbreaking essay), and "The Correspondent Breeze: A Romantic Metaphor."

In "Structure and Style," Abrams identifies what he calls the Greater Romantic Lyric, type of poem that "begins with a description of the landscape; an aspect or change of aspect in the landscape evokes a varied but integral process of memory, thought, anticipation, and feeling which remains closely intervolved with the outer scene. In the course of this meditation the lyric speaker achieves an insight, faces up to a tragic loss, comes to a moral decision, or resolved an emotional problem." This was a more complex version of what Harper called the tripartite structure: namely, a poem that was structured "description-imagination-return. With Abrams , the "return" is more than a return to the original scene--it carries with it some sort of change, an "insight" as Abrams refers to it. so what does this all mean? Think of Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey," or Coleridge's "Dejection: an Ode," just to give two examples. Think about the poems/poets you will read next week. What does this say about the romantics? That they were formulaic? Or that they held certain styles and philosophies in common? Or both? This an example of one way toward analysis.

In the second essay, "Correspondent Breeze," Abrams identifies a repeated metaphor used in Romantic poetry: that of the wind or breeze and its carrying forth the stuff of creativity and renewal--poems that, as Abrams writes, "begin with a literal wind which transforms itself into the metaphorical wind of inspiration." As Wordsworth writes in his epic autobiographical poem The Prelude, "Nature's self is the breath of God." According to Abrams, "the surprising thing is how often, in the major poems, the wind is not only a property of the landscape, but also a vehicle for radical changes in the poet's mind" and that"Coleridge's '"Dejection: an Ode"' (1802) . . . is the "earliest inclusive instance of this symbolic equation."

Give some thought as you read and re-read these poems this week and next, what other kinds of congruences you see, what kinds of similarities, yes, but also how each of these poets are individual as well.

All for now,

Jamie

Some Strategies for Responding to Poetry

I'll include this document here as well as on the Web CT site. Look also for some contextual info on the Romantics/Romanticism forthcoming.

-----------------------------

Responding to Poetry – some Strategies/Guidelines

Speaker/Summary:
- What do we know about the speaker: age, sex, sensibilities, values?
- reliable/unreliable?
- Is the audience specific? General?
- Situation/content/themes

Poetic Elements:
- Language:
o is the diction casual, elevated, a mix?
o How does word choice reveal meaning? Any word repetitions?
o What is the tone of the poem? Can you determine emotional distance of the voice? Poet writing in the midst of emotion or at some distance from it?
o Is the language intense? Compressed? Does the poem need/warrant more than two close readings?

- Sound/Rhythm
o Does the poem use assonance, consonance, and/or alliteration? How do the poem’s sounds affect you? How do they affect the meanings of the poem?
o What sounds are repeated? If there are rhymes are they forced or natural? Is there a rhyme scheme?
o Does the rhythm, whether in meter or not, seem appropriate for the tone of the poem?

- Lines/linebreaks
o How long is the line and how might it relate to the poem’s meanings (Note that less than ten syllables cuts the breath short and slows the line down; ten syllables is the natural breath; more than ten syllables requires the breath to take in more).
o Are the lines end-stopped, enjambed, or a combo of the two? How might this affect the poem?
o Are the lines broken on specific words for emphasis?

- Sentences
o Long, short, simple, complex? How does the sentence structure affect the poem’s meanings?
o Is there punctuation, and/or does the punctuation contribute to meaning?

- Form
o Is the poem in open form or closed form? Do you think the form is a suitable vehicle for the poem?
o If the poem is in stanzas, how do they function in the poem? Are they regular or irregular?

- Images (sensory)
o Do the images advance the meaning or are they purely decorative?
o How prevalent are the images?
o Are the images disparate or do they connect to each other in some way?

- Figures of Speech
o Does the poem incorporate metaphor and/or simile? How do they contribute? Is it an explicit or implied metaphor? Is it an extended metaphor?
o Does the poem use paradox (a statement that initially seems to be contradictory but turns out to make sense) or personification?
o Do any allusions enrich or hinder the poem’s meaning, and what might that say about the poem’s intended audience?

Your Initial Reaction:
- Did you enjoy the poem? what specifically pleased or displeased you?
- To what extent do your own experiences, values, beliefs, assumptions form your interpretation?

Trouble with your text . . .

For those of you who have had trouble getting your textbook. I will include here the first 300-or-so lines from Alexander Pope's "Essay on Criticism." (Preceding it you will find some biographical/historical info on A. Pope - for those of you who may like that sort of thing. As for the essays in the Norton Anthology ("Versification" and "Poetic Syntax") do your best--beg, borrow, library, etc.--or catch up when you can. Just be aware that those essays will lay the groundwork for much of our discussions throughout the course of this . . . course. Anyway . . . here's Pope.

ALEXANDER POPE.

* * * * *

This eminent English poet was born in London, May 21, 1688. His parents
were Roman Catholics, and to this faith the poet adhered, thus debarring
himself from public office and employment. His father, a linen merchant,
having saved a moderate competency, withdrew from business, and settled
on a small estate he had purchased in Windsor Forest. He died at
Chiswick, in 1717. His son shortly afterwards took a long lease of a
house and five acres of land at Twickenham, on the banks of the Thames,
whither he retired with his widowed mother, to whom he was tenderly
attached and where he resided till death, cultivating his little domain
with exquisite taste and skill, and embellishing it with a grotto,
temple, wilderness, and other adjuncts poetical and picturesque. In this
famous villa Pope was visited by the most celebrated wits, statesmen and
beauties of the day, himself being the most popular and successful poet
of his age. His early years were spent at Binfield, within the range of
the Royal Forest. He received some education at little Catholic schools,
but was his own instructor after his twelfth year. He never was a
profound or accurate scholar, but he read Latin poets with ease and
delight, and acquired some Greek, French, and Italian. He was a poet
almost from infancy, he "lisped in numbers," and when a mere youth
surpassed all his contemporaries in metrical harmony and correctness.
His pastorals and some translations appeared in 1709, but were written
three or four years earlier. These were followed by the _Essay on
Criticism_, 1711; _Rape of the Lock_ (when completed, the most
graceful, airy, and imaginative of his works), 1712-1714; _Windsor
Forest_, 1713; _Temple of Fame_, 1715. In a collection of his
works printed in 1717 he included the _Epistle of Eloisa_ and
_Elegy on an Unfortunate Lady_, two poems inimitable for pathetic
beauty and finished melodious versification.

From 1715 till 1726 Pope was chiefly engaged on his translations of the
_Iliad_ and _Odyssey_, which, though wanting in time Homeric
simplicity, naturalness, and grandeur, are splendid poems. In 1728-29 he
published his greatest satire--the _Dunciad_, an attack on all
poetasters and pretended wits, and on all other persons against whom the
sensitive poet had conceived any enmity. In 1737 he gave to the world a
volume of his _Literary Correspondence_, containing some pleasant
gossip and observations, with choice passages of description but it
appears that the correspondence was manufactured for publication not
composed of actual letters addressed to the parties whose names are
given, and the collection was introduced to the public by means of an
elaborate stratagem on the part of the scheming poet. Between the years
1731 and 1739 he issued a series of poetical essays moral and
philosophical, with satires and imitations of Horace, all admirable for
sense, wit, spirit and brilliancy of these delightful productions, the
most celebrated is the _Essay on Man_ to which Bolingbroke is
believed to have contributed the spurious philosophy and false
sentiment, but its merit consists in detached passages, descriptions,
and pictures. A fourth book to the _Dunciad_, containing many
beautiful and striking lines and a general revision of his works, closed
the poet's literary cares and toils. He died on the 30th of May, 1744,
and was buried in the church at Twickenham.

Pope was of very diminutive stature and deformed from his birth. His
physical infirmity, susceptible temperament, and incessant study
rendered his life one long disease. He was, as his friend Lord
Chesterfield said, "the most irritable of all the _genus irritabile
vatum_, offended with trifles and never forgetting or forgiving
them." His literary stratagems, disguises, assertions, denials, and (we
must add) misrepresentations would fill volumes. Yet when no disturbing
jealousy vanity, or rivalry intervened was generous and affectionate,
and he had a manly, independent spirit. As a poet he was deficient in
originality and creative power, and thus was inferior to his prototype,
Dryden, but as a literary artist, and brilliant declaimer satirist and
moralizer in verse he is still unrivaled. He is the English Horace, and
will as surely descend with honors to the latest posterity.






AN ESSAY ON CRITICISM,

WRITTEN IN THE YEAR 1709


[The title, _An Essay on Criticism_ hardly indicates all
that is included in the poem. It would have been impossible to
give a full and exact idea of the art of poetical criticism
without entering into the consideration of the art of poetry.
Accordingly Pope has interwoven the precepts of both throughout
the poem which might more properly have been styled an essay on
the Art of Criticism and of Poetry.]

* * * * *

PART I.

'Tis hard to say if greater want of skill
Appear in writing or in judging ill,
But of the two less dangerous is the offense
To tire our patience than mislead our sense
Some few in that but numbers err in this,
Ten censure wrong for one who writes amiss,
A fool might once himself alone expose,
Now one in verse makes many more in prose.

'Tis with our judgments as our watches, none
Go just alike, yet each believes his own
In poets as true genius is but rare
True taste as seldom is the critic share
Both must alike from Heaven derive their light,
These born to judge as well as those to write
Let such teach others who themselves excel,
And censure freely, who have written well
Authors are partial to their wit, 'tis true [17]
But are not critics to their judgment too?

Yet if we look more closely we shall find
Most have the seeds of judgment in their mind
Nature affords at least a glimmering light
The lines though touched but faintly are drawn right,
But as the slightest sketch if justly traced
Is by ill coloring but the more disgraced
So by false learning is good sense defaced
Some are bewildered in the maze of schools [26]
And some made coxcombs nature meant but fools
In search of wit these lose their common sense
And then turn critics in their own defense
Each burns alike who can or cannot write
Or with a rival's or an eunuch's spite
All fools have still an itching to deride
And fain would be upon the laughing side
If Maevius scribble in Apollo's spite [34]
There are who judge still worse than he can write.

Some have at first for wits then poets passed
Turned critics next and proved plain fools at last
Some neither can for wits nor critics pass
As heavy mules are neither horse nor ass.
Those half-learned witlings, numerous in our isle,
As half-formed insects on the banks of Nile
Unfinished things one knows not what to call
Their generation is so equivocal
To tell them would a hundred tongues require,
Or one vain wits that might a hundred tire.

But you who seek to give and merit fame,
And justly bear a critic's noble name,
Be sure yourself and your own reach to know
How far your genius taste and learning go.
Launch not beyond your depth, but be discreet
And mark that point where sense and dullness meet.

Nature to all things fixed the limits fit
And wisely curbed proud man's pretending wit.
As on the land while here the ocean gains.
In other parts it leaves wide sandy plains
Thus in the soul while memory prevails,
The solid power of understanding fails
Where beams of warm imagination play,
The memory's soft figures melt away
One science only will one genius fit,
So vast is art, so narrow human wit
Not only bounded to peculiar arts,
But oft in those confined to single parts
Like kings, we lose the conquests gained before,
By vain ambition still to make them more
Each might his several province well command,
Would all but stoop to what they understand.

First follow nature and your judgment frame
By her just standard, which is still the same.
Unerring nature still divinely bright,
One clear, unchanged and universal light,
Life force and beauty, must to all impart,
At once the source and end and test of art
Art from that fund each just supply provides,
Works without show and without pomp presides
In some fair body thus the informing soul
With spirits feeds, with vigor fills the whole,
Each motion guides and every nerve sustains,
Itself unseen, but in the effects remains.
Some, to whom Heaven in wit has been profuse, [80]
Want as much more, to turn it to its use;
For wit and judgment often are at strife,
Though meant each other's aid, like man and wife.
'Tis more to guide, than spur the muse's steed,
Restrain his fury, than provoke his speed,
The winged courser, like a generous horse, [86]
Shows most true mettle when you check his course.

Those rules, of old discovered, not devised,
Are nature still, but nature methodized;
Nature, like liberty, is but restrained
By the same laws which first herself ordained.

Hear how learned Greece her useful rules indites,
When to repress and when indulge our flights.
High on Parnassus' top her sons she showed, [94]
And pointed out those arduous paths they trod;
Held from afar, aloft, the immortal prize,
And urged the rest by equal steps to rise. [97]
Just precepts thus from great examples given,
She drew from them what they derived from Heaven.
The generous critic fanned the poet's fire,
And taught the world with reason to admire.
Then criticism the muse's handmaid proved,
To dress her charms, and make her more beloved:
But following wits from that intention strayed
Who could not win the mistress, wooed the maid
Against the poets their own arms they turned
Sure to hate most the men from whom they learned
So modern pothecaries taught the art
By doctors bills to play the doctor's part.
Bold in the practice of mistaken rules
Prescribe, apply, and call their masters fools.
Some on the leaves of ancient authors prey,
Nor time nor moths e'er spoil so much as they.
Some dryly plain, without invention's aid,
Write dull receipts how poems may be made
These leave the sense their learning to display,
And those explain the meaning quite away.

You then, whose judgment the right course would steer,
Know well each ancient's proper character,
His fable subject scope in every page,
Religion, country, genius of his age
Without all these at once before your eyes,
Cavil you may, but never criticise.
Be Homers works your study and delight,
Read them by day and meditate by night,
Thence form your judgment thence your maxims bring
And trace the muses upward to their spring.
Still with itself compared, his text peruse,
And let your comment be the Mantuan Muse. [129]

When first young Maro in his boundless mind, [130]
A work to outlast immortal Rome designed,
Perhaps he seemed above the critic's law
And but from nature's fountain scorned to draw
But when to examine every part he came
Nature and Homer were he found the same
Convinced, amazed, he checks the bold design
And rules as strict his labored work confine
As if the Stagirite o'erlooked each line [138]
Learn hence for ancient rules a just esteem,
To copy nature is to copy them.

Some beauties yet no precepts can declare,
For there's a happiness as well as care.
Music resembles poetry--in each
Are nameless graces which no methods teach,
And which a master hand alone can reach
If, where the rules not far enough extend
(Since rules were made but to promote their end),
Some lucky license answer to the full
The intent proposed that license is a rule.
Thus Pegasus a nearer way to take
May boldly deviate from the common track
Great wits sometimes may gloriously offend,
And rise to faults true critics dare not mend,
From vulgar bounds with brave disorder part,
And snatch a grace beyond the reach of art,
Which without passing through the judgment gains
The heart and all its end at once attains.
In prospects, thus, some objects please our eyes,
Which out of nature's common order rise,
The shapeless rock or hanging precipice.
But though the ancients thus their rules invade
(As kings dispense with laws themselves have made),
Moderns beware! or if you must offend
Against the precept, ne'er transgress its end,
Let it be seldom, and compelled by need,
And have, at least, their precedent to plead.
The critic else proceeds without remorse,
Seizes your fame, and puts his laws in force.

I know there are, to whose presumptuous thoughts
Those freer beauties, even in them, seem faults
Some figures monstrous and misshaped appear,
Considered singly, or beheld too near,
Which, but proportioned to their light, or place,
Due distance reconciles to form and grace.
A prudent chief not always must display
His powers in equal ranks and fair array,
But with the occasion and the place comply.
Conceal his force, nay, seem sometimes to fly.
Those oft are stratagems which errors seem,
Nor is it Homer nods, but we that dream. [180]

Still green with bays each ancient altar stands,
Above the reach of sacrilegious hands,
Secure from flames, from envy's fiercer rage, [183]
Destructive war, and all-involving age.
See, from each clime the learned their incense bring;
Hear, in all tongues consenting Paeans ring!
In praise so just let every voice be joined,
And fill the general chorus of mankind.
Hail! bards triumphant! born in happier days;
Immortal heirs of universal praise!
Whose honors with increase of ages grow,
As streams roll down, enlarging as they flow;
Nations unborn your mighty names shall sound, [193]
And worlds applaud that must not yet be found!
Oh may some spark of your celestial fire,
The last, the meanest of your sons inspire,
(That, on weak wings, from far pursues your flights,
Glows while he reads, but trembles as he writes),
To teach vain wits a science little known,
To admire superior sense, and doubt their own!

* * * * *

PART II.

Of all the causes which conspire to blind
Man's erring judgment and misguide the mind,
What the weak head with strongest bias rules,
Is pride, the never-failing vice of fools.
Whatever nature has in worth denied,
She gives in large recruits of needful pride;
For as in bodies, thus in souls, we find
What wants in blood and spirits, swelled with wind:
Pride where wit fails steps in to our defense,
And fills up all the mighty void of sense.
If once right reason drives that cloud away,
Truth breaks upon us with resistless day
Trust not yourself, but your defects to know,
Make use of every friend--and every foe.

A little learning is a dangerous thing
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring [216]
There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,
And drinking largely sobers us again.
Tired at first sight with what the muse imparts,
In fearless youth we tempt the heights of arts
While from the bounded level of our mind
Short views we take nor see the lengths behind
But more advanced behold with strange surprise,
New distant scenes of endless science rise!
So pleased at first the towering Alps we try,
Mount o'er the vales and seem to tread the sky,
The eternal snows appear already passed
And the first clouds and mountains seem the last.
But those attained we tremble to survey
The growing labors of the lengthened way
The increasing prospect tires our wandering eyes,
Hills peep o'er hills and Alps on Alps arise!

A perfect judge will read each work of wit
With the same spirit that its author writ
Survey the whole nor seek slight faults to find
Where nature moves and rapture warms the mind,
Nor lose for that malignant dull delight
The generous pleasure to be charmed with wit
But in such lays as neither ebb nor flow,
Correctly cold and regularly low
That, shunning faults, one quiet tenor keep;
We cannot blame indeed--but we may sleep.
In wit, as nature, what affects our hearts
Is not the exactness of peculiar parts,
'Tis not a lip, or eye, we beauty call,
But the joint force and full result of all.
Thus, when we view some well proportioned dome
(The worlds just wonder, and even thine, O Rome!), [248]
No single parts unequally surprise,
All comes united to the admiring eyes;
No monstrous height or breadth, or length, appear;
The whole at once is bold, and regular.

Whoever thinks a faultless piece to see.
Thinks what ne'er was, nor is, nor e'er shall be.
In every work regard the writer's end,
Since none can compass more than they intend;
And if the means be just, the conduct true,
Applause, in spite of trivial faults, is due.
As men of breeding, sometimes men of wit,
To avoid great errors, must the less commit:
Neglect the rules each verbal critic lays,
For not to know some trifles is a praise.
Most critics, fond of some subservient art,
Still make the whole depend upon a part:
They talk of principles, but notions prize,
And all to one loved folly sacrifice.

Once on a time La Mancha's knight, they say, [267]
A certain bard encountering on the way,
Discoursed in terms as just, with looks as sage,
As e'er could Dennis, of the Grecian stage; [270]
Concluding all were desperate sots and fools,
Who durst depart from Aristotle's rules
Our author, happy in a judge so nice,
Produced his play, and begged the knight's advice;
Made him observe the subject, and the plot,
The manners, passions, unities, what not?
All which, exact to rule, were brought about,
Were but a combat in the lists left out
"What! leave the combat out?" exclaims the knight.
"Yes, or we must renounce the Stagirite."
"Not so, by heaven!" (he answers in a rage)
"Knights, squires, and steeds must enter on the stage."
"So vast a throng the stage can ne'er contain."
"Then build a new, or act it in a plain."

Thus critics of less judgment than caprice,
Curious, not knowing, not exact, but nice,
Form short ideas, and offend in arts
(As most in manners) by a love to parts.

Some to conceit alone their taste confine,
And glittering thoughts struck out at every line;
Pleased with a work where nothing's just or fit;
One glaring chaos and wild heap of wit.
Poets, like painters, thus, unskilled to trace
The naked nature and the living grace,
With gold and jewels cover every part,
And hide with ornaments their want of art.
True wit is nature to advantage dressed;
What oft was thought, but ne'er so well expressed;
Something, whose truth convinced at sight we find
That gives us back the image of our mind.
As shades more sweetly recommend the light,
So modest plainness sets off sprightly wit
For works may have more wit than does them good,
As bodies perish through excess of blood.

Welcome to Intro to Poetry - a Poetry of Change

This class is about poetry. An introduction to poetry. Though that statement certainly sounds vague—and obvious, in light of this course’s title—it helps us realize how expansive the art form is. As the preface to your anthology states, “Poetry . . . encourages us to embrace paradox and contradiction, the unexpected, the never-thought-of (and also paradoxically, the universal, the shared, the familiar).” In a similar way, definitions of poetry are equally as vague—there are nearly as many different definitions as there are poets. Alexander Pope felt the best poetry was what was “oft thought, but ne’er so well expressed.” For Coleridge it was “the best words in the best order.” No matter how we might differ in our definitions, the one constant that we can place upon poetry is that it is always changing—and that change is governed by influence, both positive and negative. In a sense, all art moves forward in this manner; that is, artists react to prior conventions, both through incorporation and by the throwing off of prior conventions. The poet is both alone at the desk and surrounded by every other voice to have "uttered" verse. The poet's work exists to the private satisfaction of the poet himself/herself, but also in the public sphere of society/history/posterity, or whatever name one wants to place upon the masses.

Since it would be impossible to cover thousands of years of verse in three months, we will use the constant time-line of influence to help focus our study. Harold Bloom has said that poets contend with, even as they are inspired by, earlier poets, in an effort to assert their own priority. In this way we can consider the movements of poetry—evolving formal structures, themes, visions, etc.—as well as the individual poem. This will allow for an examination of both the private and public implications of the poetry we read, which seems appropriate; after all, poetry is always aimed both inward at the self and outward toward humanity.

The philosophy of this course is just that, that poetry is both public and private, simultaneously, whatever the intentions of the poet - once it has been written and published, the ideas inhabiting a poem cease to be only the poet's. For this reason, literature is often a powerful and volatile political space where artists grapple with the culture at large. Seeing literature as more than just "telling a story" requires a shift in thinking. It requires that we displace our own preconceptions, stereotypes, biases (we all have them) and approach the text objectively. It requires that we think of literature as a kind of machine; each text has a function and produces an effect. I think it was Walt Whitman who said that poetry is a small or large machine made out of words. Machines don't mean something; they do something. Our task will be to investigate what these dramatic texts are trying to do.

As a teacher, I am not governed by the notion that there is only one correct reading or interpretation of any literary work. Rather, my hope is that by the end of the semester you will be able to appreciate the many effects of any given poem. Early in the semester, I won’t expect you to be an expert on literary matters. I do, however, expect you to share your reactions and questions. As the semester progresses, you will become better versed in the methods of critical reading, and as result, will also become a more articulate, discerning, and critical writer.

Please be aware that many of the poems that we will read and consider will come from poets with widely different backgrounds and the poems will often deal with decidedly provocative issues including class, race and racism, sexuality, religion, politics, etc. We will, at times, encounter coarse language. You know your level of tolerance concerning such matters; it's up to you whether to stay in the course or seek another one more in line with your personal tastes/opinions. If you elect to stay, please know that we will not discuss whether a poet's ideas are moral/immoral, proper/improper, etc. Rudeness regarding such matters will not be tolerated and offenders will be asked to leave the class. The goal of learning to read literature is seeing beyond one's own experience and worldviews.


Welcome aboard,


Jamie Thomas


* * * * * *


Tentative Course Schedule

This schedule will evolve as the class progresses. Changes will be announced both on my blog and on WebCT. Full instructions for the items on this list, including page numbers will be posted as they become available. Unless otherwise noted, all blog assignments and discussion questions will be assigned on Monday and due by Sunday. All readings unless noted will be from the Norton Anthology of Poetry. Other readings will be provided in handout form/online at my blog and on WebCT.

Week

8.20
Course Intro (review syllabus, policies, and visit
http://intro2poetryhouston.blogspot.com/– Intro to Poetry

Reading: Versification and Poetic Syntax pp. 2027-2073
Alexander Pope (pp. 596-598, lines 1-300)

Discussion online
Blog Assn. Getting started on Blogger (Due 8/27)


8.27 [English Romantics]
Reading: Blake – from Songs of Innocence
“Introduction”
“Holy Thursday”
“The Divine Image”
from Songs of Experience
“A Divine Image”
“Holy Thursday (II)”
“London”

Wordsworth – “Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey”
“London, 1802”
“Ode: Intimations of Immortality”

Coleridge - “Frost at Midnight”
“Dejection: an Ode”

Discussion online
Blog Assignment: Due 9/1


9.3
Reading: Byron – “Written after Swimming from Sestos to Abydos”
“She Walks in Beauty”

Shelly – “Stanzas Written in Dejection, Near Naples”
“England in 1819”
“Ode to the West Wind”

Keats – “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer”
“Ode on Melancholy”
“To Autumn”
“This Living Hand”

Discussion online
Blog Assignment: Due 9/8


9.10 [American Romanticism]
Reading: Whitman, Emerson, Dickinson (poems forthcoming)

Discussion online
Blog Assignment: Due 9/15


9.17 [Victorian to Modern]
Reading: Hardy, Hopkins, Yeats, Robinson, Houseman

Discussion online
Blog Assignment: Due 9/22
(Paper #1 assigned)


9.24 [Modernism (Imagism)]
Reading: Pound, Eliot, Amy Lowell, Stein, H.D., William Carlos Williams

Discussion online
Blog Assignment: Due 9/29


10.1
Discussion online – Paper Proposals/Progress
Strategies for writing about poetry (handouts forthcoming)
Paper #1: Due 10/7


10.8 [Modernism cont.]
Reading: Lawrence, Stevens, Moore, Hart Crane, Auden, Macleish

Discussion online
Blog Assignment: Due 10/13


10.15
Reading: Frost, Sandburg, Cummings, Dylan Thomas, Millay

Discussion online
Blog Assignment: Due 10/20


10/22 [Harlem Renaissance and Black Arts Movement]
Reading: Hughes, Cullen, Toomer – Baraka, Brooks, Lorde (further
handouts forthcoming)

Discussion online
Blog Assignment: Due 10/27


10.29 [Contemporary]
Reading: Bishop, Berryman, Jarrell, Larkin, Rukeyser, Creely, Hayden,
Roethke

Discussion online
Blog Assignment: Due 11/3


11.5 [Beats & N.Y. School]
Reading: Corso, Ferlinghetti, Ginsberg – Ashbery, Koch, Schuyler, O’Hara

Discussion online
Blog Assignment: Due 11/10
(Paper #2 assigned)


11.12 [Confessional Poets]
Reading: Plath, Robert Lowell, Snodgrass, Sexton, James Wright, Bly
(further handouts forthcoming)

Discussion online
Blog Assignment: Due 11/17


11.19
Paper # 2 Proposals (Discussion online)
THANKSGIVING BREAK


11.26
Disscussion/Virtual Workshop
Semester Wrap-up
Paper #2 Due 12/5