ENGL 243 Autumn 2023
MW 12:30 – 2:20 Instructor: Henry Staten
This course is intended to teach you how to read lyric poetry, and to give you a quick overview of the different kinds of lyric poetry that have been written in English over the centuries, starting with the Renaissance. (Lyric poems are short poems, most often about love or death, or love and death; often with a lot of reference to nature.) My approach is roughly "formalist," which means that I will show you how to make sense of the words you see on the page, beginning with the grammar of the sentences they form. If you stick with me you'll find that poems aren't the mysterious "symbolic" entities with "hidden meanings" as which they're often depicted, but straightforward uses of language that are meant to communicate in a vivid and immediate way--to move you, to make you feel--the way a song does, even if you don't "understand" everything it's saying. But that doesn't mean that the kind of emotive expression in a poem is something that comes straight from the heart. Poetry is an art, which means that the words of poems are arranged very skillfully, in ways that can take a while to figure out--not because their meanings are hidden, but because poems are very compressed utterance, which is trying to say a lot in as few words as possible. The analytical techniques I teach you will be relatively simple, but take a lot of attention to apply. You will write 4 papers, 2-3 pages long, for this class, in which you will be required to apply the specific techniques we discuss in class. By the end of the course, even those of you who currently find poetry a complete mystery will have at least the beginnings of poetry-reading skill.
Get ready to spend the entire quarter in this class reading and discussing poems!
All the poems are available on the internet. Please make printouts of all poems, because you'll need to mark specific words and the accentuations of words, and take notes in the margins.
Reading schedule:
Sept. 27, Oct. 2: Introduction: what is the art of poetry? Frost, “The Aim Was Song,” “Never Again Would Birdsong be the Same”
Oct. 4, 9, 11: transience, carpe diem (“seize the day”), memento mori (“reminder of death”): Marvell, “To His Coy Mistress,” Herrick, “Corinna’s Gone A-Maying,” Shakespeare, Sonnet 65, John Crowe Ransom, “Piazza Piece”; Robert Frost, “Nothing Gold Can Stay”
Oct. 16, 18: Nature: Keats, “Ode to Autumn,” Frost, “Spring Pools,” “The Most of It”
Week 5, Oct. 23, 25: Love: Habington, “To Roses in the Bosom of Castara”; Shakespeare, Sonnets 128, 147
Week 6, Oct. 30, Nov. 1: More love: e.e. cummings, “what time is it? it is by every star”; Roethke, “I Knew a Woman”
Week 7, Nov. 6, 8: Death and mourning: grave of an infant, Emily Dickinson, “After Great Pain,” Wilfred Owen, “Futility”
Week 8, Nov. 13, 15: Dramatic monologue: Tennyson, “Tithonus,” T. S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”
Week 9: Nov. 23: Parents: Roethke, “My papa’s waltz”; Plath, “Daddy;” Dylan Thomas, “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night”
Nov. 25: Thanksgiving
Week 10, Nov 27, 29: Modernism: Rilke, “The Panther,” “In the Morgue,” T.S. Eliot, “La Figlia che Piange”
Week 11, Dec. 4: modernism continued
Dec. 6: in-class final