ENGL 243 Autumn 2024
TTH 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 (4 pages maximum), for this class, in which you will be required to apply the specific techniques we discuss in class. Each of these papers will count twenty per cent of your grade; the other 20 per cent will come from class participation, of which the most important ingredient is that you attend class and look involved. Getting on the internet or on your phones while you're in class is strictly forbidden. Each paper will count 25% of your grade, but I do also give credit for improvement. 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!
The poems we will study are in a course packet available at EZCopy on University Way (just down from the U. bookstore). I will be adding additional poems during the quarter.
Reading schedule:
What is the art of poetry? Herrick, "On Prue, his maid," "A child who died," Gilbert, "The Hotels of Paris."
Transience: Frost, "Spring Pools," "Nothing Gold can stay"; Keats, "To Autumn"
Erotic love: Shakespeare, Sonnet 147, "My love is as a fever," Habington, "To Roses in the Bosom of Castara," Roethke, "I Knew a Woman," Frost, "Never Again Would Birds' Song Be the Same"
Transience and love: Marvell, “To His Coy Mistress,” Herrick, “Corinna’s Gone A-Maying,” Shakespeare, Sonnet 65, John Crowe Ransom, “Piazza Piece”;
Nature: Keats, “Ode to Autumn,” Frost, “Spring Pools,” “The Most of It”
Love: Habington, “To Roses in the Bosom of Castara”; Shakespeare, Sonnets 20, 128, 147, e.e. cummings, “what time is it? it is by every star”; Roethke, “I Knew a Woman”
Death and mourning: Emily Dickinson, “After Great Pain,” Wilfred Owen, “Futility”
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”
Modernism: Rilke, “The Panther,” “In the Morgue,” T.S. Eliot, “Gerontion”