ENGL 243 Autumn 2023
MW 12:30 – 2:20 Instructor: Henry Staten
This class is intended to teach you how to read and enjoy lyric poetry. My instructional method depends heavily on class participation, and I expect you to attend class regularly. I will give you study questions for the poems, and frequent, unannounced quizzes to check on how well you are working with these questions to read the poems. 40 per cent of your grade will depend on these quizzes. The rest of your grade will come from a mid-term paper and a final paper, each about 2-3 pages long, each of which will count 30 per cent of your grade.
I expect you to come to class on time. I do not like students casually drifting in after class has started. If you have reason to be late, let me know. Getting on the internet on your phones while you’re in class is strictly forbidden.
Over the course of the quarter we will read 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. That is, they are trying to say a lot in as few words as possible, and making those few words as eloquent and pleasing to the ear as possible.
I will make available a course packet containing the poems to be studied. I’m still finalizing this year’s list, but here’s a tentative reading list, arranged according to topics:
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," "because feeling is first"; Roethke, “I Knew a Woman”
Death and mourning: Emily Dickinson, “After Great Pain,” Wilfred Owen, “Futility”
Dramatic monologue: Tennyson, “Tithonus,”
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, “Preludes," "Rhapsody on a Windy Night," "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock."
Are song lyrics poems? In this section I'll solicit from the class your own favorite song lyrics to consider, and we'll pay considerable attention to lyrics by Bob Dylan, the only songwriter ever to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for his songs.