T 9/9: Introductions
The “poetry of sensation” Tennyson, “The Dying Swan,” “Mariana”* (1830); “The Lady of Shallot”* (1832) Hallam, “On Some of the Characteristics of Modern Poetry”* (1831) Mill, “Tennyson’s Poems” (1835) “Tennyson, a Chronology” (p. 697-98) Recommended: paintings inspired by these poems (Blackboard)
Tennyson and the dramatic monologue Tennyson, “The Lotos-Eaters” (1832); “Ulysses,”* “Tithonus,”* and “Tiresias”* (1842) Sterling, “Poems by Alfred Tennyson” (1842) Spedding, “Tennyson’s Poems” (1843)
T 9/16: In Memoriam: language, poetry, the lyric self Introductory note to In Memoriam. Tennyson, In Memoriam (1833-49/1850). Read poems 1-77, then re-read sections 1-11. Recommended: Armstrong, “The Collapse of Object and Subject: In Memoriam”
The structure and progression of In Memoriam Read poems 78-Epilogue, then re-read sections 28-31, 78-79, 95, 103-105, 108, and 115.
T 9/23: Science and In Memoriam Re-read sections 21, 34, 54-56, and 118-127. R. W. Hill, Jr., “A Familiar Lesson from the Victorians”
Faith and doubt in In Memoriam. Re-read sections 36, 50-51, 77, 95 (again), 129-31, and Epilogue. Eliot, “In Memoriam” (1932) “The Day Thou Gavest” (blackboard)
T 9/30: Tennyson, Maud; A Monodrama (1855) Tucker, “Maud and the Doom of Culture”
Wordsworth and his Victorian readers Wordsworth, “Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey” (1798) (blackboard) Mill, “A Crisis in My Mental History” from Autobiography* (1873) (blackboard) Arnold, letters to Clough (~1848-49), “Tennyson and Wordsworth” (1862), “The Defects of English Romanticism” (1865) (blackboard) PAPER ONE DUE
T 10/7: Early Arnold Arnold, “The Strayed Reveller,” “Mycerinus,” “The Forsaken Merman,” “To a Friend,” “Resignation. To Fausta” (all 1849); “Switzerland” (1849-77/1877). Focus especially on “Isolation. To Marguerite”* and “To Marguerite. Continued.”* Shrimpton, “Note on the Author and Editor,” “Chronology of Arnold’s Life and Times,” “Introduction,” and “Note on the Text”
Arnold, “The Buried Life”* (1852); “Memorial Verses” (1850); and “Lines Written in Kensington Gardens”* (1852) (blackboard) Arnold, “Too Late,” “Destiny,” “Despondency,” “Stanzas in Memory of the Author of ‘Obermann’” (all 1852); “Cadmus and Harmonia” and “The Scholar Gypsy” (both 1853);
T 10/14: The Arnold/Clough debate Arnold, “Preface” to 1853 Poems* (blackboard) Arnold, “The Harp-Player on Etna” (1855); and “The Philosopher and the Stars” (1855) Clough, from “Recent English Poetry”* (1853) and Amours de Voyage, Canto I* (1849-50/1858) (blackboard)
Late Arnold, poet and critic Arnold, “Dover Beach”* and “Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse”* (both 1867) Arnold, from “The Study of Poetry” (1880) (blackboard) PAPER TWO DUE
T 10/21: Browning and the dramatic monologue Browning, “My Last Duchess”* and “Porphyria’s Lover” (1842); “The Bishop Orders His Tomb at St. Praxed’s Church”* (1845) Langbaum, “The Dramatic Monologue: Sympathy versus Judgment” Tucker, “Dramatic Monologue and the Overhearing of Lyric” Recommended: Ruskin, [Browning and the Italian Renaissance] (1856) Recommended: Images of Renaissance tombs (blackboard) (reading for second half of class on p. 3)
“Objective Poetry” Browning, “The Lost Leader” (1845); “Memorabilia,” “How It Strikes a Contemporary,”* and “A Grammarian’s Funeral”* (1855); “Introductory Essay” to the Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley* (1852) Carlyle, [Letter to Browning] (1841)
T 10/28: No class—fall break
T 11/4: The aesthetic of particularity Browning, “The Englishman in Italy”* (1845); “Fra Lippo Lippi”* (1855) Recommended: paintings by Fra Lippo Lippi (blackboard)
Atmosphere and observation Browning, and “Andrea del Sarto”* (1855) “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came”* (1855) Bloom, “Browning’s ‘Child Roland’: All Things Deformed and Broken” Gray, “Andrew del Sarto’s Modesty” Recommended: paintings by Andrea del Sarto (blackboard)
Sound and syntax (and the “good moment”) Browning, “Introduction” to Pippa Passes* (1841); “How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix,”* “Home-Thoughts, from Abroad,” “Home-Thoughts, from the Sea,”* “Meeting at Night” (1845); “Love among the Ruins,” The Last Ride Together”* and “Two in the Campagna”* “ (1855)
T 11/11: Browning’s “obscurity” Browning, “A Tocatta of Galuppi’s”* and “Abt Vogler”* (1855) Eliot, [Review of Men and Women]* (1855) Morris, [Browning’s Alleged Carelessness]* (1856) Austin, “The Poetry of the Period: Mr. Browning”* (1869) Swinburne, [Browning’s Obscurity]* (1875) Wilde, [Browning as a ‘Writer of Fiction’] (1890) James, “Browning in Westminster Abbey” (1891) Hawlin, “Browning’s ‘A Tocatta of Galuppi’s: How Venice Once Was Dear” Recommended: images of places mentioned in “A Tocatta of Galuppi’s” (blackboard)
Browning, religion, and the grotesque in poetic language Browning, “Rabbi Ben Ezra,”* “Caliban upon Setebos”* and “Epilogue” to Dramatis Personae (1864) Bagehot, [Browning’s Grotesque Art] (1864) Armstrong, “Browning’s ‘Caliban’ and Primitive Language” PAPER THREE DUE
T 11/18: Praise and observation Hopkins, “During the eastering,” “—Hill/Heaven,” “Distance/Dappled,” “The peacock’s eye,” “Love preparing to fly,” “Or else their cooings,” “It was a hard thing,” “A Voice from the World,” “Boughs being pruned,” “I hear a noise of waters,” “(Dawn),” “Moonrise June 19 1876,” “The Woodlark,” “God’s Grandeur,”* “The Starlight Night,”* and “The dark-out Lucifer” Hopkins, Journal, p. 191-99 Hopkins, letter to Bridges, p. 257-59 (reading for second half of class on p. 4)
Praise and observation, cont. Hopkins, “Easter Communion,” “O Death, Death,” “Let me be to Thee,” “The Habit of Perfection,”* “Nondum,” “Elegiacs: after The Convent Threshold,” “In the Valley of the Elwy,” “Pied Beauty,”* “The May Magnificat,” “Repeat that, repeat,” “Spring and Fall,”* “The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo,”* “The Blessed Virgin Compared to the Air we Breathe”* Hopkins, letter to Bridges, p. 240-41 Hopkins, “Sermon for Mondays Evening Oct. 25,” p. 278-81 Hopkins, spiritual exercise for Aug 7, 1882, p. 282 Hopkins, “The Principle or Foundation” and “Meditation on Hell,” p. 290-95 Rossetti, “The Convent Threshold” (Appendix A)
T 11/25: Inscape and instress Hopkins, “As kingfishers catch fire,”* “Spring,” “The Sea and the Skylark,” and “The Windhover”* Hopkins, Journal, p. 199-222, paying special attention to discussions of inscape and instress
Sprung rhythm Hopkins, “Author’s Preface,” “The Wreck of the Deutschland,”* “The Caged Skylark,” “Hurrahing in Harvest,”* “The Lantern out of Doors,” “Inversnaid,” and “Spelt from Sibyl’s Leaves”* Hopkins, letters to Bridges and Dixon, p. 227-37, 241-44
T 12/2: Sonnets of desolation Hopkins, “To seem the stranger lies my lot, my life,” “I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day,”* “Strike, churl; hurl, cheerless wind, then; heltering hail”, “No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief,”* “(Carrion Comfort),”* “Patience, hard thing! the hard thing but to pray,” and “My own heart let me more have pity on”*
Hopkins’s language Hopkins, “Duns Scotus’s Oxford,” “Binsey Poplars,”* “Henry Purcell,” “Felix Randall,”* “Harry Ploughman,” “Tom’s Garland,” “Epithalamion,” and “That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the comfort of the Resurrection”* Hopkins, [Oxford, 1863] and [August-September 1864] from Early Diaries (p. 185-86) Hopkins, letters to Bridges and Dixon, p. 237-40, 246-57 PAPER FOUR DUE
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