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
|