Autumn Term - Thursdays 2.00pm - 4.00pm
2010
September 16, 23, 30
October 7, 14, 21, 28
November 4, 11, 18
Spring Term - Thursdays 2.00pm - 4.00pm
2011
January 13, 20, 27
February 3, 10, 17, 24
March 3, 10, 17
Summer Term - Thursdays 2.00pm - 4.00pm
2011
April 28
May 5, 12, 19, 26
June 2, 9, 16, 23, 30
The poetic tradition is long, complex and hugely varied. Language can range from artificial ‘poetic’ grammar and vocabulary to contemporary slang. The lines may rhyme - in any number of elaborate sequences - or may not do so at all. Again, lines may be regular in their length and rhythm - or follow no apparent scheme whatsoever. There may be a sequence of verses or simply a single extended passage - perhaps lasting hundreds of lines. The poem may be a whole book - like Paradise Lost - or consist of just three lines, like a haiku. And all this without even starting to take into consideration a poem’s period, political dimension, position within an artistic movement, or the particular traditions of its country or place of origin.
Added to all this, is the way in which a poem, even at its simplest, uses language in ways that are not the same as in prose: contracted, sometimes contorted, often deliberately antique or specialised.
Poetry offers some of the most beautiful, profound and sheerly enjoyable artistic experiences in our culture. In part, its richness derives from these very ‘difficulties’ - its ability to manoeuvre through and around the enormous range of cultural possibilities and turn them into something new and living in its own right.
This series is designed:
● as a study of many of the greatest poets in the English
● and other traditions;
● to help us understand what ‘poetry’ and the ‘poetic’ are.
● How poetry, and each particular poem, works: how to read it
● and draw from it its beauty, profundity and pleasure;
● to show how the great tradition of poetry is made up: its
● movements and changes of style, attitudes and response.
The series is also ongoing and started at the point where poetry changed from an essentially aristocratic form to one that could address and include the world of ordinary people: their feelings, experiences and concerns. With the Industrial Revolution a cultural change took place that, for the first time, moved all the arts away from the classical and heroic to the world as it was actually experienced.
Out of this grew Wordsworth’s struggle to write in the language of ordinary men and women. We therefore began with that shift: from the elegance of Pope’s heroic couplets, through the sentiment of Gray’s melancholy and James Thomson’s Seasons (which Vivaldi used as the basis for his famous concertos) to Wordsworth’s observation of the lives of the poor, and of people who felt and thought like ourselves and his celebration of Nature as a new basis for truth and morality.
This set the agenda for the first series of seminars, which will include the major English and American poets of the 19th and 20th centuries, and has now reached the middle of the 19th century. In time, the second series will turn to the poets of the preceding age, from Chaucer to the 18th century proper.
The list of figures we will encounter looks daunting - but also exciting. With some we will study a range of poems - in others just one or two. In any case, it is important to remember that these poets wrote for men and women to read and enjoy. With careful application we will be opening up new worlds - or revisiting old ones - to taste the riches of this wonderful tradition.
So far we have looked at the early Romantics, starting with Wordsworth. In Autumn 2011 we will be working on the crucial fragmentation of language in late nineteenth-century France, above all with Mallarmé as the beginning of modernism proper.
● Browning (R & E), Tennyson, Arnold
● Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Longfellow
● Rossetti (D G & C), Swinburne
● Hardy, Houseman, Dowson
● Sassoon, Owen, Brooke, Rosenberg
● Yeats, Pound, Eliot
● Frost, Stevens, Williams, Cummings, Lowell
● Auden, Olson, Berryman, Dylan Thomas
● Larkin, Ginsberg, Gunn, Hughes, Plath
● Goethe, Schiller, Heine, Rilke, Brecht
● Lamartine, Hugo, de Vigny, Verlaine
● Mallarmé, Baudelaire, Rimbaud
● Foscolo, Leopardi, Montale, Quasimodo
● Pushkin, Lermontov, Akhmatova, Mandelshtam
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