LEM2011 - Formas Poéticas na Língua Inglesa 1 / English Poetic Forms 1

Dr. Bruce Stewart DLLEM / CCHLA / UFRN
Professor in English Literature & Language
Reader Emeritus in English / Ulster U (UK)

Bem-vindo / Welcome

Timetable

Introduction
Resources (Literary History & Criticism)
Evaluation Sheets (to be supplied)

Introduction
This page is designed to deliver primary and secondary texts for English Poetry 1 ][LEM2011] at UFRN in the 2nd Semester of 2021. The index below lists consecutive topics dealt with in class without any further attempt to record the lecture and discussion that accompanied them on such occasions. For commentary, you can look at my running-notes to each class as it is given on the SIGAA/LEM2011 webpage. Each class topic is supported by a variety of texts—both poems (original text) and commentary on them (criticism). Many of these are given in both .DOCX and .PDF formats and each of these are set to download to your computer when you click the relevant link. A few are given in HTML and these will appear in the contents frame of the present page. There will be more HTMLs in future as the site grows up. Please let me know if you have any trouble downloading or viewing. Email: bstewart@ricorso.net.

Semester Timetable

Texts

Go to

Evaluation

Periods

Introduction: English Poetry Through the Ages
Index

 

[Various]

Anglo-Saxon Poetry: Songs and Epics

 

Anglo-Saxon England

Beowulf: The Germanic Context
Index

 

 

Beowulf: Pagan or Christian?
 

 

 

Beowulf - The Poem (1)
 

 

 

Beowulf - The Poem (2)

 

Medieval/Early Renaissance

Beowulf - Presentations (1)
 

 

 

Beowulf - Presentations (2)
 

UNIT 1 - Test

 

Chaucer and Norman England
Index

 

 

The Canterbury Tales - Plan and Persons
 

Tudor England

Canterbury Tales: Meeting the Pilgrims (1)

 

 

Canterbury Tales: Meeting the Pilgrims (2)

 

The Elizabethan Age

Canterbury Tales: Presentations (1)

 

 

Canterbury Tales: Presentations (2)

 

Jacobean England

Tudors and Elizabethans: Wyatt, Sydney, Spenser
Index

 

 

The Poetic Drama: Marlowe to Shakespeare

 

Commonwealth & Restoration

Cavaliers & Roundheads: Herrick & Marvell

UNIT 2 - Test

 

The Jacobean Scene: Webster & Donne

 

 

John Milton and the Areopagitica
Index

 

The Augustans (Neo-classical)

Milton's Paradise Lost (1)

 

Age of Sentiment

Milton's Paradise Lost (2)

 

Romantic Dawn

The English Augustans: Dryden and Pope

 

 

The English Ballad - A Timeless Tradition
Index
 

 

Pre-Romantic Poets: Oliver Goldsmith and Thomas Gray

 

 

 

William Blake: Innocence and Experience
 

 

 

What is Poetry? - The English Answer
     
Homebased Examination and/or Presentations  

 

 

   

Unit 3 - Test

 

[ Materials will be added to the Index as the Semester proceeds. The teacher reserves the right to alter the timetable in progress. ]

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Introductory Remarks

This course—being one of two in the DLLEM curriculum—is devoted to English Poetry before and after the Romantic Revolution, an epoch conveniently marked in England by the publication of the Lyrical Ballads of William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge in 1800 whose work along with that of other later poets in English up to our own time are covered in Formas Poeticas II.

The general aim of the Poetry I is thus to cover English Poetry up that date and, in particular, to focus on the poetical genres involved in its development between the Heroic Age of the warrior-kings and the end of the 18th century (the so-called Augustan Age, in view of its neo-classical tone). While all of this requires a glance at both English and European history, it chiefly involves an encounter with the body of English poetry itself in which so many poems of an earlier time than ours have framed the most memorable thoughts and feelings about core experiences—love, death, hopes, fears, destiny and ideals—in ways which still count with us today.

“What is Poetry?,” we may ask. This is not such an easy question and various interesting answers of it have been supplied by poets themselves. Certainly, no one has explored the nature of language so deeply and some of these have gone so far as to assert that language has its origins in poetry rather than vice-versa. (Certainly poetry came into existence long before prose.) In one aspect, the study of poetry is the study of language and how it works as an expressive medium. Yet not all of poetry is made up of language in the purely lexical sense—in witness to which it has been poetry is only itself hen ‘it aspires to the condition of music’ (Walter Pater).  If so, it plays its tunes upon our nervous system and, in that sense, it is an organic part of our nature. (Can you imagine humanity without song?)

Yet, for poetry-readers, the encounter with poetry as words is an essential component of the experience: you cannot avoid thinking about the words involved and their denotations both in the immediate context of the poem and at large. We look for the particularly sense and feeling of each poem we read yet, at the same time, the poem conveys a possibility of response to experience which is peculiar to a particular poetic genre, be it lyrical, or epical, romantic or classical, encomiastic, romantic, mock-heroic, parodic, satirical, and so on. In this sense literary history and social culture intertwine since the genres themselves are the source of human feelings no less than a reflection of them.

Which came first, the feeling or the poem, is often a hard question to answer. What is certain is that poetry records and institutionalises certain ‘ways of feeling’ which were part of the culture of a given age. Thus we will encounter poems in this course which express the barbaric honour-code of the Anglo-Saxon epic, others which which communicate the code of Courtly Love so dear to Renaissance courtiers, or else the the ‘metaphysical’ flights of Jacobean ‘wits’ and ‘divines’, the ‘heroic’ (and ‘mock-heroic’) verses of Augustan aristocrats and the poets whom they patronised, and—finally—the laments and elegies of the pre-Romantics who developed the ‘sentimental’ style of writing.

The ability to recognise and interpret each of these formal kinds of poet writing is the chief outcome of the course. In all of this, our main source for the poetic texts we study will be the massive Norton Anthology of Poetry (5th Edition; 2005) together with some other materials in prose which I will copy into SIGAA and Internet for you—the latter at the RICORSO website [here]. My job is to turn the literary chronicle into a meaningful encounter. Yours is to gain an adequate understanding of the texts themselves and perhaps even to memorise a sample of them—since poetry and memory are finally indisociable. To meet these objectives, we will use a work-shop method in the classroom and this will involve a degree of performance on your part and mine. All of the materials used on the course will be supplied in class and online and the end-result will be a virtual anthology of the literature in question. Evaluation will be based on a reasonable familiarity with the materials presented and of the discussion of them conducted among us all in the classroom.

Bruce Stewart / 18.01.2021

[ For print-out of these remarks - click here. ]

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Evaluation Sheets
[ to be supplied ]




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