Subjective Truth

So remember last Friday when we were talking about truth in texts and somehow got on the subject of Georgia O'Keefe? Well one of the other blogs I follow had this post for Mother's day.

Enjoy!

Bleeding Heart Cake

For Credit: Final Blog Post from KW

Two questions:

1) What do you honestly think you will retain from this course in five years?
2) What do you hope that you retain from this course in five years (even if it strikes you as unlikely)?

You must answer both.

Deadline: Friday (May 8), noon.

Poems for the Final

Over there in the sidebar are the poems you'll need for the final (in addition to the course reading). The first three poems listed there (Rowe, Jones, and Taylor) are for Part III (you choose one of those to edit, annotate, and interpret).

The Hands poems is for Part IV. (It's one of the four poems you must write about; the first three you've encountered already in this course.)

Good luck! E-mail me if you have questions.

For Credit: The Alpha and the Omega

The first poem you read in this course was Mary Jones's "Holt Water." The last was Anne Finch's "The Spleen." What continuities do you perceive (or not!) between these two poems? Taken together, how do these poems illustrate some of the continuities and themes of the subject matter of this course?

Deadline: Wednesday (5/4), noon.

For Credit: Post an Exam Question Here!

Don't worry--you won't be committing you or your classmates to anything. But think for a moment all that you've encountered and thought about this semester in 300. Survey in your mind the depth and breadth of reading you've covered. And then consider: what sort of question would best allow you to demonstrate your learning in this class?

Propose an essay question for the 300 take-home final here. It should either (a) encourage close reading of poems from the course, (b) allow you to display interpretive and analytical skills that you have gained in your study of C18 women's poetry, (c) draw on the knowledge you have acquired in the course of the semester, or ideally, (d) some combination of (a), (b), and (c).

Deadline: Monday (5/4), noon.

New Course Offering! Tell your Friends!

It's not in the system yet, but it will be in a day or two. Meets Group I requirements.


Before Victoria Had a Secret: Sex and Sentiment in Early Modern England (late-breaking English 300 offering)

MWF 1pm

In this course, you will explore the literary depiction of desire before the Victorian era. Instead of the repressive decorum that often gets associated with the sexuality of earlier times, you will encounter a fluid and changing world, where sexuality is celebrated, feared, debated, encouraged, scorned and expressed, by men and women alike. Through close reading of a broad swathe of primary texts, you will learn to interpret the language of early modern desire, to investigate the relationships between genre and expression, to register the significance of race and class to issues of gender, and to engage productively in critical disagreement. Readings will take you from the frank eroticism of Restoration coterie poetry, to the libidinal peregrinations of James Boswell and Fanny Hill, from the containment of female desire in Frances Burney’s Evelina, to the polymorphous perversity of Matthew Lewis’s The Monk.

For Credit: The Object of Leapor's Critique?

Changing "Edgecote Hall" to "Crumble-Hall" for her poem suggests that Leapor has some larger game in mind than simply describing a house.

Class discussion today brought forward a number of elements in the poem that might suggest what that larger purpose is:

• unlike most writers of country-house poems she includes people (Biron in the study and "the menial Train")
• she contrasts past, present, and future
• she invokes a muse AND an implied reader/tour participant
• she contrasts interior and exterior, house and garden, man-made and natural
• she frames the poem with two meals

Which of these elements of the poem strike you as most significant? Alternatively, how might these elements be working together? Just how satirical/critical is Leapor's tone? What is her atttude toward the country house and its owners? Does "Man the Monarch" display any continuities with Leapor's passages of natural description in "Crumble-Hall"?

Choose whatever dimension of this poem interests you most and continue the discussion here.

Deadline: Monday (4/27), noon.

For Credit: What is Crumble-Hall About?

Discuss. Cite a passage to illuminate your assertions.

Deadline: Friday (4/24), noon.

So this has nothing to do with poetry, but I have to express my .... I don't know if outrage is the right word, but it works.

Just follow this link:

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies

I just stared in disbelief for awhile and then I became morbidly interested and kind of want to read it, but I know it will be the death of that book for me.

Midsemester Project Paper Rewrites: The Deal

When I handed back the longer papers on the poets you researched, I gave provisional grades and the promise of rewriting for a higher grade. I also said I would give you a written explanation of how the rewrites would work. Here it is. You get credit in two ways for the rewrite: as a component of the midsemester project and as part of your final exam grade. As follows:

I. Rewrite the paper and I will use the point totals for the revision to calculate your grade on the midsemester project. In other words, your grade on the first version of the paper disappears, to be replaced by the later version. The grading rubric will be identical to that used on the first version of the paper.

II. The effort you put into the revision will be evaluated and count for 30% of the final exam. To determine that part of the final exam grade, I will use a different rubric from the one that I use to calculate your grade on the midsemester project. I'm e-mailing to everyone the rubric I'll use to evaluate improvement in your paper.

Please note that the grades on I and II are to some degree independent of each other. That is, it is possible to go from a B to a B+ on part one of the assignment by simply cleaning up the mechanical errors noted on the original paper, but that kind of limited improvement will achieve only a fraction of the available points for the final exam grade.

Revised papers will be due 5/8 (Friday) in my mailbox--after the last day of class but before the final exam. Please note that you'll need to hand in the marked-up original of the paper in order to get final exam credit for the revision!

Please feel free to ask questions by responding to this post.

For Credit: Three Voices of Critique

As I specified in class on Monday, in class tomorrow (Wednesday) we'll be discussing Sarah Fyge Egerton's "The Liberty" (Blackwell anthology p. 11 - 12) and Mary Leapor's "Man the Monarch." Both of these poems speak to a theme we discussed with relation to the two Anne Finch poems, "Introduction" and "The Apology": the woman poet's sense of constraint or limitation stemming from her gender.

The question for you to consider: what differences do you see between (a) the way these three poets depict that sense of constraint and (b) the specific sources of constraint or limitation that they identify?

Deadline: Wednesday (4/22), noon.

For Credit: New Challenges in Writing

The third paper you're writing for this course requires you to exercise some different mental skills than the other writing you've done so far. Reflect here on what kinds of challenges this paper topic is presenting for you.

Deadline: Wednesday (4/22), noon.

For Credit: Essays for Third Paper

Over there in the right-hand sidebar is the topic for the third paper, along with the three articles you can choose among for writing it.

The three articles vary a great deal, and each will present different challenges for writing a critique.

The Doody article is the one that lines up most squarely with the time frame for our readings, and it may be the most clearly written of the three--but though it is perhaps the easiest to read, it may be difficult to find a standpoint from which to pick some critical holes in it.

The Jackson and Prins essy, "Lyrical Studies," is the most recent of the three essays and perhaps the hardest to get a handle on. It's also firmly oriented, though, towards the C19, which may make it a bit easier to write about (once you understand what it's arguing). You can ask, as you read along, "how do these claims NOT apply to the earlier poets we've been reading?" "what here is more generally characteristic of women's poetry than the authors assume?" "how are these claims about poetry not taking into account earlier poetry by women?" Answers to questions like those may give you some interesting avenues for writing.

Mellor's "The Female Poet and the Poetess" is perhaps the most influential of these three essays--it gets referred to a lot (Backscheider makes mention of it, and Jackson and Prins clearly have it in mind, as do most critics who choose the term "poetess" over "poet.") It describes historical phenomena that, according to Mellor, largely begin with early Romanticism--precisely the sort of arguable yet plausible claim that can give you room for a good counterargument based on your reading (much of which has been pre-1780).

We'll be talking about these essays on Friday. Here, though, feel free to identify anything in these essays that you're finding particularly baffling, ask any questions that would help you make more sense of this reading, or try out any fledgling ideas about how to write about this material.

Deadline: Friday (4/17), noon.

Emily Was Right! It was A Totally Different Poem. OMG.

Wow--in my zeal to give you all Lonsdale's belittling summary of Carter's achievement I managed to overlook the fact that Carter wrote (at least) two poems about Elizabeth Singer Rowe, and that the poem published in Lonsdale's anthology is NOT the same poem I posted on the blog (which as Emily pointed out, is much longer and goes on to the next page). See those close reading skills in action? It takes a Ph.D. to get it THAT wrong.

Ahem.

Anyone care to comment on the interesting differences between the two poems? (If you missed class today or lost your handout, the Carter poem I distributed is available in the sidebar).

Anyone care to read a little Rowe, now that she's inadvertently come up 2x with relation to Carter? Here's an elegy she wrote on her dead husband--evidence that some C18 women did in fact love their male life partners (and yes, if you click on the window, you will find the poem extends for a couple more pages).


The Miscellaneous Works, in Prose and Verse, of Mrs. Elizabeth Rowe By Elizabeth Singer Rowe, Theophilus Rowe, Thomas Rowe

For Credit: Links in the Chain

Milcah Martha Moore's book includes Hannah Griffitt's reflections on the poems of Elizabeth Carter. Elizabeth Carter's Poems On Several Occasions (1762) is probably the work that Griffitts was familiar with; it includes the following poem, on another female poet, Elizabeth Singer Rowe, who wrote on religious things and was enormously popular in North America as well as England during the C18. Here's the poem, from the 1825 edition of Carter's collected works (edited by her nephew):


Memoirs of the Life of Mrs. Elizabeth Carter, With a New Edition of Her Poems, Some of which Have Never Appeared Before; to which are Added, Some Miscellaneous Essays in Prose, Together with Her Notes on the Bible, ... By Montagu Pennington, Elisabeth Carter

Your thoughts?

For Credit: Elizabeth Carter

On Wednesday, we read Griffitt's poem in praise of Elizabeth Carter. Here's what Roger Londsdale has to say about her, in his anthology, C18 Women Poets:

Early in her career, Elizabeth Carter did much to make the woman writer "respectable," taking advantage of the new opportunities offered by the periodical press, dealin gconfidently from an early age with publishers and literary men, and dedicating herslef to impressive scholarship, without arousing the mockery or hostility usually directed at women who wrote professionally or at "learned ladies," For thse reasons she was often cited and hailed with some awe as an exemplary figure for women. Having won high literary reputation and financial security by the 1760s, she did not thereafter develop this inspirational role. Her elegant and decorous, if relatively small, output of verse was highly influential...but its effect was mostly inhibiting. An obituary praised the "Sublime simplicity of sentiment, melodious sweetness of expression, and morality the most amiable" in her poems, but her nephew and biographer granted her "ease, correctness, and elegance" rather than "fire or strength." She is perhaps doomed to be best remembered for Johnson's intended compliment, that "My old friend, Mrs. Carter, could make a pudding as well as translate Epictetus." (Lonsdale 166-167)

There's a tone of disappointment to this narrative; Lonsdale seems to think that Carter somehow let the team down. Without having read Carter's work, you are not in a position to evaluate the "fire and strength" of her verse, but as readers of a broad swathe of C18 women's poetry, you do have a context for evaluating the interpretive frame Lonsdale puts around it, particularly given the very different spin that Griffits gives it in #92, "By the same on reading Eliza. Carters poems" (p. 263-264). Your reflections?

For Credit: The Poems We'll Be Talking About Friday

This week, we're transitioning from the mapping of C18 women's poetry--what's out there, what are the various kinds of experience depicted in poetry, who's writing it and why, what does and doesn't get said in verse--to questions about what it all adds up to. What interesting interpretive claims can one make about C18 women's poetry (or any coherent subset thereof)? What are the key contextual questions to ask? What does the study of this body of literature tell us about the world that we didn't already know?

Obviously, an effort to answer those questions with reference to the whole of C18 women's poetry will result in claims that are so vague as to be useless. So let's start by trying to come to some interpretive conclusions about the particular subset of C18 women's poetry brought together in Martha Milcah Moore's book. Let me ask again the question I put on the board on Wednesday: To what extent (and how) does Martha Milcah Moore's book express/articulate/give voice to a feminist consciousness? Or to put the question another way, what does it matter that most of the poems included in MMM's book are by women?

In addition to the poems and prose from the book that we've been talking about this week, here are a couple of others that might be read as speaking directly to these women's awareness of the gendered parameters of their lives:

85. To the Memory of Sarah Morris... (p. 253-255): she was well-known Quaker preacher, who spoke not only within her own congregation but travelled widely to preach in other places.

99. On reading the Adventurer World &c. (p. 270-272): Griffitts here critiques British women based on their representation in British periodicals of the time.

We'll be talking about these poems in class on Friday. Feel free to respond here with your reflections on the MMM poems we've been reading this week, the issue of how the poets in the book treat their specifically female experience of the world, or more broadly, the question of the broader interpretive questions to which C18 women's poetry can supply useful or provocative answers.

For Credit: Writing Process

Take a step back for a moment from the literary content of this course, and consider instead the fact that it is an Advanced Composition class. Bracketing the frustrations of the particular assignment I've saddled you with, what kinds of more general problems in academic writing would you like to work on? What do you find particularly difficult when you write academic papers for your lit. courses? What writing skills do you feel like you need to develop further? When you start working on an academic writing assignment, was aspects of the task seem most daunting, even baffling?

Reflect here on your own writing process, and those aspects of it that you would like to work on improving.

Deadline: Friday (4/3), noon.

For Credit: Political Poetry

By popular request, we'll be focusing on the more political poetry in MMM's Book for Wednesday (4/1). I'll expect you all to be familiar with

The Female Patriots. Addressed to the Daughters of Liberty (Hannah Griffitts), p. 172
New Jail. Philadelphia Jany. 1st 1776 (Unattributed), p. 198
The Patriotic Minority in Both Houses of the British Parliament (Hannah Griffitts), p. 244
The Ladies Lamentation over an Empty Cannister (Hannah Griffitts), p. 247

Some questions you might like to address in response to this blog post:

Do these poems present a coherent and seamless set of political views, or do they display some tension and uncertainty?
Does the tone and style differ in any interesting ways from the poems by Susannah Wright that we've read in class from this book?
What do you find in these poems that complicates your understanding of the woman-authored poetry of this period?
How would you describe the political agency that Griffitts displays in these poems? Is there a meaningful distinction between to be drawn between the political agency they show and the poetic/aesthetic agency at work in them?

Deadline: Wednesday (4/1), start of class.

Due Dates for Various Parts of the Midsemester Project

Those of you who were in class today (Monday) got back your thesis statement exercises from the Friday before spring break, your annotated poems, and your short analysis papers. As I discussed in class, everyone has the option of revising everything (in fact, I haven't calibrated the points on the various assignments to any grading scale, on the assumption that everyone will be revising everything anyway). Since your 6- to 8-page papers are due on Monday, there was some anxiety about when the revisions of the bibliographies, annotated poems, and shorter papers would be due. The syllabus says "complete midsemester project due" on Monday (4/6), but I gather that most people would prefer not to divide their attention between revising old assignments and completing the longer paper.

What I suggested in class is that each of you contact me individually to let me know when you want to hand in the revisions. If your longer paper relies little on secondary sources or the poem you annotated, you may prefer to wait until after the Monday deadline to hand in the revisions; on the other hand, if your longer paper builds heavily on the work in your other assignments, you might prefer to complete those revisions before you do the longer paper. Look at what you've got, look at your schedule for this week and next, and then let me know what you would prefer to do. I would rather not accept any work for the midsemester project after 4/10 (there is a third assignment coming up...)--but within that framework, I'm happy to work with whatever arrangement will allow you to hand in your best work.

For Credit: Martha Milcah Moore's Book

For Wednesday, I've asked you to read the Preface and the Blecki introduction to this book, and then to browse the Table of Contents and pick a couple of poems to read for class tomorrow.

Which poems drew your attention? What particular features of this book are you interested in exploring in greater depth? What surprises or perplexes you about it?

Reflect here.

Deadline: Friday (3/20), noon.

A possibly good source that I can't use, but maybe you can!

So, on my journey, trying to sort through the various results I found, I came upon Elegy as political expression in women's poetry: Akhmatova, Levertov, Forche. Granted it does not cover the time period or the poets we are studying, but there may be some good ideas that could be applicable.

Hope this helps!

Reading for Friday: Smith, "Verses on the Death of the Same Lady"

Here is the poem that Gabriel will be teaching in class on Friday.

Epitaph on a Favorite Tame Chicken

Although I did not choose to present the Epitaph on the chicken in class, I did not want to deprive everyone from enjoying the poem. What if any aspects of this poem do you find similar to "The Choice"? Would this poem fall within the classification of an elegy as defined by Backscheider? Any other thoughts on the death of the chicken?

BENEATh this stone a chicken's laid,
Her mistress named her Bess,
Six months she tenderly was nursed,
Yes still she grew the less.

In fairy hill poor Bess was hatched,
If there she had but staid,
She might have had a verdant grave,
And not in dust been laid.

But hapless chick, like this world's fools,
Must wander far from home,
And by a lady's scissars fell,
And here must fix her tomb.

Farewell! my little favourite Bess,
Thy fate why should I mourn?
Since kings and queens the fame must share,
And unto dust return.

Reading for Friday: Kelly, "The Choice"

Here is the poem that Emily will be teaching on Wednesday.

For Credit: Where Does this Poetry Analysis Get Us?

Let me first say that I am deeply impressed by the close-reading skills that all of you have been bringing to class and the sophisticated level of engagement and analysis that has been characterizing our discussions. There are a lot of ways that a tiny class on rather off-beat subject matter can go, and I definitely feel like I'm living a best-case scenario. So thank you all! (And by all means, carry on!)

Let's step back for a minute, now that we're about midway through the student-led discussions, and think more broadly about these poems that we've been scrutinizing. So far we've mourned the death of Marie Antoinette, heard some good marital advice, explored the pleasures of cosy room on a stormy night, and considered the implications of a boy's first pair of pants.

What does it all add up to? Are we looking at a bunch of entertaining and diverse poems that happen to have existed within the same hundred-year span and were written by people with vaginas but otherwise have little to connect them? Or do these various works hang together with the other poems you've read in the course in ways that suggest that "C18 Poetry By Women" is a coherent, stable, and analyzable literary field? That may sound like a leading question, but it's not meant to be (I'm not looking for affirmation that the course title makes sense, but I am looking for an active engagement with the question).

Deadline: oh, fairly open-ended under the circumstances, but I did tally up the blog points thus far and some of you need to step up and start posting responses if you do not want your grade dragged down by this requirement.

Reading for Monday: Yearsley, "Elegy on Marie Antoinette"

Here is the poem that Ryan will be teaching the class on Monday.

Reading for Friday: Bannerman, "To the Nightingale"

Here is the poem that Kristen will be teaching on Friday.

More Mary Masters

Hey People-

I thought you might want to read the poem that I kept mentioning during class. Notice the very long title, it seems to be a common trope with Masters. Enjoy!

(Update--if you had trouble opening that link before, it should be working now.)

Reading for Wednesday: Masters, "On a Lady who...died a maid."

Here is the poem that Liz will be teaching the class on Wednesday.

Midsemester Project: Make Editing Posts Here!

The topic sheet for this part of the Midsemester Project specifies that you are to make a blog post about the editing choices you made in making a modern edition of your poem for your class. Feel free to make that post here, in the form of a response to this post.

What kinds of choices did you find yourself making in (a) selecting a poem to teach to your classmates, (b) preparing a modern edition of the poem, and (c) writing a short analysis of the poem? Reflect on the process of doing this assignment here.

Reading for Monday: Barber, "Written to My Son..."

Here is the poem that Dustin will be teaching the class on Monday.

Also, I encourage you to start reading Backscheider's chapter, "Friendship Poems" (Chapter 5, p. 175 - 132) in preparation for discussion on Wednesday and Friday (in addition to the poems that Liz and Kristen will be teaching).

Reading for Friday: Blamire, "Oh Donald Ye Are Just the Man"

Here is the poem that Dhara will be teaching in class on Friday.

For Credit: Love, Desire, and Marriage

Here are three short poems that follow up on some of the themes that Ez introduced in class today on Monday with reference to Seward's "To Time Past" and that Dhara further amplified in class discussion on Blamire's "Oh Donald Ye Are Just the Man." How much room is there in C18 poetry for women to express sexual desire, discuss sexual desire between women, question heterosexual desire, critique the institution of marriage? How do these issues bleed into one another and how do they get isolated?

The first poem is one of the most frank expressions of homoerotic desire to be found in C18 literature, Aphra Behn's "To the Fair Clarinda, Who Made Love to Me, Imagined More than Woman." (Written in 1688, the poem belongs to the "long eighteenth century" rather than the 1700s.) The second is a peculiar little piece that...well what is it saying exactly? Does this poem reflect desire for another woman, or simply a rejection of men? And is it men's sexuality that's being rejected here, or male power generally? Finally, there's another, longer, anonymous poem, which doesn't address same-sex desire necessarily, but it does question the "normalcy" of heterosexuality, particularly sexual desire between married people.

How do these poems illuminate, amplify, or contextualize the possibility of same-sex desire that may or may not be expressed in Seward's "To Time Past"? How do these poems illuminate, amplify, or contextualize the critique of marriage that may or may not be expressed in Blamire's "Oh Donald"? Offer your reflections here.

Alternatively, respond to the question that was asked in class today: are there C18 woman-authored poems that unambiguously express or describe heterosexual lust, longing, or love? Are all C18 men dogs?

No particular deadline here--it may take us a while to work our way through that handout of three poems. Likewise, since we haven't had a chance yet to finish with Greville's "Prayer for Indifference," feel free to reflect on its connections to the Jo Dee Messina video in the post below--I've removed the deadline on that one as well.

Reading for Wednesday: Anna Seward, "To Time Past"

Here is the poem that Ez will be teaching in class on Wednesday.

For Credit: The Power of Indifference

We ended class today by looking at Frances Greville's highly popular poem, "A Prayer for Indifference."

The question we didn't get to: In what way is this poem a "retirement poem"? Is it in fact a retirement poem? What insight does Backscheider's taxonomy give us into how to read the poem and make sense of it?

On a different, but related issue: How can we make sense of the tremendous popularity of this poem?

Sometimes, measuring the assumptions of the past against those of the present can make their particular contours more apparent to us. "Indifference" was a common theme for C18 women writers; in what way is "indifference" as characterized in this poem different from (or similar to) the attitude expressed in the song embedded below?




Feel free, too, to make your own post about Greville, Finch, "retirement poetry" or any related issues.

For Credit: "A Pyramid of Cans in the Pale Moonlight"

YAY! Dustin threw down!

For purposes of comparison, let me give some examples of what I had in mind as the pastoral theme in country music. These country music stars don't seem to let people embed their YouTube videos, so in several cases what you're watching is an amateur homage to the original song. And, like Dustin, I'm not making any claims about the literary or musical merit of this body of work. But here's the Man in Black himself:



A more recent variation on the pastoral theme:



Pastoral poetry is often subdivided into two further categories: pastoral (following on the tradition established by Virgil's Eclogues, which are all about shepherds playing their lutes and singing love songs on idealized hillsides) and georgic (following on the tradition established by Virgil's Georgics, which tell you how to farm and deal more closely with the gritty realities of rural life and making a living from the land. In that sense, Stephen Duck's "Thresher's Labour" is more georgic than pastoral, and so is this song:



(Finally, this isn't exactly pastoral, but click here to find out what happens when the Alexander Pope of Nashville imagines an encounter with a Stephen Duck on the road.)

What do you think?

Offer your reflections here on how pastoral poetry finds its way into contemporary music/verse/poetry (or feel free to make a post of your own making the case for other voices that are worthy of these laurels).

Pastoral Imagery in Contemporary Music

Since no one has yet taken advantage of authoring a post on the blog, I'll take the initiative with a reference to our discussion in class yesterday. Prof. Wilcox said in passing that country music is the sole purveyor of pastoral imagery in modern music, and I hold a bit of contention with that statement. Over the past few years, there have been a slew of independent releases by folk/rock musicians that embrace the pastoral while framing it within a C20 perspective. I'll provide a couple of examples here for the purpose of comparing and contrasting the lyrical content with some of the images we've already encountered, mainly in the Gray, Collier, and Duck. Note: YouTube cuts are provided if you're interested, not to debate whether or not so-and-so constitutes "good music."

Joanna Newsom - "Sadie" (From 2004's The Milk Eyed Mender)


Sadie, white coat,
carry me home.
Bury this bone,
take this pinecone.

Bury this bone
to gnaw on it later; gnaw on the telephone.
'Till then, we pray & suspend
the notion that these lives do never end.

And all day long we talk about mercy:
lead me to water lord, I sure am thirsty.
Down in the ditch where I nearly served you,
up in the clouds where he almost heard you

And all that we built,
and all that we breathed,
and all that we spilt, or pulled up like weeds
is piled up in back;
it burns irrevocably.
(we spoke up in turns,
'till the silence crept over me)

Bless you
and I deeply do
no longer resolute
and I call to you

But the water go so cold,
and you do lose
what you don't hold.

This is an old song,
these are old blues.
This is not my tune,
but it's mine to use.
And the seabirds
where the fear once grew
will flock with a fury,
and they will bury what'd come for you

Down where I darn with the milk-eyed mender
you and I, and a love so tender,
is stretched-on the hoop where I stitch-this adage:
"Bless this house and its heart so savage."

And all that I want, and all that I need
and all that I've got is scattered like seed.
And all that I knew is moving away from me.
(and all that I know is blowing
like tumbleweed)

And the mealy worms
in the brine will burn
in a salty pyre,
among the fauns and ferns.

And the love we hold,
and the love we spurn,
will never grow cold
only taciturn.

And I'll tell you tomorrow.
Sadie, go on home now.
Bless those who've sickened below;
bless us who've chosen so.

And all that I've got
and all that I need
I tie in a knot
that I lay at your feet.
I have not forgot,
but a silence crept over me.
(So dig up your bone,
exhume your pinecone, my sadie)

Fleet Foxes - "Ragged Wood" (From 2008's Fleet Foxes)

Come down from the mountain, you have been gone too long
The spring is upon us, follow my only song
Settle down with me by the fire of my yearning
You should come back home, back on your own now

The world is alive now, in and outside our home
You run through the forest, settle before the sun
Darling, I can barely remember you beside me
You should come back home, back on your own now

In the evening light, when the woman of the woods came by
To give to you the word of the old man
In the morning tide, when the sparrow and the seagull fly
And Johnathan and Evelyn get tired

Lie to me if you will at the top of Beringer Hill
Tell me anything you want, any old lie will do
Call me back to you

Thought's? Comments? Do you think these constitute proper pastoral imagery, or a sort of pastiche-throwback stylistic cribbing?

-Dustin Chabert

For Credit: Phillis Wheatley, "To Maecenas"

You can find the PDF of this poem here and in the sidebar. Since the poem is the first in the volume, I also threw in the fascinating front-matter to Wheatley's volume: the "Mezzo-Tint," the Dedication, the Preface, John Wheatley's letter, and the affadavit that was deemed necessary. If you have time to look at any of that stuff, it offers interesting insights into the stakes in play for Wheatley's readers. They key thing we'll be discussing, though, is the poem itself--so go ahead and skip straight to it if you're short on time.

It's a difficult poem to parse, and there's little critical agreement on precisely what Wheatley is saying. What do you think?

Deadline: Friday (2/20), noon.

For Credit: Frameworks and Taxonomies

So it became clear in class today that a plan that was concocted with a full complement of 24 students in mind is not going to work as effectively with only a third of that number in play.

The plan: Students would present annotated poems from their chosen poets that fit one of Backscheider's three categories of important secular women's poetry (retirement poems, friendship poems, elegies). We would use these case studies to illustrate and test Backscheider's conclusions about the ubiquity and significance of these kinds of poems.

The goal (behind the curtain): To draw on students' growing interpretive skills by having them "teach" the poems in question, to get students to engage critically with Backscheider's ideas, to explore the question of just what constitutes "representative" or "characteristic literature."

The problem: a sampling of 24 poets will probably yield a significant number of "friendship," "retirement," or "elegiac" poems--enough that a handful of poems that don't quite fit the bill will lead to an interesting side-discussion. A sampling of 8 poets may well present a different situation: a fascinating array of poems that make for interesting conversation but together offer little critical purchase either on Backscheider or the broader problems of finding a coherent way to examine "C18 Women's Poetry" as a literary entity.

What do you suggest? Would it be better to:

• Let everyone present the particular poem(s) by their poets that they find most interesting and find some other way to connect the poems to Backscheider's critical frameworks (and if so--how might we do that?)
• Require everyone to consult again the volumes published by their poets and locate something--anything--that fits into one of those categories, at the risk of sacrificing the interest of individual poems to the larger critical project?
• Develop an alternative critical taxonomy to Backscheider's--some other way of grouping woman-authored poems of this period--so that we can use the reading of individual poems to arrive at useful insights about this poetry as a whole? If so, what might that alternative taxonomy look like?

Or to put the question another way: how can Backscheider help us (or not!) to get a handle on a universe that includes, in addition to the poem's we've read thus far, Isabella Kelly's epitaph for her tame chicken, Mary Barber's advice to her son on wearing pants, and Susanna Blamire's Scottish-dialect verses on...well, we're not really sure what a "siller" is. What new plan can help us meet the goals specified above? Or should we stick with the old plan?

???

Respond here with your thoughts. Or start a post of your own if that's more conducive to your ideas.

Deadline: Friday (2/20), noon.

For Credit: 500 pounds/year and a room of one's own

In her famous essay, "A Room of One's Own," Virginia Woolf claimed that, to suceed as an artist, a woman needed a room of her own and an income of 500 pounds/year (that is, enough to allow one to live in independently). She argued that women writers have historically failed to flourish for want of these two things.

Thomas Gray (unlike the other authors we've read in the course of thinking about poetic vocation) had both of these things. At the age of 19, his aunt died, leaving him a small but comfortable inheritance, and so Gray was able to devote himself to the quiet life of the mind and the cultivation of his poetic talents, without regard to whether or not his works would make money. Leapor, Jones, Pope, and Wheatley did not have this advantage. (Neither did Collier or Duck, for that matter.)

Do these material circumstances make a difference as to how we read Gray's representation of the poetic vocation in the Elegy? Is a disinterested, dispassionate commitment to writing excellent poetry the consequence of a strong poetic gift--or of life circumstances that offer few obstacles to one's vocation?

Discuss. Cite evidence to support your claims.

Deadline: Friday (2/20), noon.

For Credit: The Speaker in Gray's Elegy

After elegizing the poor who lie buried in the churchyard (as opposed to the local landed gentry, who are buried under the church floor and memorialized with marble slabs and monuments lining the church walls), the speaker imagines how he will be spoken of after his death. He considers, first, the way a rural laborer ("some hoary-headed Swain," l. 97) would speak of him, and second, the epitaph on his gravestone (the final three stanzas of the poem).

Two questions (feel free to answer either):

How does the depiction of the poet in this poem differ from the depiction offered up by the Jones, Leapor, and Pope poems that we've read?

How would you characterize the poet's attitude toward those buried in the country churchyard?

Deadline: Wednesday (2/18), noon.

Happy Valenstein Day!

That's how my six-year-old has been consistently mispronouncing the holiday. Depending on the state of your love-life at the moment, it may be appropriate. Whatever the situation, may today involve chocolate.

See you Monday.

For Credit: Nocturnal Reverie (Which We Still Haven't Discussed!) Redux, Now UPDATED AND BUMPED

Liz wrote in response to my earlier "Nocturnal Reverie" post:

Unlike...previous poems [read in this course] "Reverie" is pastoral in nature and simply recounts the state in which the poet gathers his or her best inspiration: during the quiet and peaceful night....The poem's thorough description of the nighttime scene as well as its use of simple language...herald in the beginning of the Romantic age in a way that none of the other poetry...has done yet.

Dustin elaborates on Liz's point:

She invokes imagery of horses, owls, sheep, and curlews....Finch's addition of these woodland critters breathe a quaint vivacity into her simple pastoral language. Although her structure is neither floral nor Latinate, the presence of wildlife animates her words. I almost imagined this poem being the inspiration for some of the expository scenes in Walt Disney's Bambi.
Her language is incredibly sensually appealing, for as Finch speaks of "the torn up forage in his teeth," the reader can literally hear this beautiful beast consuming the delicate night. A parallel position is created where we become one with these animals, immersed into this reverie. We consume alongside the creatures and take in the scene until "a sedate content the spirit feels."

It is often said of C18 poetry that it is difficult to read because all our habits and expectations of reading poetry date from the Romantic era; our post-Romantic assumptions make pre-Romantic poetry seem less appealing or powerful to us.

If Liz and Dustin are right, then is the enduring power of "Nocturnal Reverie" simply quirks of Finch's style and subject matter that lock onto our post-Romantic assumptions about what "good" poetry does and sounds like? Or does "Nocturnal Reverie" function both as a "good" C18 poem (as you are beginning to understand that concept) and as a "good" poem in post-Romantic terms?

Offer your thoughts, informed opinions, reflections here.

Deadline: Monday (2/16), noon.

For Credit: Artimesia's BFF

Mira: more or less sense of artistic agency than Jones? What makes you think so?

In her response to this post below, Emily argues that Jones and Leapor differ in significant ways on the ways that they regard fame. Does that cash out into similar differences in the way they regard their sense of a poetic vocation that they have the power to shape and advance?

Deadline: Monday (2/16), noon.

For Credit: Epistles to Lady Whoozit

Class discussion on Wednesday (centering on Mary Jones's "Epistle to Lady Bowyer") got bogged down in my determination to throw in a certain amount of data on the nature of poetry publishing in the eighteenth-century:

• the significance of Pope
• the importance of the "footman-poet" and printer, Robert Dodsley, who produced the important multi-volume, multi-edition anthology, A Collection of Poems in Several Hands
• the typical features of a C18 volume of poetry (preface, dedication, "Mezzo-Tint," list of subscribers)
• the nature of C18 patronage and court culture

Not all of these things are relevant to all of the poets we will be reading. Subscription publication (which we didn't quite get around to discussing) was starting to become more significant in bringing poets into print. Subscription publication still involved patronage, but patronage of a different sort.

Arguably, Jones's picture of patronage-seeking is something of a "straw man"--that is, a vision of publishing that isn't entirely accurate or realistic, but which gives her something to argue against as she articulates a positive vision of the audience and purpose for which she writes. Aristocratic/royal patronage looms large in Jones's self-presentation, but the assumption that poetry publication depended on the endorsement and support of a prominent noble was already starting to fade by the time she was writing. Moreover, as a means of bringing a poet's verses to print, it was never available to women writers in quite the way Jones depicts.

One question for you to consider: What, then, does this "straw man" do for Jones's poetic self-presentation? What is the positive view of her vocation that it helps her to advance?

Another issue for you to consider: How does Mary Leapor's depiction of her audience in "Epistle to Artimesia" differ from Jones's? How does Leapor depict her poetic ambitions? Does she differ from Jones in the degree of "agency" (to use Backscheider's term) that she asserts, or are they just articulating the same kind of artistic stance in different ways?

You don't have to answer all these questions! But offer your reflections here. Or create a post of your own to identifies issues that interest you in these two poems.

Deadline: Friday (2/13), noon.

For Credit: Nocturnal Reverie

I put Anne Finch's "Noctural Reverie" in the early lineup for several reasons:

• It's not like anything else we've read thus far.
• It makes no reference to the author's gender, relationships, or social status.
• It is one of the woman-authored C18 poems that Backscheider believes should be part of the canon of Great Poems.
• It is written by one the few C18 woman poets who was never forgotten and who is generally agreed to be deserving of a place in the revised canon of Great Writers.

Offer your reflections on this poem here. Some questions you might consider: What strikes you as interesting or compelling about this poem? What is it about? How does it depict nature differently than Anna Seward's much later "Sonnet" about winter?

Deadline: Friday (2/13), noon.

Useful Resources and More Information

Someone in class today asked about the rules for commas; after class someone else confessed ignorance about split infinitives. An excellent resource for these and other grammar and writing questions is The Tongue Untied (full disclosure: a friend of mine runs the site). Closer to home, UIUC has a similar but less comprehensive Writer's Resources site at the Center for Writing Studies.

As we discussed (in class on Monday) the particular writers each of you is thinking of working on, someone asked about how to find further information about them. In many cases, there simply may not be a lot of information. Of those mentioned in class today, Susannah Centlivre and Ann Yearsley have received a lot of critical attention, the others have received little. For most of you, the research you do in this course, will not be the kind of summary and synthesis of critical/secondary sources that would be necessary if you were writing about a more prominent writer--but that's partly the point! The research you'll be doing is largely primary research: looking at the texts that your writer wrote and using those as the basis of your critical work.

That said, you will need to identify what, if anything, is known about your poet. The index, footnotes, and bibliography to Backscheider are a great place to start. There are also two good print resources: Roger Lonsdale's anthology, Eighteenth-Century Women Poets has carefully researched write-ups of all the women included in the anthology, and Janet Todd's Dictionary of British and American Women Writers 1660 - 1800 is also an excellent resource.

As some of you have already discovered, a Google search is not particularly helpful, particularly as many of these poets have fairly common names. The UIUC Library site has more to offer: the Literature Resource Center may have information on your poet. The Dictionary of National Biography (online) can help you learn more about figures who get addressed or alluded to in the poems you are reading. There is also the MLA (Modern Language Association) database, which indexes every literary-critical publication. If scholarly journal articles have been published about your poet, they will be in the MLA database, sometimes with a link to the full text.

Finally, by all means avail yourself of the librarians in the English Library on the 3rd floor of the UIUC library. They are smart, kind, and deeply knowledgeable--I have routinely found that asking them for help saves me a lot of time. Among other things, they are very good at shaking information out of MLA. The search engine is sort-of-self-explanatory, but they know lots of tricks for getting it to work more effectively.

I also have things to say about the Rare Book Library--but I'll save them for class.

Feel free to post questions, problems, concerns relating to the research process here.

For Credit: Introducing the Poetic Vocation

For Wednesday, we're reading Mary Jones's "Epistle to Lady Bowyer" (the same Mary Jones who wrote "Holt Water"). This is the first of several poems we'll be reading in which a poet writes about her (or his--we'll be looking at the Pope poem alluded to in the headnote) sense of poetic vocation: her gift, her ambitions, her intentions.
There are several things you can do here:

• identify what you find striking or interesting or puzzling in the way Jones represents her poetic abilities and aspirations, or

• define or identify the view of poetic creation against which Jones appears to be arguing, or

• skim the oeuvre of "your" poet to see if she published a similar sort of poetic credo, and tell us about it, or

• disagree (kindly and collegially, of course) with the remarks of a classmate, offering alternative evidence to support your view.
  

Deadline: Wednesday (2/11), noon.

For Monday: Picking a Poet

As I said in class on Friday, by Monday you'll need to have some idea of the poet you would like to do more work on in this course. Backscheider (the intro. to her book, supplemented with judicious use of the index) may give you some names to start thinking about. I also encourage you to browse on ECCO (Eighteenth-Century Collections Online).

There are many ways to get to ECCO, but they all involve starting with the UIUC Library website. If you start with the English Library site, you can simply type "ECCO" into the upper-right-hand search window and the first hit will take you to the login screen for ECCO. Alternatively, you can look at the left-hand sidebar on the English Library page, and click on "Online Resources in English and Film." If you scroll down past "Indexes" and "Resources," you'll come to "Full-Text Primary Resources," of which ECCO is one. If you are doing this from an off-campus computer, you'll need to log in.

Once you're on the ECCO site, try noodling around a little with the search engine. Keyword searches ("cooking," "beer," "pirates") can be fun. You can also do things like identify every book published in 1756 (for example) with the word "poem" in the title. Or you can try some generic titles for poetry books (a lot of people write books called "Poems on Several Occasions" or "Poems on Various Subjects."

"Some idea of the poet you would like to work on" ideally means a name of a woman poet who has not been published in the C20/C21, who published poetry between 1688 and 1799, and who interests you for a reason that you'll be able to articulate. But for purposes of class on Monday, a short-list of 3 names, or an idea of the particular cultural/aesthetic/historical issues you'd like to be able to explore through your poet are fine, if you're not able to conclusively identify "your" poet.

Feel free to post-for-credit on the blog about the research process. What frustrations have you encountered dealing with ECCO? What kinds of things have you found? What fears or anxieties do you have about approaching this project?

For Credit: Reflections on Backscheider's "Intro"

What surprised you or interested you in Backscheider's large-scale map of C18 women's poetry? What dimensions of this body of literature strike you as most important for your further study?

Deadline: Monday (2/9), noon.

For Credit: Poetry is for GIRLS

We ended class on Wednesday with me suggesting that Duck's invocation of the Muse displaces the labor of writing the poem onto a mythic female figure. He doesn't write the poem; she (the Muse) does.

Is this just Duck being weird and/or trying to play up his muscular manual manly manliness? Or does that moment in the poem tell us something about the prevailing conventions connecting class, gender, and poetry?

Offer your reflections here.

Deadline: Friday (2/6), noon.

Own the Blog!

As promised, I just e-mailed everyone invitations to become authors on the blog. You should accept; it's a course requirement.

Since there are only nine of you, I'll go ahead and pull back the curtain: there's a pedagogical point to having you be authors on the blog. I find that classes work better and students learn more when I build in ways for them to wrestle independently with the course content. Figuring out what kinds of questions to ask, getting curious and following up on that curiosity, measuring ones own insights against the ways other people respond to a text: these are all important skills for reading and writing about literature. One can learn by watching the instructor do all these things, but it's more fun (and more effective) to learn by doing it oneself.

So: in addition to answering the questions I pose on the blog, you can now

• ask questions of your own for your classmates to respond to,
• muse and invite reactions,
• start a conversation about why certain critical frameworks seem troubling,
• expose your ignorance and give your classmates freedom to do the same,
• reveal your erudition and give your classmates helpful background,
• try to nail down answers to interpretive close-reading questions,
• invite discussion of big-picture issues,
• question authority,
• identify useful connections between present-day texts and these poems,
• say what you didn't get to say in class,
• clarify a thought that you fear you expressed poorly in class,
• and so on.

Generally, blog posts that contribute meaningfully to the ongoing semester-long conversation about women and C18 poetry will get blog credit. Recipes, pet photos, random YouTube clips, and the like will not (though we will no doubt find them amusing).

As Mr Garrison of South Park says, "There are no stupid questions, only stupid students." You guys have CLEARLY demonstrated in class discussion that you are not stupid students, so you need not fear the stupid questions. In fact, there's a lot to be said for stupid questions. One of my dissertation advisers was renowned for asking stupid questions that only revealed his abysmal ignorance of critical feminist theory and his complete cluelessness about race and class. I'd roll my eyes at the questions (which usually came in the form of comments on a chapter draft) and then set out to answer them...and a while later I'd still be thinking...and by the time I had actually formulated a response, I'd realize that the stupid questions had led me to some important insights.

If no one writes anything, I'll build some additional carrots and sticks into this course component--but for now I'll just see how it goes.

For Credit: What is Duck Doing?

Reflect here on your reading of Duck's A Thresher's Labour.

Our discussion of Mary Collier's A Woman's Labour started today with several people mentioning how hard it is to read Collier without reading Stephen Duck's Thresher's Labour. Collier refers repeatedly to Duck's poem, which annoyed her so profoundly that she was motivated to write a similar poem of her own.

Some questions to consider: What motivated Duck to write his poem? Are the ideas he wants to communicate to readers the male counterparts of Collier's ideas--or is he pursuing different poetic goals? In class today I suggested a continuum of critical awareness:

1. my life sucks
2. my life sucks because of X
3. my life sucks because of X, and that's not fair
4. my life sucks because of X, and that's not fair, and something needs to change to make it fair.

You might like to consider whether Duck positions himself somewhere along this continuum.

Cite text as necessary to support your claims.

Deadline: Wednesday (2/4), noon.

UPDATE: Assignment due Monday (2/2)

As e-mailed to everyone yesterday:

One thing I forgot to mention in my assignment "fine
print"--the English Dept. has not shelled out for
software to allow us to read ".docx" documents.
 When you e-mail your assignment to me, make sure
it's a ".doc" or ".pdf" file.  If you're not sure
how to do that, use your "save as" command, which
will open a dialog box; one of the options you'll
have is to change the "file extension"--change it to
".doc".  And be sure to bring a hard copy to class!

For Credit: Reflections on the Reading/Writing Process

The topic for your first assignment can be found in this post and in the sidebar. As you work on the assignment, feel free to reflect (or vent) here on any particular difficulties you encounter. Is there anything about this poem you are finding confusing or unusually challenging?

Deadline: Monday (2/2), 10am.

For Credit: Reasoned Disagreement or Ad Hominem Attack?

In the course of lively discussion today of Montagu's poem, we never quite got to thoroughly air the larger question of how Montagu responds to Swift.

Is this verse conversation largely a matter of Swift writing a nasty poem about women, which annoys Montagu, who writes an nasty attack on Swift in response? Or is there a substantive issue here about which they disagree?

Often, the rhetorical set-up, "It is just X going on here--or is it really Y?" is meant to elicit the answer "Oh, well obviously Y, it couldn't possibly be just X." However, I'd encourage you to consider seriously the possibility that it is just X. And whichever way you come down, cite some text to support your response.

Deadline: Wednesday (2/4), noon.

For Credit: Dressing Rooms UPDATED AND BUMPED

The original post:

I put links to Wednesday's reading in the right-hand sidebar, in case you didn't get the Montagu handout or haven't bought the C18 Poetry anthology yet.

The question for you to consider: What is Swift's problem? Do you think Montagu's diagnosis of the situation is correct, or are there other ways to understand the emotions and ideas at play in "The Lady's Dressing Room"?

The updated question, following Wednesday's excellent discussion (where we never got to Montagu's poem): Reflect here on how Montagu interprets Swift's poem. To what extent is she reading "A Lady's Dressing Room" accurately? To what extent does she miss the point? What about Swift's poem seems to bother her most? What evidence do you find to support the suggestion that Montagu's response is a "friendly jest"? Your answer does not need to answer all these questions! But do offer your thoughts on the nature (tone, point, biographical subtext, gender politics) of Montagu's role in this poetic interaction--and be sure to support your claims with evidence drawn from the poem.

Deadline: Wednesday (1/28) Friday (1/30), noon.

The First Assignment

Your first writing assignment, due Monday (2/2), can be found here. Please feel free to ask questions about the assignment in comments on this post.

A Corset from the 1760s (FYI)

Deep Background: The C18 Port-a-Potty

The top and left-hand panel of this object are hinged; the top swings down and the left-hand side swings in to make it more compact. It is thought to have been used by military officers in the field.

If you've got a spare $1.5K - $2.5K lying around, this object can be yours from Bloomsbury Auctions, an antique dealer in NYC.

For Credit: What IS the solemn lesson of the ruin'd year?

Well???

Offer your conjectures here.

Two related questions you might consider:

Seward writes of "Nature" and of "the time,/and its great Ruler," and of "sacred fear." What (if anything) do such concepts have to do with Stevens's "Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is"?

The word "Enlightenment" got written on the board in class on Friday, and has not been referred to since. Is that a term that--like "sensibility"--can help us make sense of this poem?

Please don't worry that you should have emerged from class today with a solid "big picture" of what these two poems are all about, or that your response here should reflect such a big picture. Thoughtful explanation or questioning of a single line or image can contribute to the conversation through which we can together arrive at a big picture.

Deadline: Wednesday (1/28), noon.

For Credit: Minds of Winter

Read the two poems on the "The Minds of Winter" handout. Respond here with your thoughts about how these poems are similar or different. You don't have to have a fully worked out analysis of each poem! Just point out some interesting point of connection, the more specific, the better. It's okay to be brief. Cite lines as necessary to support your reflections.

Deadline: Monday (1/26), 9am.

For Credit: Toilet Humor, Then and Now

The following clip is not, in my opinion, among the best The Daily Show has to offer, but somewhere around 2:18, you'll see its relevance to "Holt Water."

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

Paging Dr. Mandvi - Political Genes

Barack Obama Interview
John McCain Interview

Sarah Palin Video
Funny Election Video

Out-loud laughs there. Why? Does this scene provoke the same audience response that "Holt Water" elicits from the reader? Is the nature of the intended humor the same in both instances, or is something different going on in "Holt Water"?

Offer some reflections here.

If you have had further thoughts about Friday's discussion of this poem (remarks you didn't have a chance to make, concerns or issues you would have liked to discuss further), feel free to write about them here.

Deadline: Monday (1/26), 9am.

(Thanks to Professor Renee Trilling for alerting me to this clip.)

For Credit: Mary Jones Debriefing (DEADLINE EXTENDED)

[UPDATE: And we're off! Everyone did a great job in class on Friday. Like I said in class, we won't be discussing "Holt Water" on Monday, but it may be coming up again over the course of the semester. Since I screwed up the response format this past week and people didn't get a chance to record their reflections, I'm extending the deadline until Monday.]

Excellent discussion today! We're off to a great start. If you're curious about Mary Jones, I encourage you to look her up in the Eighteenth-Century Poetry anthology (aka Blackwell), which has a comprehensive biographical note about her. The anthology does not reprint "Holt Water" (surprising?) but it does have some other poems from the volume of her poetry, the only book she is known to have written.

What follows is a grab-bag of questions about "Holt Water." You can get blog credit for answering any one of them (so long as you don't repeat someone else's response), or by taking issue (kindly and constructively, please!) with what someone else has written. As I said in class, blog posts are meant to be short, informal, and low- stress. That said, any interpretive remark about the poem should be supported by a brief and relevant quotation drawn from it.

1. How does the biographical info about Jones change how you read "Holt Water"?

2. It was suggested in class that "Holt Water" might actually mean "holy water." What outside information about the term "Holt Water" or "Holt" can you find to support this claim or to suggest some other reason for the title?

3. What is significant about the name "Baucis"? What outside information can you find to suggest why Jones goes from calling the dairy-maid "Nan or Mary" to calling her "Baucis"?

4. [This question continues the tail end of our discussion in class, and assumes that you had a look at the biographical info about Jones.] What additional questions would you like to ask about "Holt Water"? What continues to puzzle or surprise you about it?

Deadline: Friday (1/23) Monday (1/26), 9am.

(Please note--the "For Credit" questions below are still open for responses and will be until Monday.)

For Credit: Poetry in Your Life (DEADLINE EXTENDED)

UPDATE: the responses to this thread have been going in such interesting directions that I'm going to leave it open a while longer.

What it means to read (and write) poetry has changed since the eighteenth century; this fact will shape how you read the poems we will be working with this semester.

To get you thinking about the kinds of assumptions we bring to poetry (and to give you a low-pressure way to get familiar with the blog), respond to this blog post by identifying a poem that has meant something to you (expressed your emotions, given you new things to think about, baffled you in interesting ways, helped you through a difficult time, angered you...) and saying why.

If an answer doesn't come easily to you (if you find yourself trying to remember the reading from a high school English class, or rifling through a textbook for inspiration), that's okay! Be honest about it and tell us what kinds of literary texts are meaningful for you--and why.

Deadline: Monday (1/26) Monday (2/2), 9am.

For Credit: How to Read a Poem, Then and Now

The following poem was not written in the C18, nor is its author a woman. I'm putting it here, though, because it illuminates a very C21 way of looking at poetry.

Respond to this poem with your reflections: How do Collins's students read poetry? How does he think they ought to read poetry? How relevant are his prescriptions for reading poetry written 200 years ago? Don't feel you need to answer all those questions comprehensively! A few sentences that can open up or advance discussion are fine.


Introduction to Poetry

by Billy Collins

I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem's room
and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author's name on the shore.

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.

(from The Apple that Astonished Paris, 1996
University of Arkansas Press, Fayetteville, Ark.)


Deadline: Monday (1/26), 9am