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).