5/05/10

introduction

Best way to understand the premise of this class is to experience it, so I'll save the formal introduction for later:

• Koch: what do you make of it?
  • funny--but why? who or what is it laughing at? is the speaker demented? what does it mean?
• the obvious allusion: Williams. This is Just to Say
  • --is it funny? If so, is it funny in the same way?
  • This looks like--and for all we know may have been--an apology one would leave on a refrigerator door. Is there more to it?
• Red Wheelbarrow--even more famous poem.
  • What are the similarities to "This is Just to Say"? [Concrete language, vivid imagery]. Why do the lines break as they do, and why don't Koch's?
• some of the theory that informs the work: Imagism. Why direct treatment of the thing? What's being valued here?
• "The Red Wheelbarrow" appeared in a book called Spring and All--partly poetry, partly prose which made an argument about what poetry should be. Excerpts: What does Williams seem to want to do with the stark images in the poetry? Why?
• back to Koch. If Williams is attempting to help us break through the barriers which separate us from the world, and bring us into "contact" with it, then is Koch disagreeing that that is a necessary thing? Or is the joke of a different nature?
• many questions left over: why did Imagism come about? What was the relationship between Pound and Williams? In the 1950's and early 60's, when this "Variations" was written, Koch was a member of the New York School of poets (incl. Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery), known for, among other things, their wit, their urban sophistication, and their aversion to the confessional school of poetry which was developing at around the same.; does that have anything to do with his jab at Williams? Etc.
• We could trace these threads much further, in other words, and each connection that we made would help us to understand each poem that we had looked at along the way.

• My contention, both today and throughout the course, is that ALL American poetry, and indeed nearly all literature, is like this: every poem is in conversation with a whole range of other poetry and for that matter lots of things that aren't poetry--other arts, history, biography and so on. Poetry forms a web of ideas and connections; you can't fully understand any of the poems that we've looked at today on their own; to learn to read poetry is to develop a sense of the whole constellation of ideas in the web.

This class is designed to help you form such a web of ideas, in a couple of ways.

First, one of the assignments in this class--and in fact 50% of the grade—is to construct a map of American Poetry as a whole. In a very direct way, you'll have to decide what the pieces are, how they interconnect, and how the go together into a whole. We'll talk about this more later in the class.

The second has to do with the organization of the class. I've taught this class in two different ways: as a straight chronological survey and as a series of threads in which we traced some idea or poetic theme across the work of several poets (much as we did today). Each has its advantages. The "threads" approach makes it easier to see the kinds of connections we've been drawing today, which helps one to understand the ideas in the poems better. The chronological approach gives a clearer historical sense, which helps one to see a poem in its historical context. I believe that the threads approach tends to be more interesting, both to me and to the majority of students, but it is potentially more confusing.

We're going to combine the two. For most of the term, we'll be taking the threads approach. But we will start with a whirlwind tour. Today and tomorrow, we'll cover three centuries of American poetry, from the Puritan era to after WWII. What I'm hoping is that this whirlwind tour will give you at least a mental framework, if only a skeletal one, into which you will be able to place the poems that we read later.

Let me say something about the level of the class. This is a 220, which is to say that it is designed for English majors but open to non-majors looking for literature credit. That makes it the opposite of a 170, which is a course that is designed as a general education course but open to English majors. Now because it's May Term, I have had to scale back from the usual expectations for a 220: in a regular semester class, I would assign at least one more paper, maybe two; and I would have some kind of assignment that requires students to go to the library and find secondary sources. There's just no time for that. Still, the class should be plenty challenging. Since the readings are mostly poetry, most of them are short, but they are also dense and demanding. Even the easy poems you'll need to read 2 or 3 times in order to grasp them, and the hard ones will take more effort than that. We're going to try to preserve Wednesdays as reading days as much as possible, but even so, you're going to be struggling to keep up at times. As for the assignments, I have as I say backed off from what I would assign for this class in a regular semester, but the map in particular is going to be tough.

So as a matter of truth in advertizing let me offer some reassurance and a caution. To the English majors, I offer the reassurance that even in its truncated form this class should provide you with what this kind of 220 can offer--a broad overview of a literary domain and practice in interpretation and argumentation that can serve as a basis for 300 level English classes. To the non-majors, I offer the reassurance that I do not expect you to come into this class with prior knowledge of American poetry. Any prior knowledge you have will help, but it should be possible to come to this material more or less cold and still succeed in the class if you're willing to work at it.

The caution is just the obvious: somehow I never got the memo that May Term is supposed to be Play Term. I hope to have some fun in this class, but we are definitely going to be working at it. (The safety valve for you is simply that teaching a May Term is harder than taking one--if I can't keep up, I'll find a way to slow things down). And of course we are talking about poetry, which some people find difficult or boring. If you're here because you like poetry, or because you want a broad overview of a particular domain of American literature, you're in the right place. If you're here because you were hoping for an easy gen ed credit, I'm sorry to disappoint you.

during the break, please do the following:

• look over the syllabus.
• read all the poems on the syllabus for today. Don't worry, it's only about a hundred and fifty years of poetry, from the 1680s to the late 1830s. Read each poem at least twice. If you're a fast reader and you can read the headnotes listed on the syllabus, great. , but it's much more important during the break to read the poems and read them carefully.

BREAK - 40 minutes?

whirlwind tour, part 1

Today we're moving through, or will start to move through, 150 years of poetry on our tour. If we finish everything on the syllabus for today, we'll have sample a poem from the Colonial period, a poem from the Early National period, and two poems by the 19th C Fireside poets. We may not get to it all, but please do keep up with the reading for tomorrow.

Puritans

When traditional literary histories talk about the colonial era in American poetry, they are usually talking about work produced in the Puritan colonies. They are also usually talking about work produced in the late 1600's and early 1700's, even though the Colonial period runs to 1775; I'll come back to that later.

More recent literary histories, and many of the major anthologies of American literature (including the Norton) show the Anglocentrism of this move: the Puritan colonies are really only the places where American literature in English was being written. Elsewhere in North America the Spanish were developing an American literature of their own, and of course Native Americans had thriving oral traditions. We aren't going to look at anything beyond the Puritans ourselves in this class, but I don't want to imply that's all there is. Among the Puritans, the major figures in poetry are Anne Bradstreet, Edward Taylor, and Michael Wigglesworth.

The Puritans were extremely influential in this country--that's why we study them--but that also means that there is alot of baggage attached to the word. What do you think of when you hear the word "Puritan"? Moral narrowness? Work ethic?

Myth is only partly true:

• did believe in hard work. Believed that human beings were inherently sinful, and that only by hard work, unrelenting discipline, and constant self-monitoring could good works be achieved.
• were rigorous in suppressing political or religious dissent, but
• were not "against" pleasure or learning or wit per se;
  • subtitle of Bradstreet's Tenth muse Lately Sprung up in America: "Severall poems, composed with a great variety of Wit and Learning, full of Delight"
  • in fact they believed in a balance of the worldly and the spiritual, albeit with an emphasis on the spiritual. Everything had its place: learning in the service of God, pleasure as a sign of God's bounty. They did not perceive a contradiction between devoting oneself to God's service and enjoying earthly prosperity; in England the Puritans had for the most part been prosperous and highly educated.

The Puritans left legacies of both doctrine and aesthetics.

• underlying doctrines:
  • Calvinism; election or Preterition pre-ordained, cannot be influenced by worldy deeds. However, a reverse logic at work: religious uprightness and worldly success could be taken as a sign of election by God. This logic sometimes flipped over to its reverse--that good deeds could lead to heavenly reward (we'll see an example later in the class when we read Bradstreet)--but strictly speaking this view was heretical.
  • Ramist logic (Peter Ramus): opposite of inductive logic: rather than seeing what is and drawing conclusions from it, would instead start with a premise (from Scripture or doctrine) and find evidence for it in the world. This was a particular version of a much larger tradition in poetry both in America and elsewhere of looking to Nature for signs of God's nature and will--we'll trace this idea through half a dozen poets in our first thread.
  • vision of America: America represented possibility of a new start, a chance to create a "city on a hill" which would be morally exemplary; they believed in the perfectability of human beings not only as a possibility but as a duty, and saw America as chance to fulfill this duty
• aesthetics:
  • a belief that art is or ought to be in the service of God;
  • an emphasis on the elegy, a poem lamenting and finding consolation for the death of a particular person. The Puritans were preoccupied with death, as death was the threshold between life in this world and either election or damnation; therefore an opportunity for moral self-inspection. Elegies were a natural form for this purpose.
  • a pattern of looking for ordinary life for the subject of poetry. At the time, this was a matter of necessity as much as anything else: the Puritans were after all eking out a subsistence living in near-wilderness. There was no royal court, no aristocracry, nor even a major city, to write about. But the example persisted long after there was a wider scope of subject matter.
  • tendencies towards two kinds of style.
    • One is the plain style, exemplified by Anne Bradstreet. This style is what you would expect from the name: there is little poetic diction, the language is rough and almost conversational. Bradstreet herself may have thought of this style as a defect--we'll decide that much later in the course--but this unpretentious poetic voice certainly has its charms, and has influenced poets throughout American literary history.
    • The other style, exemplified by Edward Taylor, was influenced by the English Metaphysical poets, especially George Herbert.
      • [English Metaphysical poets were called that on account of the difficulty of the poems; Dryden said of the Donne--both English poets, the latter a metaphysical poet--that he "affects the metaphysics" with "nice speculations of philosophy" (Oxford Companion to English Literature). The term is actually a misnomer, as the poems are not especially concerned with metaphysics in the philosophical sense. ]
      • Metaphysical poetry tends to be somewhat difficult. Taylor's poetry follows the metaphysical poets' practices that make it so: linking images together abruptly, often moving very quickly from one difficult comparison to another and/or combining images in contradictory or paradoxical ways.
      • A central value in such poetry is wit--defined not as humor but as apt association of thought and expression (we could say verbal cleverness if that phrase didn't carry so many negative connotations in the modern era). But the language, even more in other poems, is often deliberately rough, also. The object isn't a graceful or elegant style but a dazzling compression of image and idea. The Puritans, and Taylor especially, picked up both of these attributes.
• Edward Taylor, "Huswifery" (1680s?) (1.142)
  • want to know terms?
    • distaff: a staff that holds the flax or raw wool, the raw material of the thread
    • flyer: the part which twists the thread
    • spool: the part that holds the thread after it comes off the flyer
    • reel: holds the spun thread
    • quills: hold the yarn for weaving
    • fulling mills: clean and thicken cloth
  • note extended metaphor: wit
  • But note also the commonness of the image. Why THIS metaphor? what's at stake in it?
  • what do you make of the fact that the speaker starts as a spinning wheel, then is the loom, and then is the wearer of the cloth?
  • curious mixture of practical and spiritual: image of work

Early National Period

Note that we've skipped more than 100 years--"Huswifery" was written in the early 1680's, while "Rights of Man" was written in 1795. To be frank, I have often skipped the entire 18th C in this class and the Early National Period with it.

That's not to say that lots of important things didn't happen during that time--on the contrary.

• America was changing rapidly.
  • colonial population jumped from 100,000 to one and a half million between 1670 to 1760;
  • demographics were changing too: immigrants were now not only English but also German, Dutch and French; Jewish communities were beginning to appear in Philadelphia and New York
  • colonies were much more prosperous--and correspondingly more profit-motivated; shipping and related industries developed in the North; rice, indigo and tobacco in the South; land speculation everywhere.
• Political and intellectual climate of the World shifting as well: Europe and America had thoroughly entered the age of Enlightenment, in which faith in human reason and the fervor for political change would lead first to the American Revolution, and then to the French Revolution.

changes in poetry:

• Puritan poetic conventions faded into disuse. Puritanism itself did not die out by any means: the Great Awakening, a massive religious revival which swept through the American colonies from the 1730s through the 1770s, affected the Puritans among others. Calvinist theology would stay healthy enough to be a frequent target for Oliver Wendell Holmes two centuries later; his "One-Hoss Shay" is often taken to be a satire of Puritanism. Ramist logic still evident, especially in broadside verse (e.g. a poem about a 1744 earthquake in Boston which was taken as sign of God’s wrath)--as it is today. But poetic forms not so fortunate
  • reaction against elegaic verse: Franklin in 1722 satirically offered a recipe for cooking up a New England Elegy: "Take one of your Neighbors who has lately departed this Life: it is not great matter at what Age the Party dy’d, but it well be best if he went away suddenly, being Kill’ed, Drown’d, or Froze to Death" . . . add some "Virtues, Excellencies, Last Words, [and] Melancholy Expressions"; some Latin would "garnish it mightily."
  • In some quarters, reaction against the Puritan plain style: Mather Byles (1740):

    Rough, horrid Verse, harsh, grated thro’ the Ear,
    And jarring Discords tore the tortur’d Air;
    Solid, and grave, and plain the Country stood,
    Inelegant, and rigorously good.

  This reaction would only proceed so far; the idea that poetry somehow should convey a moral weight, even if that weight were not necessarily Calvinist, continued on until at least the 20th century.

The Byles poem, after it trashes the Puritans, goes on to claim that in his own day poetry was improving:

Each Year succeeding the rude Rust devours
And softer Arts lead on the following Hours;
The tuneful Nine begin to touch the Lyre,
And flowing Pencils light the living Fire;
In the fair Page new Beauties learn to shine,
The Thoughts to brighten, and the Style refine . . .

• Whether you think these lines are an improvement on the Puritans or not (Byles certainly isn't anthologized as often as Bradstreet or Taylor), they are indicative of some very real stirrings of a sense of cultural nationalism. It was the era of the Am. Revolution, after all, and some writers were developing a sense that Americans would some day shift the cultural epicenter away from Europe toward America. William Smith and the "Swains of the Schuylkill," a clique of poets in Philadelphia, came to speak of a great "Translation" of culture from the Old to the New World. The Connecticut Wits, the most famous of whom was Joel Barlow, were also centrally concerned with trying to create a literature independent of England. Cultural and political aspirations were often intertwined: Philip Freneau, who provides our sample poem, was known in his own time as the "Poet of the American Revolution."
  In practice, the Translation did not pan out, at least not in that era. Poetry of the era was largely derivative of Dryden and Pope, which effectively affirmed the dominance of the English tradition.
• Another way to put it: although a lot happened during the eventful hundred-plus years we're talking about, what DIDN'T happen was the creation of a body of American verse considered then or now to be great. On the contrary, there were the beginnings of what would be a long tradition of deploring America’s lack of culture. Richard Lewis (Southerner) in 1728:

There ["on fair ITALIAN PLAINS"], PAINTURE breathes,
There, STATUARY lives,
And MUSIC most delightful Rapture gives:
There pompous piles of Building pierce the Skies,
And endless Scenes of Pleasure court the Eyes.
While Here, rough Woods embrown the Hills and Plains,
Mean are the Buildings, artless are the Swains:
"To raise the Genius," WE no Time can Spare,
A bare subsistency claims our utmost care.

Other changes in poetry during the late colonial and early national period:

• beginnings of regional variation: no longer just Boston area, but Philadelphia, New York, and the South. We won’t be covering regional variations much in this course, but it’s important to keep in mind that many areas of the country were NOT founded on Puritan principles or values. For example, education was a high value for the Puritans, and continued to be important throughout new England; in the South, however, the Governor of Virginia thanked God that "there are no free schools nor printing" in the colony, because schooling "has brought disobedience, and heresy, and sects into the world, and printing has divulged them. . . . God keep us from both." Thus, there were competing strains of reverence for learning and anti-intellectualism--a competition which continues even today. Such a rift has considerable implications for poetry. Poetry is sometimes viewed as a learned attainment, and more than one poet in America has felt embattled with a hostile party; but it can ally itself to either party; e.g. populist verse.
• development of women’s poetry. More on women poets later in the course.
• first black poets; we’ll hear from them too later.
• beginnings of what I’ll call newspaper verse, although at the time it was largely broadside verse: generally occasional poems, conventional in versification, sometimes satiric, typically genteel or at least supportive of stock American values. This would become important later on as a negative example for the modernists.

Philip Freneau, "On Mr. Paine's Rights of Man" (1795)

• the reference in the title is to Thomas Paine's The Rights of Man. Paine's book in turn was a response to Edmund Burke's Reflections on the French Revolution, which was a condemnation of the French Revolution and a defense of the monarchy. Paine countered with a defense of the Revolution and a sweeping argument for republicanism, including plans for public education, assistance for the poor, and old age pensions, all to be financed by a progressive income tax. Needless to say it was an influential document.
• Note the versification: heroic couplets (iambic pentameter lines, rhymed aa bb cc dd and so on.
• The first 33 lines are more or less summary or description of Paine: monarchy causes most of the miseries of humankind, including war, servitude, and so on.
• I'd like to focus on the fourth verse paragraph. What vision of America does Freneau offer here?

The Nineteenth Century

The 19th C brought to America a period of relative prosperity--albeit uneven prosperity--at least until the Civil War. But it was not exactly a calm era. On the contrary, it was a period of rapid change:

• industrialization
• Westward expansion (Louisiana Purchase in 1803)
• burning political issues such as the fight over slavery
• divergence of regional identities and growing regional tensions, and
• several wars, including the War of 1812, the Mexican War and the Civil War

It also brought an audience for poetry--not all of it a cultivated audience--but no distinguished poetic tradition. If anything we had something of a cultural inferiority complex--with all the arrogance that attends an inferiority complex. The cultural scene mingled strains of nationalism and leftover Puritanism. Added to this mix were the first influxes of European Romanticism: Bryant, first of all, was taken by the poetry of Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Byron; other writers followed. For the moment we'll simplify Romanticism to say that it entailed a

• renewed interest in nature, and for some Romantic poets a vision of nature as the site and sign of a benevolent deity;
• rejection of the flowery, bombastic diction of the classical styles in favor of a more natural language;
• exaltation of the individual and the imagination

Add all this together and you get an era in which American identity was very much at stake and very much up in the air.

Conditions were right, in other words, for a massive cultural shift. And that’s what happened--but not all at once. The poets before the shift, the "Schoolroom" or "Fireside" poets as they are called, constituted the mainstream of American poetry for a considerable time. Included in this group are William Cullen Bryant, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and John Greenleaf Whittier. Ralph Waldo Emerson is often included in this group, although for reasons I'll get to later in the course Emerson is a special case. They were popular in their own time, Longfellow especially. They are considerably less popular now.

Against the backdrop of the Fireside poets, four names stand out. In the terms I'm talking about, these poets come after the cultural shift, although in fact only two of them come from late in the century. These four are Emerson, who as I've said is a special case; Edgar Allan Poe, who was completely out of sync with his time but who would later prove to be quite important, and then the two real standouts and arguably the first great American poets, Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson. We'll talk about all four of them later in the class.

We'll start with the two Fireside poets.

William Cullen Bryant, "To a Waterfowl" (1815,1821) (1.479)

• structure: asks a question in first 3 stanzas; interprets what he sees in the next three; applies it to himself in the last two
  • what's the question of the first 3 stanzas?
  • what is the argument of stanza 4?
  • what is the "lesson" he learns in the last 2 stanzas?
• how is this different from Taylor's "Huswifery," especially in its theology? Is God represented differently? (If you've read much Wordsworth, you'll recognize the influence.)

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, "A Psalm of Life" (1.645-646)

• The Fireside poets were so called because their verse was seen to be comforting. is this a comforting poem? If so, why?