Reading list: Victorian poetry seminar

A couple of people have asked about the syllabus for the Victorian poetry seminar, so here it is, minus the critical texts.  As I said in my earlier post, this is an advanced seminar organized around a theme, not a general introductory survey, so we frequently have canonical poets without their canonical poems, and some famous poems don't appear at all (e.g., there's no Goblin Market).  The readings are arranged topically, not chronologically.

This could be called a "past, present, and future" course, focusing on poems that explicitly think about their own relationship to history, change, and loss.  Thus, the course starts off with some Victorian attempts to think about what made contemporary poetry modern--or, indeed, Victorian.   As we go along, we look at poems set in the past; poems about loss and mourning (the elegy); poems that are about, in some way or another, urgent questions of presentness; and poems that look toward the future, possibly in apocalyptic terms.  Students will be encouraged to work with poets and/or poems not on the syllabus for their final research projects.  The theme allows for a relatively catholic range of theoretical approaches, from the very historicist to the very formalist. 

The class meets once a week; there's virtually no reading on the final day because students are doing research presentations.  Unless otherwise noted, students are using the full Broadview Anthology of Victorian Poetry and Poetics. 

In case you're wondering why Dante is in a Victorian poetry course, Tennyson's "Ulysses" hews very closely to Ulysses' account of his death in The Inferno.  

We'll see how well Aurora Leigh goes down.  I'm also feeling a bit of trepidation about "Bishop Blougram's Apology," which is one of Browning's toughest dramatic monologues outside of The Ring and the Book. 

(ETA: Holiday corrected.  Sheesh.) 

 

8/29     Introduction

•  Edmund Clarence Stedman, “The Period,” Victorian Poets (GoogleBooks)
• William Johnson Fox, “Tennyson—Poems, Chiefly Lyrical—1830”
• Arthur Henry Hallam, “On Some of the Characteristics of Modern Poetry”

9/5       LABOR DAY—NO CLASS

9/12     Return to antiquity

• Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “The Lotos Eaters,” “Ulysses,” “Tiresias”
• Dante Alighieri,  Canto XXVI of The Inferno (http://dante.ilt.columbia.edu/new/comedy/index.html ; I suggest the Mandelbaum translation)
• Elizabeth Barrett Browning, “A Musical Instrument”
• A.C. Swinburne, “Anactoria”
• Augusta Webster, “Circe”
• Amy Levy, “Xantippe”

9/19     Christianity’s past

• Elizabeth Barrett Browning, “The Dead Pan”
• Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “St. Simeon Stylites”
• Robert Browning,  “Johannes Agricola in Meditation”
• Adelaide Anne Procter, “A Legend of Provence”
• A.C. Swinburne, “Hymn to Proserpine,” “St. Dorothy” (http://webapp1.dlib.indiana.edu/swinburne/view?docId=pb1stdor00&query=&brand=swinburne)

9/26     Victorian medievalism (I)

• Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “The Lady of Shalott”
• Robert Browning, “'Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came’”
• William Morris, “The Defense of Guenevere,” “The Haystack in the Floods”
• Mary Elizabeth Braddon, “Queen Guinevere”
• Algernon Charles Swinburne, “The Leper”
• Matthew Arnold, “Tristram and Iseult” (http://www.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/arnold.htm)

10/3     Victorian medievalism (II)

• Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Idylls of the King

10/10   Revisiting the Renaissance

• Robert Browning, “Pictor Ignotus,” “The Bishop Orders His Tomb at Saint Praxed’s Church,” “Andrea del Sarto,” “Fra Lippo Lippi”
• Walter Pater, excerpt from The Renaissance
• Edward Dowden, “Leonardo’s ‘Monna Lisa’”
• Michael Field, “La Gioconda”
• Dante Gabriel Rossetti, “Dante at Verona” (http://www.rossettiarchive.org/docs/1-1848.s55.raw.html)
• Christina Rossetti, Monna Innominata

10/17   MIDTERM BREAK—NO CLASS

10/24   Elegy (I)

• Elizabeth Barrett Browning, “L.E.L.’s Last Question” (http://ebbarchive.org/poems/DAL_EBB_030.html)
• Dora Greenwell, “To Elizabeth Barrett Browning in 1861”
• Matthew Arnold, “Thyrsis,” “Stanzas in Memory of the Author of ‘Obermann’”
• James Thomson, “E.B.B.”
• A.C. Swinburne, “Ave Atque Vale” 
• Thomas Hardy, “The Darkling Thrush,” “The Convergence of the Twain”

10/31   Elegy (II)

• Alfred, Lord Tennyson, In Memoriam A. H. H.

11/7     Christianity’s present  (I)

• Robert Browning, “Bishop Blougram’s Apology”
• Charlotte Bronte, “The Missionary”
• Anne Bronte, “A Word to the Calvinists”
• T. E. Brown, “A Sermon at Clevedon”
• W.H. Mallock, “Christmas Thoughts, by a Modern Thinker”
• Charlotte Mew, “Madeleine in Church”

11/14   Christianity’s present (II)

• Christina Rossetti, “A Better Resurrection,” “’For Thine Own Sake, O My God”
• Gerard Manley Hopkins, “God’s Grandeur,” “The Windover,” “’As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame,” “Carrion Comfort,” No worst, there is none,” “To scorn the stranger lies my lot, my life,” “I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day,” “”Patience, hard thing! the hard thing but to pray,” “My own heart let me more have pity on”     
• Ernest Dowson, “Nuns of the Perpetual Adoration”
• Francis Thompson, “The Hound of Heaven”

11/21   Now

• Matthew Arnold, “Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse,” “Dover Beach”
• Dante Gabriel Rossetti, “At the Sunrise in 1848”
• Elizabeth Barrett Browning, “The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point”
• George Meredith, Modern Love

11/28   Into the Future

• Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh

12/5     The End

• Rudyard Kipling, “Recessional”
• Charlotte Mew, “V.R.I.”

 

Comments

[Alexandra Lykissas]

Can I take your class? The works you've chosen sound really interesting to read/examine/analyze...Good luck with the new semester