Spiegelman, Willard
How to Read and Understand Poetry / Willard Spiegelman ; The Teaching Company. - 1st ed. - Chantilly, VA : The Teaching Company, 1999. - 12 DVDs (720 min) : sd. col. ; 4 3/4 in + 1 Course Guidebook (ii, 74 p. : ill. ; 19 cm) - The Great Courses .
Includes a biography of author, glossary, index and bibliographical references.
"This course of 24 lectures will introduce students to a subject about which they already know – or remember – something. Even though most educated people can recall poems from childhood, from school, even from their university years, most of them are no longer fans or readers of poetry. There are many explanations for the drop in poetry’s popularity since the 19th century. Families no longer practice reading aloud at home; various forms of prose have gained pre-eminence; “free verse” has made many people think that poetry has lost its music; the heady days of “modernism,” along with T.S. Eliot’s insistence that poetry be “difficulty,” confused and troubled people who wanted things to remain (or so they thought) simple.
Many undergraduates, like many adults, are suspicious of poetry: They think it requires special skills and an almost magical ability to “decipher” it or to discover its “hidden meanings.” This course will allay your fears and encourage you to respond to many different kind of poems; it will (I hope) inspire you to continue to read and to listen to poetry. We will be less interested in those (perhaps nonexistent) hidden or “deep” meanings in poetry, and more concerned with how poets go about their business of communicating thought and feeling through a verbal medium that we all have heard since childhood.
Instead of asking, “What does this poem mean?” the questions I shall encourage you to think about all the time are these:
1. What do I notice about this poem?
2. What is odd, quirky, peculiar about it?
3. What new words do I see or what familiar words in new situations?
4. Why is it the way it is, and not some other way?
Although the course will cover a range of poems – from Renaissance England to contemporary America – it will not really be a historical “survey.” Instead, it will focus on poetic techniques, patterns, habits, and genres, and it will do so with a special concern for the three areas which, taken together, can be said to define what poetry is and what distinguishes it from other kinds of literary utterance.
Figurative language. Whether metaphor, simile, metonymy, synecdoche, irony (all of these items will be taken up), “figuration” is the crucial component of poetry. Aristotle, the first major Western literary critic, said in the Poetics that of all the gifts necessary for a poet, the gift of metaphor was the most important. If you have everything else (a good ear, a sense for plo9t of character) but you lack the gift of metaphor, you won’t be a good poet; if you have it and you lack everything else, you’ll still be a poet. We shall look at how representative something in terms of something else. Poetry is at once the most concise literary language (“the best words in the best order,” Samuel Taylor Coleridge called it) and the most suggestive. The combination of concision and suggestiveness encourages (indeed, requires) a reader to pay close attention to words and music, to see how things fit together, and to sense what kinds of relationships are stated, implied, or hinted at in the poet’s characteristic manoeuvres. Precisely because we are engaged in an act of “interpretation,” we run the risk of getting it all wrong. There are areas of right and wrong, of course, but the most interesting is the middle, grey one, in which many possible meanings, feelings, and effects of a poem are up for interpretation. If there were not more than one possible “meaning” or “effect” of a poem, it would not be a poem, but rather, a piece of unmistakable instruction (“Insert Tab A into Slot B”) or a tautology (“A rectangle has four sides and four ninety-degree angles”). Even religious commandments (“Thou shalt not kill”) are open to interpretation.
Music and sound. Most poetry in English until quite recently has been written in “formal” ways, hewing to patterns of rhythm and rhyme with which most of us are familiar, even if we don’t know the exact nomenclature. When Walt Whitman, in the middle of the 19th century, began writing a new kind of “free” verse (but one whose subtle rhythms owe a great deal to the Bible as well as to political speech and operatic song) he began the move toward a new kind of verse, one which Robert Frost said, in a famous dismissal, was like playing tennis with the net down. All good poems, whether in conventional forms or in new, freer ones, have a strong musical basis, and we shall spend some time listening to and for the experiments in sound that all poets have made. Whether a poem is written in “conventional” or “free” verse, it is always a response to a formal problem: That is, the poet has at some point in the composition decided that this particular poem should be written in (say) iambic pentameter, or as a villanelle, a haiku, or a long-lined meditation, rather than in some other way. Sound, form, and meaning are all part of the same package.
Tone of voice. The subtlest, most elastic, and most difficult thing to “hear” in a poem. We usually define “tone” as the writer’s attitude to his or her material, but of course, it is a lot more. Almost any simple sentence (“How are you today?” “Pass the salt, please”) can be uttered in a variety of ways and with many connotations or ironic suggestions. If we misinterpret the tone of someone’s remarks, we can get into a lot of trouble. Delicacy of tone is precisely one of poetry’s strongest assets, rather than a curse. Just because a poem is about a certain subject (love, death, God, nature) does not mean that it must maintain a prescribed attitude toward that subject. In fact, much of the play of poetry comes from the discrepancy between what we might reasonably expect a poet to say (or the tone of voice in which he or she might say it) and what he or she actually does say and in what tone. Once again, it was Frost who said over and over that the speaking voice in poetry is the most important thing of all. If we cannot hear the voice of an imagined person behind the poem, we’d be listening to a machine. Remember: a poem is a printed text that is like a play script. It is a blueprint for a performance. Once you have thought through, and read through, a poem many times, you will be able to say it in your way, having decided what to play up and what to play down. Once you have it by heart, it will be as much yours as it is the author’s.
Because of the 30-minute length of each lecture, and because we shall be examining the poems at close range, we shall have to limit ourselves to shorter workers, or to a consideration of parts of longer works. Since this is not a historical survey (that would be another way of arranging a course in poetry), we shall not be able to talk about big poems, like Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, Milton’s Paradise Lost, Wordsworth’s The Prelude, nor will we have much to say about medium-length narrative or contemplative poems. The focus will be on poems of no more than two pages in length, poems that you can get into your ears and memory, and learn - essentially - by heart.
The course has been arranged to consider aspects of the three major areas above, but each lecture (and the discussion of most of the individual poems) will deal, to some degree, with all of the areas, veering among them to produce the fullest readings of the works at hand. To get the most out of this course, you should read the poems discussed in the lectures – and others as well. The bibliography lists a number of books of collected poems, including the well-known standard college text, The Norton Anthology of Poetry (4th edition, ed. Margaret Ferguson et al.). This is the primary item for “Essential Reading” and will not be mentioned again in the lecture notes. In addition, virtually all of the poems are easy to find elsewhere". CONTENTS:
Professor Biography
Course Scope
Disc 1:
Lecture One: What to Look (and Listen) for in Poems
Lecture Two: Memory and Composition
Lecture Three: Poets Look at the World
Lecture Four: Picturing Nature
Lecture Five: Metaphor and Metonymy I
Lecture Six: Metaphor and Metonymy II
Disc 2:
Lecture Seven: Poetic Tone
Lecture Eight: The Uses of Sentiment
Lecture Nine: The Uses of Irony
Lecture Ten: Poetic Forms and Meter
Lecture Eleven: Sound Effects
Lecture Twelve: Three 20th-Century Villanelles
Disc 3:
Lecture Thirteen: Free Verse
Lecture Fourteen: The English Sonnet I
Lecture Fifteen: The English Sonnet II
Lecture Sixteen: The Enduring Sonnet
Lecture Seventeen: Poets Thinking
Lecture Eighteen: The Greater Romantic Lyric
Disc 4:
Lecture Nineteen: Poets Thinking - Some 20th Century Versions
Lecture Twenty: Portrayals of Heroism
Lecture Twenty-One: Heroism - Some 20th Century Versions
Lecture Twenty-Two: Poets Talking to (and for) Works of Art
Lecture Twenty-Three: Echoes in Poems
Lecture Twenty-Four: Farewells and Falling Leaves
Cross-Reference by Poem
Cross-Reference by Poet
Cross-Reference by Lecture
Glossary
Bibliography
Credits
"This course of 24 lectures will introduce students to a subject about which they already know – or remember – something. Even though most educated people can recall poems from childhood, from school, even from their university years, most of them are no longer fans or readers of poetry. There are many explanations for the drop in poetry’s popularity since the 19th century. Families no longer practice reading aloud at home; various forms of prose have gained pre-eminence; “free verse” has made many people think that poetry has lost its music; the heady days of “modernism,” along with T.S. Eliot’s insistence that poetry be “difficulty,” confused and troubled people who wanted things to remain (or so they thought) simple.
Many undergraduates, like many adults, are suspicious of poetry: They think it requires special skills and an almost magical ability to “decipher” it or to discover its “hidden meanings.” This course will allay your fears and encourage you to respond to many different kind of poems; it will (I hope) inspire you to continue to read and to listen to poetry. We will be less interested in those (perhaps nonexistent) hidden or “deep” meanings in poetry, and more concerned with how poets go about their business of communicating thought and feeling through a verbal medium that we all have heard since childhood.
Instead of asking, “What does this poem mean?” the questions I shall encourage you to think about all the time are these:
1. What do I notice about this poem?
2. What is odd, quirky, peculiar about it?
3. What new words do I see or what familiar words in new situations?
4. Why is it the way it is, and not some other way?
Although the course will cover a range of poems – from Renaissance England to contemporary America – it will not really be a historical “survey.” Instead, it will focus on poetic techniques, patterns, habits, and genres, and it will do so with a special concern for the three areas which, taken together, can be said to define what poetry is and what distinguishes it from other kinds of literary utterance.
Figurative language. Whether metaphor, simile, metonymy, synecdoche, irony (all of these items will be taken up), “figuration” is the crucial component of poetry. Aristotle, the first major Western literary critic, said in the Poetics that of all the gifts necessary for a poet, the gift of metaphor was the most important. If you have everything else (a good ear, a sense for plo9t of character) but you lack the gift of metaphor, you won’t be a good poet; if you have it and you lack everything else, you’ll still be a poet. We shall look at how representative something in terms of something else. Poetry is at once the most concise literary language (“the best words in the best order,” Samuel Taylor Coleridge called it) and the most suggestive. The combination of concision and suggestiveness encourages (indeed, requires) a reader to pay close attention to words and music, to see how things fit together, and to sense what kinds of relationships are stated, implied, or hinted at in the poet’s characteristic manoeuvres. Precisely because we are engaged in an act of “interpretation,” we run the risk of getting it all wrong. There are areas of right and wrong, of course, but the most interesting is the middle, grey one, in which many possible meanings, feelings, and effects of a poem are up for interpretation. If there were not more than one possible “meaning” or “effect” of a poem, it would not be a poem, but rather, a piece of unmistakable instruction (“Insert Tab A into Slot B”) or a tautology (“A rectangle has four sides and four ninety-degree angles”). Even religious commandments (“Thou shalt not kill”) are open to interpretation.
Music and sound. Most poetry in English until quite recently has been written in “formal” ways, hewing to patterns of rhythm and rhyme with which most of us are familiar, even if we don’t know the exact nomenclature. When Walt Whitman, in the middle of the 19th century, began writing a new kind of “free” verse (but one whose subtle rhythms owe a great deal to the Bible as well as to political speech and operatic song) he began the move toward a new kind of verse, one which Robert Frost said, in a famous dismissal, was like playing tennis with the net down. All good poems, whether in conventional forms or in new, freer ones, have a strong musical basis, and we shall spend some time listening to and for the experiments in sound that all poets have made. Whether a poem is written in “conventional” or “free” verse, it is always a response to a formal problem: That is, the poet has at some point in the composition decided that this particular poem should be written in (say) iambic pentameter, or as a villanelle, a haiku, or a long-lined meditation, rather than in some other way. Sound, form, and meaning are all part of the same package.
Tone of voice. The subtlest, most elastic, and most difficult thing to “hear” in a poem. We usually define “tone” as the writer’s attitude to his or her material, but of course, it is a lot more. Almost any simple sentence (“How are you today?” “Pass the salt, please”) can be uttered in a variety of ways and with many connotations or ironic suggestions. If we misinterpret the tone of someone’s remarks, we can get into a lot of trouble. Delicacy of tone is precisely one of poetry’s strongest assets, rather than a curse. Just because a poem is about a certain subject (love, death, God, nature) does not mean that it must maintain a prescribed attitude toward that subject. In fact, much of the play of poetry comes from the discrepancy between what we might reasonably expect a poet to say (or the tone of voice in which he or she might say it) and what he or she actually does say and in what tone. Once again, it was Frost who said over and over that the speaking voice in poetry is the most important thing of all. If we cannot hear the voice of an imagined person behind the poem, we’d be listening to a machine. Remember: a poem is a printed text that is like a play script. It is a blueprint for a performance. Once you have thought through, and read through, a poem many times, you will be able to say it in your way, having decided what to play up and what to play down. Once you have it by heart, it will be as much yours as it is the author’s.
Because of the 30-minute length of each lecture, and because we shall be examining the poems at close range, we shall have to limit ourselves to shorter workers, or to a consideration of parts of longer works. Since this is not a historical survey (that would be another way of arranging a course in poetry), we shall not be able to talk about big poems, like Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, Milton’s Paradise Lost, Wordsworth’s The Prelude, nor will we have much to say about medium-length narrative or contemplative poems. The focus will be on poems of no more than two pages in length, poems that you can get into your ears and memory, and learn - essentially - by heart.
The course has been arranged to consider aspects of the three major areas above, but each lecture (and the discussion of most of the individual poems) will deal, to some degree, with all of the areas, veering among them to produce the fullest readings of the works at hand. To get the most out of this course, you should read the poems discussed in the lectures – and others as well. The bibliography lists a number of books of collected poems, including the well-known standard college text, The Norton Anthology of Poetry (4th edition, ed. Margaret Ferguson et al.). This is the primary item for “Essential Reading” and will not be mentioned again in the lecture notes. In addition, virtually all of the poems are easy to find elsewhere". DVD CONTENTS:
Professor Biography
Course Scope
Disc 1:
Lecture One: What to Look (and Listen) for in Poems
Lecture Two: Memory and Composition
Lecture Three: Poets Look at the World
Lecture Four: Picturing Nature
Lecture Five: Metaphor and Metonymy I
Lecture Six: Metaphor and Metonymy II
Disc 2:
Lecture Seven: Poetic Tone
Lecture Eight: The Uses of Sentiment
Lecture Nine: The Uses of Irony
Lecture Ten: Poetic Forms and Meter
Lecture Eleven: Sound Effects
Lecture Twelve: Three 20th-Century Villanelles
Disc 3:
Lecture Thirteen: Free Verse
Lecture Fourteen: The English Sonnet I
Lecture Fifteen: The English Sonnet II
Lecture Sixteen: The Enduring Sonnet
Lecture Seventeen: Poets Thinking
Lecture Eighteen: The Greater Romantic Lyric
Disc 4:
Lecture Nineteen: Poets Thinking - Some 20th Century Versions
Lecture Twenty: Portrayals of Heroism
Lecture Twenty-One: Heroism - Some 20th Century Versions
Lecture Twenty-Two: Poets Talking to (and for) Works of Art
Lecture Twenty-Three: Echoes in Poems
Lecture Twenty-Four: Farewells and Falling Leaves
Cross-Reference by Poem
Cross-Reference by Poet
Cross-Reference by Lecture
Glossary
Bibliography
Credits
1565853059 (dvd)
Literature and composition--Poetry.
Poetry--Reading and Comprehension.
Poetry --Themes and motives.
How to Read and Understand Poetry / Willard Spiegelman ; The Teaching Company. - 1st ed. - Chantilly, VA : The Teaching Company, 1999. - 12 DVDs (720 min) : sd. col. ; 4 3/4 in + 1 Course Guidebook (ii, 74 p. : ill. ; 19 cm) - The Great Courses .
Includes a biography of author, glossary, index and bibliographical references.
"This course of 24 lectures will introduce students to a subject about which they already know – or remember – something. Even though most educated people can recall poems from childhood, from school, even from their university years, most of them are no longer fans or readers of poetry. There are many explanations for the drop in poetry’s popularity since the 19th century. Families no longer practice reading aloud at home; various forms of prose have gained pre-eminence; “free verse” has made many people think that poetry has lost its music; the heady days of “modernism,” along with T.S. Eliot’s insistence that poetry be “difficulty,” confused and troubled people who wanted things to remain (or so they thought) simple.
Many undergraduates, like many adults, are suspicious of poetry: They think it requires special skills and an almost magical ability to “decipher” it or to discover its “hidden meanings.” This course will allay your fears and encourage you to respond to many different kind of poems; it will (I hope) inspire you to continue to read and to listen to poetry. We will be less interested in those (perhaps nonexistent) hidden or “deep” meanings in poetry, and more concerned with how poets go about their business of communicating thought and feeling through a verbal medium that we all have heard since childhood.
Instead of asking, “What does this poem mean?” the questions I shall encourage you to think about all the time are these:
1. What do I notice about this poem?
2. What is odd, quirky, peculiar about it?
3. What new words do I see or what familiar words in new situations?
4. Why is it the way it is, and not some other way?
Although the course will cover a range of poems – from Renaissance England to contemporary America – it will not really be a historical “survey.” Instead, it will focus on poetic techniques, patterns, habits, and genres, and it will do so with a special concern for the three areas which, taken together, can be said to define what poetry is and what distinguishes it from other kinds of literary utterance.
Figurative language. Whether metaphor, simile, metonymy, synecdoche, irony (all of these items will be taken up), “figuration” is the crucial component of poetry. Aristotle, the first major Western literary critic, said in the Poetics that of all the gifts necessary for a poet, the gift of metaphor was the most important. If you have everything else (a good ear, a sense for plo9t of character) but you lack the gift of metaphor, you won’t be a good poet; if you have it and you lack everything else, you’ll still be a poet. We shall look at how representative something in terms of something else. Poetry is at once the most concise literary language (“the best words in the best order,” Samuel Taylor Coleridge called it) and the most suggestive. The combination of concision and suggestiveness encourages (indeed, requires) a reader to pay close attention to words and music, to see how things fit together, and to sense what kinds of relationships are stated, implied, or hinted at in the poet’s characteristic manoeuvres. Precisely because we are engaged in an act of “interpretation,” we run the risk of getting it all wrong. There are areas of right and wrong, of course, but the most interesting is the middle, grey one, in which many possible meanings, feelings, and effects of a poem are up for interpretation. If there were not more than one possible “meaning” or “effect” of a poem, it would not be a poem, but rather, a piece of unmistakable instruction (“Insert Tab A into Slot B”) or a tautology (“A rectangle has four sides and four ninety-degree angles”). Even religious commandments (“Thou shalt not kill”) are open to interpretation.
Music and sound. Most poetry in English until quite recently has been written in “formal” ways, hewing to patterns of rhythm and rhyme with which most of us are familiar, even if we don’t know the exact nomenclature. When Walt Whitman, in the middle of the 19th century, began writing a new kind of “free” verse (but one whose subtle rhythms owe a great deal to the Bible as well as to political speech and operatic song) he began the move toward a new kind of verse, one which Robert Frost said, in a famous dismissal, was like playing tennis with the net down. All good poems, whether in conventional forms or in new, freer ones, have a strong musical basis, and we shall spend some time listening to and for the experiments in sound that all poets have made. Whether a poem is written in “conventional” or “free” verse, it is always a response to a formal problem: That is, the poet has at some point in the composition decided that this particular poem should be written in (say) iambic pentameter, or as a villanelle, a haiku, or a long-lined meditation, rather than in some other way. Sound, form, and meaning are all part of the same package.
Tone of voice. The subtlest, most elastic, and most difficult thing to “hear” in a poem. We usually define “tone” as the writer’s attitude to his or her material, but of course, it is a lot more. Almost any simple sentence (“How are you today?” “Pass the salt, please”) can be uttered in a variety of ways and with many connotations or ironic suggestions. If we misinterpret the tone of someone’s remarks, we can get into a lot of trouble. Delicacy of tone is precisely one of poetry’s strongest assets, rather than a curse. Just because a poem is about a certain subject (love, death, God, nature) does not mean that it must maintain a prescribed attitude toward that subject. In fact, much of the play of poetry comes from the discrepancy between what we might reasonably expect a poet to say (or the tone of voice in which he or she might say it) and what he or she actually does say and in what tone. Once again, it was Frost who said over and over that the speaking voice in poetry is the most important thing of all. If we cannot hear the voice of an imagined person behind the poem, we’d be listening to a machine. Remember: a poem is a printed text that is like a play script. It is a blueprint for a performance. Once you have thought through, and read through, a poem many times, you will be able to say it in your way, having decided what to play up and what to play down. Once you have it by heart, it will be as much yours as it is the author’s.
Because of the 30-minute length of each lecture, and because we shall be examining the poems at close range, we shall have to limit ourselves to shorter workers, or to a consideration of parts of longer works. Since this is not a historical survey (that would be another way of arranging a course in poetry), we shall not be able to talk about big poems, like Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, Milton’s Paradise Lost, Wordsworth’s The Prelude, nor will we have much to say about medium-length narrative or contemplative poems. The focus will be on poems of no more than two pages in length, poems that you can get into your ears and memory, and learn - essentially - by heart.
The course has been arranged to consider aspects of the three major areas above, but each lecture (and the discussion of most of the individual poems) will deal, to some degree, with all of the areas, veering among them to produce the fullest readings of the works at hand. To get the most out of this course, you should read the poems discussed in the lectures – and others as well. The bibliography lists a number of books of collected poems, including the well-known standard college text, The Norton Anthology of Poetry (4th edition, ed. Margaret Ferguson et al.). This is the primary item for “Essential Reading” and will not be mentioned again in the lecture notes. In addition, virtually all of the poems are easy to find elsewhere". CONTENTS:
Professor Biography
Course Scope
Disc 1:
Lecture One: What to Look (and Listen) for in Poems
Lecture Two: Memory and Composition
Lecture Three: Poets Look at the World
Lecture Four: Picturing Nature
Lecture Five: Metaphor and Metonymy I
Lecture Six: Metaphor and Metonymy II
Disc 2:
Lecture Seven: Poetic Tone
Lecture Eight: The Uses of Sentiment
Lecture Nine: The Uses of Irony
Lecture Ten: Poetic Forms and Meter
Lecture Eleven: Sound Effects
Lecture Twelve: Three 20th-Century Villanelles
Disc 3:
Lecture Thirteen: Free Verse
Lecture Fourteen: The English Sonnet I
Lecture Fifteen: The English Sonnet II
Lecture Sixteen: The Enduring Sonnet
Lecture Seventeen: Poets Thinking
Lecture Eighteen: The Greater Romantic Lyric
Disc 4:
Lecture Nineteen: Poets Thinking - Some 20th Century Versions
Lecture Twenty: Portrayals of Heroism
Lecture Twenty-One: Heroism - Some 20th Century Versions
Lecture Twenty-Two: Poets Talking to (and for) Works of Art
Lecture Twenty-Three: Echoes in Poems
Lecture Twenty-Four: Farewells and Falling Leaves
Cross-Reference by Poem
Cross-Reference by Poet
Cross-Reference by Lecture
Glossary
Bibliography
Credits
"This course of 24 lectures will introduce students to a subject about which they already know – or remember – something. Even though most educated people can recall poems from childhood, from school, even from their university years, most of them are no longer fans or readers of poetry. There are many explanations for the drop in poetry’s popularity since the 19th century. Families no longer practice reading aloud at home; various forms of prose have gained pre-eminence; “free verse” has made many people think that poetry has lost its music; the heady days of “modernism,” along with T.S. Eliot’s insistence that poetry be “difficulty,” confused and troubled people who wanted things to remain (or so they thought) simple.
Many undergraduates, like many adults, are suspicious of poetry: They think it requires special skills and an almost magical ability to “decipher” it or to discover its “hidden meanings.” This course will allay your fears and encourage you to respond to many different kind of poems; it will (I hope) inspire you to continue to read and to listen to poetry. We will be less interested in those (perhaps nonexistent) hidden or “deep” meanings in poetry, and more concerned with how poets go about their business of communicating thought and feeling through a verbal medium that we all have heard since childhood.
Instead of asking, “What does this poem mean?” the questions I shall encourage you to think about all the time are these:
1. What do I notice about this poem?
2. What is odd, quirky, peculiar about it?
3. What new words do I see or what familiar words in new situations?
4. Why is it the way it is, and not some other way?
Although the course will cover a range of poems – from Renaissance England to contemporary America – it will not really be a historical “survey.” Instead, it will focus on poetic techniques, patterns, habits, and genres, and it will do so with a special concern for the three areas which, taken together, can be said to define what poetry is and what distinguishes it from other kinds of literary utterance.
Figurative language. Whether metaphor, simile, metonymy, synecdoche, irony (all of these items will be taken up), “figuration” is the crucial component of poetry. Aristotle, the first major Western literary critic, said in the Poetics that of all the gifts necessary for a poet, the gift of metaphor was the most important. If you have everything else (a good ear, a sense for plo9t of character) but you lack the gift of metaphor, you won’t be a good poet; if you have it and you lack everything else, you’ll still be a poet. We shall look at how representative something in terms of something else. Poetry is at once the most concise literary language (“the best words in the best order,” Samuel Taylor Coleridge called it) and the most suggestive. The combination of concision and suggestiveness encourages (indeed, requires) a reader to pay close attention to words and music, to see how things fit together, and to sense what kinds of relationships are stated, implied, or hinted at in the poet’s characteristic manoeuvres. Precisely because we are engaged in an act of “interpretation,” we run the risk of getting it all wrong. There are areas of right and wrong, of course, but the most interesting is the middle, grey one, in which many possible meanings, feelings, and effects of a poem are up for interpretation. If there were not more than one possible “meaning” or “effect” of a poem, it would not be a poem, but rather, a piece of unmistakable instruction (“Insert Tab A into Slot B”) or a tautology (“A rectangle has four sides and four ninety-degree angles”). Even religious commandments (“Thou shalt not kill”) are open to interpretation.
Music and sound. Most poetry in English until quite recently has been written in “formal” ways, hewing to patterns of rhythm and rhyme with which most of us are familiar, even if we don’t know the exact nomenclature. When Walt Whitman, in the middle of the 19th century, began writing a new kind of “free” verse (but one whose subtle rhythms owe a great deal to the Bible as well as to political speech and operatic song) he began the move toward a new kind of verse, one which Robert Frost said, in a famous dismissal, was like playing tennis with the net down. All good poems, whether in conventional forms or in new, freer ones, have a strong musical basis, and we shall spend some time listening to and for the experiments in sound that all poets have made. Whether a poem is written in “conventional” or “free” verse, it is always a response to a formal problem: That is, the poet has at some point in the composition decided that this particular poem should be written in (say) iambic pentameter, or as a villanelle, a haiku, or a long-lined meditation, rather than in some other way. Sound, form, and meaning are all part of the same package.
Tone of voice. The subtlest, most elastic, and most difficult thing to “hear” in a poem. We usually define “tone” as the writer’s attitude to his or her material, but of course, it is a lot more. Almost any simple sentence (“How are you today?” “Pass the salt, please”) can be uttered in a variety of ways and with many connotations or ironic suggestions. If we misinterpret the tone of someone’s remarks, we can get into a lot of trouble. Delicacy of tone is precisely one of poetry’s strongest assets, rather than a curse. Just because a poem is about a certain subject (love, death, God, nature) does not mean that it must maintain a prescribed attitude toward that subject. In fact, much of the play of poetry comes from the discrepancy between what we might reasonably expect a poet to say (or the tone of voice in which he or she might say it) and what he or she actually does say and in what tone. Once again, it was Frost who said over and over that the speaking voice in poetry is the most important thing of all. If we cannot hear the voice of an imagined person behind the poem, we’d be listening to a machine. Remember: a poem is a printed text that is like a play script. It is a blueprint for a performance. Once you have thought through, and read through, a poem many times, you will be able to say it in your way, having decided what to play up and what to play down. Once you have it by heart, it will be as much yours as it is the author’s.
Because of the 30-minute length of each lecture, and because we shall be examining the poems at close range, we shall have to limit ourselves to shorter workers, or to a consideration of parts of longer works. Since this is not a historical survey (that would be another way of arranging a course in poetry), we shall not be able to talk about big poems, like Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, Milton’s Paradise Lost, Wordsworth’s The Prelude, nor will we have much to say about medium-length narrative or contemplative poems. The focus will be on poems of no more than two pages in length, poems that you can get into your ears and memory, and learn - essentially - by heart.
The course has been arranged to consider aspects of the three major areas above, but each lecture (and the discussion of most of the individual poems) will deal, to some degree, with all of the areas, veering among them to produce the fullest readings of the works at hand. To get the most out of this course, you should read the poems discussed in the lectures – and others as well. The bibliography lists a number of books of collected poems, including the well-known standard college text, The Norton Anthology of Poetry (4th edition, ed. Margaret Ferguson et al.). This is the primary item for “Essential Reading” and will not be mentioned again in the lecture notes. In addition, virtually all of the poems are easy to find elsewhere". DVD CONTENTS:
Professor Biography
Course Scope
Disc 1:
Lecture One: What to Look (and Listen) for in Poems
Lecture Two: Memory and Composition
Lecture Three: Poets Look at the World
Lecture Four: Picturing Nature
Lecture Five: Metaphor and Metonymy I
Lecture Six: Metaphor and Metonymy II
Disc 2:
Lecture Seven: Poetic Tone
Lecture Eight: The Uses of Sentiment
Lecture Nine: The Uses of Irony
Lecture Ten: Poetic Forms and Meter
Lecture Eleven: Sound Effects
Lecture Twelve: Three 20th-Century Villanelles
Disc 3:
Lecture Thirteen: Free Verse
Lecture Fourteen: The English Sonnet I
Lecture Fifteen: The English Sonnet II
Lecture Sixteen: The Enduring Sonnet
Lecture Seventeen: Poets Thinking
Lecture Eighteen: The Greater Romantic Lyric
Disc 4:
Lecture Nineteen: Poets Thinking - Some 20th Century Versions
Lecture Twenty: Portrayals of Heroism
Lecture Twenty-One: Heroism - Some 20th Century Versions
Lecture Twenty-Two: Poets Talking to (and for) Works of Art
Lecture Twenty-Three: Echoes in Poems
Lecture Twenty-Four: Farewells and Falling Leaves
Cross-Reference by Poem
Cross-Reference by Poet
Cross-Reference by Lecture
Glossary
Bibliography
Credits
1565853059 (dvd)
Literature and composition--Poetry.
Poetry--Reading and Comprehension.
Poetry --Themes and motives.