Aims
This course aims to:
• teach how to read poems closely and productively
• develop a critical vocabulary for the study of poetry
• compare and contrast Victorian with Modernist poetry
Content
Cambridge is famous for close reading as the foundation of literary study. This course will draw on that discipline and its traditions. We shall spend a week examining at least two poems a day. Each class will begin with the poems set for that day being read aloud and we shall then discuss the poems, each day comparing one poem with another. If you join this class, you must be prepared both to read aloud and engage in discussion.
The course is not primarily historical, though it has a historical dimension to it. The poems we shall read and discuss all belong to the same period of English literature: roughly 1880-1980, a period which includes both poets who began writing in the late Victorian period and poets of the post-Modernist era. In each class poems very different in character will be compared and contrasted, demonstrating the richness and variety of the century’s work. The poets whose work we shall discuss will be paired as follows: Thomas Hardy/ Elizabeth Bishop, Marianne Moore/ Ted Hughes, W H Auden/ Thom Gunn, W B Yeats and Philip Larkin, Dylan Thomas and Basil Bunting. A few other poets may come up as well. Each poet will be briefly contextualised, but the main focus will be on reading and discussing the words on the page and the sounds and rhythms we hear when the words are recited.
Though the differences between 1880 and 1980 are profound, it could be argued that the ten poets listed above all belong to a modern sort of society: one in which religion is open to doubt, democracy is the dominant mode of politics, and daily life is more affected by mechanisation and technology than by agriculture and the organic life of the countryside. Perhaps, therefore, we shall find as many similarities as contrasts.
Despite this emphasis on the period, however, this will not be primarily an historical course, but a series of exercises in literary appreciation.
Presentation of the course
This course is not based on historical generalisations or summaries of what happened in the relevant period. Instead, we shall attend closely to complete poems, two a day, listening to the sound of them, recognising forms, genres and conventions, locating their meaning in their detail – the words, images, allusions and rhythms that make them up. Through such close reading of particular works we may hope to learn how to read poems in general.
Course sessions
1. Thomas Hardy and Elizabeth Bishop
Poems about the family, both of which depend on implication
2. Marianne Moore and Ted Hughes
Poems about fishes which indicate the otherness of animal life
3. W H Auden and Thom Gunn
Elegiac poems
4. W B Yeats and Philip Larkin
Poems concerned with the individual and the social
5. Basil Bunting and Dylan Thomas
Autobiographical poems
Learning outcomes
You are expected to gain from this series of classroom sessions a greater understanding of the subject and of the core issues and arguments central to the course.
The learning outcomes for this course are:
• to develop a deeper and more articulate appreciation of lyric poetry
• to become familiar with the modes and procedures of the short poem in the course of the
20th century
• to practice the skill of comparing specific poems of contrasting types
