AWAY WITH WORDS IV: UNDERSTANDING POETRY COURSE GUIDE Professor Michael D.C. Drout WHEATON COLLEGE A Way with Words IV: Understanding Poetry Professor Michael D.C. Drout Wheaton College Recorded Books™ is a trademark of Recorded Books, LLC. All rights reserved. A Way with Words IV: Understanding Poetry Professor Michael D.C. Drout Executive Producer John J. Alexander Executive Editor Donna F. Carnahan RECORDING Producer - David Markowitz Director - Matthew Cavnar COURSE GUIDE Editor - James Gallagher Design - Ed White Lecture content ©2008 by Michael D.C. Drout Course guide ©2008 by Recorded Books, LLC 72007 by Recorded Books, LLC Cover image: © Digital Stock #UT122 ISBN: 978-1-4361-2921-3 All beliefs and opinions expressed in this audio/video program and accompanying course guide are those of the author and not of Recorded Books, LLC, or its employees. Course Syllabus A Way with Words IV: Understanding Poetry About Your Professor...................................................................................................4 Introduction...................................................................................................................5 Lecture 1 What Is Poetry? .....................................................................................6 Lecture 2 Oral Tradition .......................................................................................11 Lecture 3 The Roots of the Tree: Anglo-Saxon Poetry .......................................16 Lecture 4 Of Meters and Rhyming Craftily: Middle English and the Development of Rhymed Poetry....................25 Lecture 5 Early Renaissance: An Exploration of Form........................................33 Lecture 6 Metaphysicals, Milton ..........................................................................40 Lecture 7 The Hard Stuff: The Eighteenth Century and the Influence of Classical Learning............................................................48 Lecture 8 Romantics: Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge ..........................................56 Lecture 9 Later Romantics: Byron, Shelley, and Keats.......................................66 Lecture 10 Victorians! ............................................................................................75 Lecture 11 American Poetry and the Development of Free Verse........................84 Lecture 12 Modernism ...........................................................................................93 Lecture 13 Late Modernism .................................................................................102 Lecture 14 Poetry Now ........................................................................................108 Course Materials ......................................................................................................117 Recorded Books.......................................................................................................119 Notes ........................................................................................................................120 3 About Your Professor Michael D.C. Drout Michael D.C. Drout is the William and Elsie Prentice Professor of English at Wheaton College in Norton, Massachu- setts, where he chairs the English depart- ment and teaches courses in Old and Middle English, medieval literature, Chaucer, fantasy, and science fiction. Professor Drout received his Ph.D. in medieval literature from Loyola University in 1997. He also holds M.A. degrees from Stanford (journalism) and the University © Benjamin Collier, BCCImages.com of Missouri-Columbia (English literature) and a B.A. from Carnegie Mellon. In 2006, Professor Drout was chosen as a Millicent C. McIntosh Fellow by the Woodrow Wilson Foundation. In 2005, he was awarded the Prentice Professorship for outstanding teaching. The Wheaton College class of 2003 presented him with the Faculty Appreciation Award in that year. He is editor of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Beowulf and the Critics, which won the Mythopoeic Scholar- ship Award for Inklings Studies for 2003. He is also the author of How Tradition Works: A Meme-Based Cultural Poetics of the Anglo-Saxon Tenth Century (Arizona Medieval and Renaissance Studies). Drout is one of the founding editors of the journal Tolkien Studies and is editor of The J.R.R. Tolkien Encyclopedia (Routledge). Drout has published extensively on medieval literature, including articles on William Langland’s Piers Plowman, Beowulf, the Anglo-Saxon wills, the Old English translation of the Rule of Chrodegang, the Exeter Book “wisdom poems,” and Anglo-Saxon medical texts. He has also published articles on Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea books and Susan Cooper’s Dark Is Rising series of children’s fantasy novels. Drout has written an Old English grammar book, King Alfred’s Grammar, which is available for free at his website, www.michaeldrout.com. Professor Drout’s other websites are www.Beowulfaloud.com and www.anglosaxonaloud.com. He has given lectures in England, Finland, Italy, Canada, Norway, and throughout the United States. Drout lives in Dedham, Massachusetts, with his wife Raquel D’Oyen, their daughter Rhys, and their son Mitchell. You may enjoy these other Modern Scholar courses by Professor Drout: A History of the English Language A Way with Words: Writing, Rhetoric, and the Art of Persuasion A Way with Words II: Approaches to Literature A Way with Words III: Understanding Grammar for Powerful Communication Bard of the Middle Ages: The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer From Here to Infinity: An Exploration of Science Fiction Literature Rings, Swords, and Monsters: Exploring Fantasy Literature 4 © Digital Stock Introduction Professor Michael D.C. Drout’s remarkable A Way with Words series has increased listeners’ understanding of the language that we speak, rhetoric that shapes our lives, and the ways we understand the literature that we love. Now, in A Way with Words IV, Professor Drout examines the greatest artistic accomplishments of the English language: the ten centuries of great poetry in English. We live surrounded by poetry, though we do not always recognize it, and at our highest highs and lowest lows, we reach for poems, sayings, and songs. In Understanding Poetry, Drout traces the development of poetry from the Anglo-Saxon period to the present day, celebrating the great achievements of English and explaining the techniques used to create the poems and the methods we use to understand them. The course touches on the greatest poets and poems of the English tradi- tion, including Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Wallace Stevens, and Robert Lowell. Drout skillfully mixes discussion of forms, meters, rhymes, and patterns with a genuine celebration of the joy of poetry in English, enhancing readers’ appreciation of poems and explain- ing “why” we love the particular poems we love. 5 Lecture 1: What Is Poetry? The Suggested Reading for this lecture is Perrine’s Sound and Sense: An Introduction to Poetry edited by Thomas R. Arp and Greg Johnson. Musée des Beaux Arts About suffering they were never wrong, The Old Masters: how well, they understood Its human position; how it takes place While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along; How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting For the miraculous birth, there always must be Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating On a pond at the edge of the wood: They never forgot That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse Scratches its innocent behind on a tree. –W.H. Auden People love poetry, and they are frightened by it. Poetry is old, dusty, hard to understand, and we reach for poetry when we are in love, or confronted by death, or very, very happy. Poetry is found in funny-looking, very thin books in an empty section of the bookstore or in forbidding school texts, and poetry pours through the air whenever we turn on a radio. Poetry is the supreme lin- guistic achievement of the human species, and we use poetry to sell donuts. All of the statements in the previous paragraph are true, which is why poetry is worth studying. Poetry is at once omnipresent (in popular music and greet- ing cards) and rare (in the great poems of the past that are so challenging to understand). It is a natural part of human life, present in even the earliest societies, but it is also a matter of great refinement and exclusivity. In this course we will examine both how poetry works and where it has come from. To these ends, we will discuss the particular qualities of poetry (such as rhyme, meter, alliteration) and the history of poetry in English. By pulling these two strands together in multiple lectures, we will see how techniques and meanings have evolved over time, and we will also develop a set of ana- lytical skills that we can use to understand new poems. Thus this course is not a traditional survey (“From Beowulf to Virginia Woolf) but is instead a mixed approach. We will go in chronological order, because that is easier to remember, but we will also be building up analysis of different techniques. At the end of the course, you will have the skills and the historical knowledge to understand and appreciate poetry from different times and different genres. To begin, we should define poetry (a problem that has bedeviled many LECTURE ONE scholars through the centuries). For our purposes, poetry is a verbal art form 6 in which both form and