Podcast
amimetobios
Hosted by Amimetobios · EN
New for 2023: Victorian Poetry
Scroll back for previous courses on Shakespeare, Eighteenth Century Poetry, Close Reading, Various film genres, Film and Philosophy, the Western Canon, Early Romantics, 17th Century Poetry, etc.
10episodes
Episodes
Newest firstAll episodes
Victorian Poetry 26: Last class: Housman after a touch of Yeats and a little Michael Field
May 4, 202301:05:42Tap to summarizeWe look at Yeats a little more, then "Michael Field," and then Housman's poem about Wilde and other poems about his own sexuality, and about the intense, Horatian ephemerality of life. A class in part about why I hope poetry, or some poems, will matter to the students throughout their lives.
Transcribe →Victorian Poetry 25: Jeff Nunokawa visits to discuss Wilde’s ”Ballad of Reading Gaol”
May 1, 202301:19:25Tap to summarizeWilde in prison, or in Dante's hell, and the differences and similarities between the grimness of "The Ballad of Reading Gaol" and the charming, dazzling self-delight of his earlier self-presentations, in a class guest-taught by Princeton's Professor Jeff Nunokawa.
Transcribe →Victorian Poetry 24: The Rhymers’ Club: Fin de siècle poetry, towards Wilde and Yeats
Apr 28, 202301:20:23Tap to summarizeAnother Kipling poem -- "Danny Deaver" and the horror of hanging (in partial anticipation of Wilde's "Ballad of Reading Gaol"), and some discussion of Arnold, Pater, and Wilde as context for Lionel Johnson's "Dark Angel." Then two versions of Yeats's "Cradle Song."
Transcribe →Victorian Poetry 23: Amy Levy, Robert Bridges and... Kipling
Apr 24, 202301:18:22Tap to summarizeWe discuss one poem of Amy Levy in the context of her short and painful life, then look at Robert Bridges's version of sprung rhythm -- how it differs from his friend Hopkins's and then after a brief and fractional defense of Kipling from the worst that could be said about him, we consider his poem "In the Neolithic Age."
Transcribe →Victorian Poetry 22: A bit more Stevenson, George R. Sims, and the amazing Alice Meynell
Apr 21, 202301:16:09Tap to summarizeThe way metaphor works in one of Stevenson's songs of travel, a little attention to George R. Sim's punning in one of his "lunatic laureate" poems, and then close reading of the amazing Alice Meynell, in particular "Renouncement," "A Cradle Song," "The Modern Mother," and "Parentage," with some attention to the experience of Catholic guilt.
Transcribe →Victorian Poetry 21: Later Victorian Forms: Stevenson, Guggenberger, MacDonald
Apr 17, 202301:14:24Tap to summarizeWe look at an interesting poem by Louisa S. Guggenberger, a very short poem by George MacDonald, and a couple of formal experiments by Stevenson, which mean the explanation of pantoum-like poems and triolets or rondeaux more generally -- examples of triolets from Hopkins and Chesterton. Then the sublime original envoy to A Child's Garden of Verses.
Transcribe →Victorian Poetry 20: George Eliot, Hardy, Hopkins
Apr 4, 202301:20:01Tap to summarizeA lot of greats to do in a single day, and not wanting to miss Eliot we begin with a little contextualization of three of the sonnets from "Brother and Sister," then move on to a few grim Hardy poems, and then to Hopkins: "As kingfishers catch fire" compared with one of the "terrible sonnets," "I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day."
Transcribe →Victorian Poetry 19: Swinburne and Hopkins
Mar 31, 202301:17:53Tap to summarizeWe discuss "The Garden of Proserpine" and the ways that it anticipates or instantiates Freud's idea of the death drive: all the repetitions in the poem. Then we turn to the poet most opposite in attitude: Hopkins, and talk briefly of "Pied Beauty" and "That Nature is a Heralcitean Fire." Discussion in Instress and the Duns-Scotian term haecicity that makes it possible, as opposed to Thomas Aquainas' universality. We'll finish considering Hopkins next class.
Transcribe →Victorian Poetry 18: A touch of Fitzgerald and Hopkins; more on Meredith and Swinburne
Mar 27, 202301:19:29Tap to summarizeWe have to abandon Fitzgerald because time is short, so mainly on to Modern Love, with some context, then Hopkins's "Binsey Poplars," Swinburne (and Buck Mulligan quoting The Triumph of Time in Ulysses), and an intro to "The Garden of Proserpine," via Spenser's "Garden of Adonis" in The Faerie Queene (which I discussed a little while ago here), and Milton's account of how Eden is even greater than the fair field of Enna where Persephone gathering flowers by gloomy Dis was gathered.
Transcribe →Victorian Poetry 17: Some Meredith, then we begin The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam
Mar 23, 202301:20:40Tap to summarizeWe talk about George Meredith for a while -- "Lucifer in Starlight" (and the 1882 transit of Venus) and his relation to his wife, Mary Ellen Nicolls, and the relationship of both of them to Henry Wallis who'd painted Meredith as Chatterton. We plan to return to Modern Love, but first we begin reading through Fitzgerald's Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam, after quoting him on its form and its moral: "Drink--for the Moon will often come round to look for us in this Garden and find us not."
Transcribe →