3/5/09 Cowper, Gray

Next week, all week: Blake. Please try to read the poems assigned for both days--the SoI/SoE and MHH--for Tuesday. That's a lot of reading, and MHH is so completely insane as to be pretty difficult, but it may be the case that the most useful way to go through Blake is to do a couple of the Songs, then go the MHH, then come back to the Songs.

According to syllabus, next thing due is poems and discussion--in brief, an assignment which asks you to imitate poems from the different eras and to explain what makes them representative of their eras. At present it's on the syllabus for March 31, and the 2nd paper is due on 4/14. We could, if you prefer, alter the order. The advantage of having the paper last is that it gives you more options for topics to write about. The advantage of having the poems last is that you have more exposure to the different eras, and thus a better understanding of what kinds of poems you should write. What's your preference?

On the table for today: issue of how the poetry of the late 18th C is transitional. We're going to start with Cowper, but spend most of our time on Gray.

So WRT Cowper: consider an issue we've talked about before, the transition from a conception of poetry as public to a conception of poetry as being personal.

• What does it mean for poetry to be "public" for the neoclassical writers?
  • poems frequently allude to public events; often written on particular public occasions
  • they are about issues of broadly social or universally human import
  • the personality of the author is submerged; usually a persona; originally, often anonymous.
  • where the poem is about the personal concerns of the author, those concerns are universalized, and frequently the self-regard is ironic. "Death of Dr. Swift" a good example--hard to get more personal than one's own death, but that topic is only the occasion for an discussion of universal concerns.
    • submergence of author is in accord with neoclassical view of PEOPLE as limited beings, halfway up the Chain of Being; it would be prideful to insist too much on oneself as the center of attention
    • and also in accord with neoclassical view of POETRY as mimesis rather than expression: what matters is what is represented, not who represents it
  • therefore a poem like Wordsworth's Prelude, a poem of epic length on "the growth of a poet's mind," unthinkable
• Is "The Castaway" public or private?
  • On the one hand, it is an account of a real event, the death of a sailor washed overboard; it is "occasional" in that sense.
  • Yet the force of the poem lies in the last two stanzas, which turn inward to compare the sailor's fate with the poet's. "We perished, each alone": community or isolation? Mimesis or expression?

Gray:similarly transitional

• satiric urge still there: "Ode on the Death of a Favorite Cat": thinly disguised animal fable ridiculing human folly. Not in couplets, but has some of Pope's easy elegance. Inflation of scene ("lofty vase") reminiscent of Belinda's dressing table.
• in both poems, distinctly neoclassical diction: the fish are described as the "genii of the stream" whose "scaly armor's Tyrian hue/Through richest purple to the view/Betrayed a golden gleam." As you know from the headnote, Gray believed that "the language of the age is never the language of poetry," and got slammed for it by Wordsworth in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads.
• but in fact, the "Elegy" in particular has a lot in common with Wordsworth's poetry:
  • it is concerned, up to a point, with "low and rustic life"
  • its descriptions of nature are relatively detailed, especially in the first 3 stanzas. These are not the abstractions of the classical/neoclassical pastoral; and the Gray-persona as described late in the poem by the "hoary-headed swain," wandering about in nature and lounging lazily under a tree, is remarkably like the Wordsworth persona in "Expostulation and Reply."
  • part of what the poem does is explore the condition of "melancholy"--this is an excellent example of what I was talking about last time when I said that late 18th C writers are interested in new emotions.
  • on account of this poem, Gray is sometimes considered one of the Graveyard School: group of 18th C poets who wrote about death, mortality. Among the most famous: Robert Blair, The Grave (1743); Edward Young, Night Thoughts (1742-1745). Made it over to America as well, e.g. Bryant's Thanatopsis.
    • Not strikingly evident in "Elegy," but some poems in the graveyard school had strong Gothic elements: general mood of decay, gloomy settings, in some cases vaguely supernatural elements--an obvious precursor to the Romance element of Romantic poetry. The Graveyard School poets are in that way important precursors to the "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" and the "The Eve of St. Agnes."

Elegy, discussion:

• just to get it out: what's the poem's argument about death? about power and fame?
  • 29-36
  • 37-56, esp. 53-56
  • 61-72
• the speaker sides with the villagers over the rich and powerful--the "mute inglorious Miltons" and their ilk, but notes that even the villagers attempt to memorialize the dead. What attitude does the poem take towards obscurity, then?
• traditionally, poems are taken to be immortal: e.g. Shakespeare, "Not marble, nor the gilded monuments/ Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme." So what happens to the figure of the poet when he or she sides with the "Mute inglorious Miltons"? Is the very act of writing a poem in praise of obscurity a contradiction in terms? If so, how does the poem resolve that contradiction, if it does?
• How does the speaker of the poem represent himself? Does he treat himself ironically or seriously? How similar is he, really, to the villagers? What audience does he address? What do we make of the last two sections, when he first represents himself from the point of view of a villager (like Swift in "Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift") and then in the epitaph? What status or role does a poet have?
• speech of the hoary-headed swain, 97-116. How is the speaker characterized? Is he treated ironically or seriously? By the values articulated earlier in the poem, how does he fare?
• epitaph: the speaker has learned from the gravestones what he says earlier in the poem. What should we as reader learn from his?