When I first developed this course, I did so out of a sense of a particular need. It seemed to me that students in my 300-level classes were coming in with pretty good skills in close reading and in supporting claims with evidence from the text, but they had a very sketchy sense of literary history. Offhand references to, say, "neoclassical irony" or like "Keatsian praise of the imagination" or "Arnoldian doubt" would have meant a lot to the few in the class who had already had a class in 18th C or Romantics or Victorians, usually not the same few, but not a whole lot to anyone else. And as we've seen, a sense of literary history makes a big difference. Poets don't write in isolation; they write in a particular context and with some sense of their literary ancestors; and to know what poets are saying, you have to know something about who they're talking to.
The reasons this was happening were many, some of them unavoidable, some not. But one reason was that, some years before, we had changed the curriculum, like many other schools, and done away with our sophomore-level surveys. These courses covered huge spans of time, and tried to cover as many as possible of the major works of the canon as possible. In six courses, we "covered" all of British and American literature, both poetry and prose. If students took all six courses, they would have a somewhat shallow but reasonably comprehensive view of literary history as a whole.
The reason we dropped these courses, and the reason that they have been dropped in most schools across the nation, is that they were impossible. In the first place, students didn't take all six courses; they took three, and of course we had to let students choose what they wanted. So a student might well have taken, say, American Novel, the first half of British Prose, and the second half of British Poetry. That covers a lot of literature, but it doesn't exactly give you a coherent picture of literature. Second, and in the long run more importantly, the literary canon had exploded in the previous 30 years, adding huge numbers of new writers--women, minorities, writers from colonies, writers from regional areas of America that tended to get overlooked, and so on. Six courses was never enough, but at the time I was an undergraduate, it would have at least been thinkable: you had to let all kinds of important things go, but at least you could provide some kind of coherent sketch of the whole. By the time I was a new professor, and certainly by the time we changed our curriculum here, "coverage" was clearly hopeless and could even be seen as a way of keeping certain people out of the canon--remember what we've said about female poets in this class--rather than as a way of representing the whole.
So this class is a kind of throwback. I didn't fool myself into thinking I could offer, and don't now pretend to offer, "coverage" of anything, but I thought, well, if we read a lot of influential authors, and we point pretty self-consciously at literary periods, then students would at least come into 300 level classes with some sense of literary history, some understanding that literary history matters to how you interpret things, and some confidence that a view of literature as a whole can be consciously developed--and is further developed every time you read a book and say "this belongs there."
As such, this is probably the most traditional course I teach, in several ways. I tend to go after difficult, out-there, and relatively recent bodies of materials--modernism, post-modernism, theory, electronic media, and so on. Not in this class. In the majority of my classes, female authors usually number about half of those we study. Not here. In many of my classes, the ideas discussed tend to be pretty daring; in this class, we've followed pretty conventional lines. If you think about the content of the poems we've studied, the most common topics are art and religion--and in both areas we've covered conservative traditions at least as much we've covered any outrageous upstarts and heretics.
It was clear to me after the very first time I taught this class that it wasn't going to have a substantial effect on student preparation for 300 level classes. Even if we assume that the course does give some sense of literary history--and I hope it does, although of course we've only covered a small slice of that history and in only one genre--not enough students cycle through the class to have any substantial effect on the English major as a whole, especially given that I only teach the class every few years and that scare words like "continuity" and "change" and "poetry" in the title keep the numbers of students low.
And yet I still enjoy teaching this class, and I still think it is valuable. Partly that's just a matter of liking the poetry--this is my only chance to teach old chestnuts that I still love, like "Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift" or Gray's "Elegy" or "Ode on a Grecian Urn" or "The Lady of Shallott." But partly it has to do with the hopelessness of survey courses that I mentioned earlier. I'm coming to think, in fact, that a course like this is all the more valuable BECAUSE it's hopeless.
To show this, let me start with a premise that I've tried to suggest in this class without necessarily articulating explicitly: Romanticism doesn't exist. Neither does Neoclassicism or Victorianism, or while we're at it the Renaissance or Modernism or Medieval literature. Clearly, people wrote poems between 1785 and 1830, the span of time that we call the Romantic era. I don't know how many poems, exactly--surely thousands, possibly tens of thousands. But even if you accept those dates--and we've talked before about how insubstantial the dates of literary periods are--there is not a single generalization that could possibly apply to all the poems written during that era. I doubt that there's even a generalization that would apply to most of them. What we're doing when we say that the poetry of a certain period has such and such features is at best identifying features of a certain number of poems that we think are especially important or representative. And of course what we think of as being important or representative is based upon generalizations from particular poems, and so on in an endless circle: we identify "representative" poems based upon certain features which we have identified as being representative because they appear in poems that we chose as representative because they have the features that we consider representative.
Another way to put this is to say, very simply, I've been feeding you a pack of lies in this class. So has the Norton anthology, in its introductions to the different periods. So has anyone who has ever used the words "Romantic," "Victorian," "neoclassical," or any other period designation. These are all fictions. The entire English major, here and everywhere else in the country, is based on a pack of lies. Sorry about that.
That's not to say that I don't believe these lies. I've told you the best lies I could, given the circumstances of trying to cover far more material than one can possibly deal with in one class. I've tried to lie responsibly.
And that, I would say, is one of the most important benefits of this class, or perhaps of any class that tries to teach you something about literary periods: to teach you to lie responsibly about continuity and change.
To see why this is important, I ask you to think back to when you were ten years old. How much do you really share with that child? For the most part, you don't like to do the same things, you don't have the same priorities, you don't have the same view of other people, you probably don't have all that many friends in common. Many of your core values have changed--you are now more "realistic," more "mature," and so on. You look different, surprisingly so in some cases. Your tastes have changed. Some of what you can remember doing at that age embarasses you. And if that kid could see you now at your worst moments--oh, how shocked and appalled he or she would be!
And yet, despite the immense changes, something persists. There are some elements in you that were there then. They are hard to pin down, because they show up in new forms and in a new context. But there is a certain shape or tone to aspects of your personality that someone who knew you both times would recognize. it might be a particular habit, or a particular flavor of optimism or pessimism, or just a certain gesture or a way of holding your body.
In your identity, in other words--and while we're at it, in anything that has an identity, your friendships, your family, your profession, Romanticism--there are elements of continuity and elements of change. We look at the river and we know that the water in it is completely different from the water there yesterday, yet we lie, responsibly, and say it is the same river. We look at the river that we have known all our lives, yet we lie responsibly and say, "none of the water is the same."
And of course both elements are vitally necessary. We all face times when our lives seem so chaotic and ephemeral that we have to ask, "who am I?" "what happened to me?" "am I anything at all?" And at that moment, we have to learn to lie responsibly and say, "I am this way. I have always been this way." We also all face times when we seem so stuck in life, in our habits or our circumstances, that we have to ask, "isn't there any way out of this?" "isn't there anything more than this?" And at that time, we have to learn to lie responsibly and say, "I am not this way. I am a different person, starting now." You could say that there are times in life when you have to be neoclassical, and there are times when you have to be romantic. My experience has been that there isn't a whole lot of stability in life. Everything changes, like it or not. But there is enough persistence in life to allow for both freedom and security. You can say "I know this river," and you can say, "this water is all new." In either case what you say may be only partly true, but if the lies are responsible ones they will be true enough to be useful. For example, I said earlier that the terms "Romantic" and "neoclassical" and the rest are lies...but I just used those terms, and you all knew something about what I meant by them.
I'm not claiming that this class will fix your life, of course. You never know what'll help, but that would be hubristic even for me. I am suggesting that any time you understand some literary text better because you understand that the author has a neoclassical sense of irony or a Keatsian sense of the imagination and so on, whether the source of that understanding is this class or any other, than you are making the same cognitive move by which you hold together your sense of self in trying hours. And I am suggesting that it helps to be aware of when you're doing it, when you're lying in the way I've discussed, because awareness will help you to lie responsibly. But ultimately this class is just more water in the stream. It is almost over; when it is gone, some of it will persist in you, some of it will pass away; more or less depending on who you are and what your life requires of you. I am OK with that, and I hope you are too. May both what is continuous for you and what changes for you be what you need.
See you Thursday, when I shall ask you to lie responsibly one more time.