EH 362

Renaissances

 

Section One: Brief Answers:

IN 40 MINUTES OR SO, ANSWER AN APPROPRIATE ARRAY [ FOUR OR FIVE WOULD BE FINE] OF THE FOLLOWING TOPICS. Be sure to read all choices.

1. Can Donne really be serious in his conflation of sexuality and divinity?

2. What does Donne really like about women?

3. What would you do in Marvell's Garden? Do you really want melons to insist that you eat them?

4. Is my office really the whole world?

5. Donne works in such close proximity to the physical details of life that we are permitted to ask, "What would Donne's God look like?"

6. Does Wyatt want a lover or a faithful pet?

7. Are there Metaphysical Conceits in T. S. Eliot's Wasteland?

8. If you could place one of my colleagues in Marvell’s Garden, who would it be? How long would that colleague stay? Why would someone leave?

9. If you were a female poet in the 16th or 17th century, how would you write poems in response to one or more of our poets?

10. Does Donne think we are voyeurs?

11. Does our poetry think we are voyeurs?

12. Is there any way to tell from Herrick’s poems that he might have never had a real “girlfriend”?

13. Does the poetic language of hyperbolic compliment and self-sacrifice find expression in our culture?

14. Who has greater agency in Boccaccio- god or the crafty individual?

15. You are a firefighter and proud of it. As you don your uniform, how does it symbolize your commitment to God and purity?

16. You are a topless dancer and proud of it. As you "don your uniform," how does it symbolize your commitment to God and purity?

17. You are dead and on the dissecting table. For some reason you are also conscious. How do you feel?

18. The love of your life wants to play, but expects you to choose the game. All you have is a rather faded map of the world. How do you use that map to get where you desire?

19. Did the “love” poetry we read actually end up sexualizing the world? And if so, did the poets end up shrinking the world to a hormonal microcosm?

20. You are completely broke. The love of your life is a greedy, money-grubbing swine. How do you ask that person to run off with you and live on the beach or in the woods?

21. Are the poems addressed to women inherently sexual and seductive, or are they just chatter between men?

22. How would modern psychotherapy affect one of our poets? Would such therapy improve their poetry?

23. Is the Cavalier ideal of making one's life a beautiful and perfectly integrated whole a Utopian scheme destined to failure?

24. Does the metaphysical impulse survive in popular arts and culture today?

25. Why did Romantic poets like Coleridge so admire Donne?

26. If you had to live the life implied by the poetry of one of our poets, who would it be and why?

27. If Boccaccio were to write a tale that praises the potential greatness in you, what would he celebrate and how would he do it?

28. You are on the first flight to Jupiter. The love of your life is sad to see you go. How do you persuade that person that your trip is actually an act of fidelity?

29. There is a knock at your door. It is God. He (She, It, Them) is (are) selling magazine subscriptions to win a free trip to Disney world. How do you get rid of the visitor and keep your money?

30. You harvest your prize Cantaloupe. As you lift it from the ground the bottom cracks and the inside spills out, an orange mass of half-digested melon and the slugs digesting it. How do you turn that moment into an image of God and eternity?

31. You awaken one Kafkaesque morning and your stomach, or your libido, is actually, literally, truly talking to you. Perhaps it sits in a chair and offers you a cup of coffee and a bagel, or some other food more appropriate to this choice. How do you talk back to yourself and what do the two of you say?

32. We live in the enclosed world of campus, in the ivory tower of academe. Argue that our world is the real world and all others just reflections of this ideal space.

32a. Let the Hilltop be Penshurst, what do we praise about this “ancient Pile?” what are our woods, our fish ponds, our ripe cheeses and ripe “maidens”? What are our aristocrats and our aristocratic function in life?

33. What would Boccaccio offer as the essential features of his own narrative?

34. Argue that T. S. Eliot is, in fact, Donne reborn- that his essential modernism is little more than the past reanimated and adapted to current circumstances.

 35. If there is another world more real than ours, more perfect than ours, shouldn’t we try to live in that world, to make our world that world, shouldn’t we scour the bookstores for the Encyclopedia of Tlon?”

36. Are Ted Hughes’ Crows migratory metaphysicals?

37. Is the Renaissance ideal of making one's life a beautiful and perfectly integrated whole a Utopian scheme destined to failure? This, too, might become a long answer question.

38. Is Herbert's God sexual; does he have any sexual thoughts at all toward that God, or any sexual thoughts at all?

39. Which of the metaphysical poets is actually God's best friend?

40. Are any of the classical poets friends, or antagonists, with God?

41. Did Garcia Marquez spend 100 years of solitude reading metaphysical poetry translated by Borges?

42. Poetry delights in sensual language, but where is the poetry of the papillae?

43. Which of our poetic styles seems most/least to exploit women?

44. Would Lawrence’s Mountain lion eat Keats’s nightingale only to be consumed in turn by Hughes’s Crow in the twilight of a rural hillside churchyard? How permeable is the boundary between human and animal in a select few of our readings?

45. If you were his "mistress," would Marvell's poem about your coyness persuade you?

46. Is Herbert too sweet? Is he the Mr. Rogers of Metaphysical Poetry?

47. What if your being divided (like a divided cell) and that other version of you lived its own life?  What would happen when you met?

48. If Rilke were to write an elegy that follows one of our poets into the land of the dead, what poet would you choose and what would that land be like?

49. You are God throwing a cocktail party. Ben Jonson comes to the door. You want to welcome him, yet you are not sure if you have enough food and wine. What do you say without ever identifying yourself as God?

50. Is the Cavalier delight in connoisseurship really just bunkum. Can you flavor cheap wine with spices and peat moss and persuade the Jonson's of the world it is 29 Latour, which is past its prime by the way? The 28 is still drinking beautifully.

51. Science fiction images for us a world of the virtual. Could the Platonic love we have encountered find its object in a virtual person?

52. Why did we read so few works by women?

52A. What do we need to bring with us as we “dive into the wreck” of the artistic and cultural past?- What do we need to bring to a new surface life that deep values of the past without becoming lost in a pale simulacrum of the underworld? This asks for a metaphorical but inventive apparatus.

53. Are the Ninja Turtles actually cloaccan metaphysical fungoids?

54. Does the Petrarchan impulse survive today?

55. If you worked in a video store- are there any surviving? - and Robert Herrick came in, what DVD would you recommend to him in an effort to get his repeat business?

56. Homer, Marge, Bart, and Lisa! Cast some of our poets as the Simpsons.

57. Adult/ post modern cartoons- What would a few of our authors watch and why? How does the deep aesthetic past find vitality in the popular modern arena?

58. How do you know you are alive? How does that knowledge express itself?

59. Why is the ideal women we have encountered so often silent and accepting?

60. Is it easier to understand why poets might persist in pursuing the unreachable political goal instead of the tangible romantic object?

61. If there were “poetic steroids” and a covert dose would make your pen flow free, how would your poem confess and celebrate your inspiring transgression?

62. You are drawn to a person with a large Chaucerian “wen” prominently visible, in spite of that person’s effort to diminish or conceal. How do you make that excrescence the basis of your seductive imagery?

63. Would a LBGT+ sonneteer have to change much in the language and images available?

64. Let’s think about “The Garden” and “Penshurst” again. If nature in those worlds is both real and almost perfect, how could the poet include leaf mold, worms, and Platonic manure?

65. From Mickey to Donald to Barney to Brian and on, we have made animals into humans. Are they indeed our fellows or is it just an effort to convince ourselves that we are more real than they?

666. The Literary Stock Market: Will your investment in Wyatt rise? Are Sappho Futures sound? Should you sell Lawrence or Ted Hughes?

67. The Blazon of Beauty is all red and white and pink. Would an African Sonneteer need to change more than the hues to make the tradition work?

68. In a world without God (or gods) would our poets have to revalue all their poetic values?

69. You and Snoop D – remember him- are having a party. How do you publicly invite your friends in a way that makes them want to attend without the feds busting you again?

70. You know the rules are everywhere and have always been, yet you do not feel bound by them, what do you say when you discover that you still must pay the price, that there is no escape from their world?

71. Does poetry, or art, free the poet from the role society constructs? Is art a refuge where we can close the door and be ourselves? How would we know that self is authentic?

72. A package arrives in the mail- Inside you find Gyges’ ring. With this ring, you can be invisible and fly invisibly wherever you want on earth, but you can only use the ring for a month- maybe just a week. Where do you go? What do you do? What would one of our poets do?

73. Why does fidelity seem to matter so much?

74. What would be the minimum price to get you to sell your chance to be president?

75. If you could live forever, what would be your ambitions?

76. Can we ever tell the truth? Is it worth telling? If everyone believes our lies, do they cease to be lies; if no one believes our truth, is it true?

77. Arctic or Tropics- Iceland or Barbados?

78. When you stand at the edge of the Valley of Not Knowing and call out- who answers? Who do you want to answer?

79. When you are wayfaring, what if you meet the other half of your sheared soul? And what if you must pass on and depart from the Platonic wholeness?

80. Is “Eternity” a great ring of endless light- glowing in unchanging incandescence? Is Edmund Spenser right when he claims eternal perfection can be always mutable?

 

BONUS: List five critical terms or phrases introduced in this class.

 

Questions with Longer Answers

[In These Answers You Should Show the Range and depth of Your Reading]

Instructions: Do one from Column A and another one or two from Columns B, C, and D- but only one from each column [Thus a total of two OR three essays]:

You may include Wyatt, Surrey in Column A or B.

You must EXCLUDE the Metaphysical poets from Column B.

You may do a total of One Reading answer

COLUMN A:

 1. We are often told that Death is the ultimate meaning and measure of life, and the only measure of meaning. How do some of our poets, try your best to avoid Donne, make sense out of death? How do they use death as a measure of life and meaning?

2. This is a kind of parallel to #1. Is there a kind of Elegiac sadness for the impermanence of the good and the beautiful that echoes through our readings? Through what transforming mists does that elegiac tone sometimes pass?

3. How does Herbert try to relocate Donne's subject matter and technique? In some sense your answer to this question will get at the originality of Herbert's poetry.

4. How does Metaphysical poetry [Donne, Herbert, Vaughan, Marvell, ?Eliot?] explore the powers and dangers of imagination? Does the very inventiveness call itself into question? Is Hamlet a kind of metaphysical poet?

5. Stand up for the Herdsmen in Gray’s Elegy Argue that their Bucolic country life is a truer and deeper experience than the urban visitors melancholic encounter. Claim that The Herdsman’s is the true experience of the power and mystery of the natural. Run with discovery.

6. Almost all the poems- let’s not forget The Decameron -  we read came from a culture that valued oral presentation and oral performance. In what sense are our readings acts of performance? What is created in/by such a performance? Are the Writers (performers) in some way afraid to make themselves public? Do they create a false face to wear in their performance? OR is their performance a way to get beyond/behind the public mask to the real being? Where is the real person in the poetry we encounter? Is there a real person? How would that person be RE-Presented in the poems?

7. We spoke often of the Natural world in our examination of poems. How do our readings show the poets thinking about the natural world in ways that are a form of exploration and discovery? Be sure to include some obvious poems and poets and some not so obvious. Feel free to Explore the Garden/ Forest dimension.

8. Most of our poets were “Men” of the world. How does that complex political, social, economic world (you may add to the list) become part of the poetry?

9. What might be the Metaphysical definition of the Good Life that is so celebrated in Classical verse [mostly Jonson and Herrick]? What are the values the metaphysical poets are at odds to protect and uphold?

10. Read a poem by Herbert. Try “The Pulley” if you want a new challenge, but any H. poem will do

10A. Read a Donne poem. What about Holy Sonnet 2. Again any D poem will do.

10B. Read a Marvell poem as exemplary of the Metaphysical.

11. Argue that Marvell's Garden poem is either Metaphysical or Classical. Be sure to show your sense of the tradition and how Marvell works with it.

12. We have wandered far together over the hillsides and through the forest thickets? How does Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey” function as a summary and culmination of of our travels in common/

 

 

 

COLUMN B

13. If we take seriously the notion of the Cavalier interest in “The Good Life,” we bump into questions about the nature and worth of Cavalier poetry, with which we include the poems of Jonson and Herrick. Some of the questions might be these: How can such poetic topics produce significant art? How can we take seriously poems of such light and playful tone? Are these poems where craft dominates content? Isn’t the persona in the poems rather evanescent, almost frivolous compared to, say, Yeats and Eliot?

How do we see the Cavalier tradition in our more general context of substantial or significant poetry?

14.  Place Jonson's "On My First Son (xlv), “Farewell thou child,” in the context of some of his other poems.

15. Discuss the FIGURE of the LADY/lover/woman in some readings that illuminate the issue.

16. In what sense is The Decameron a collection of portraits, or perhaps sketches? In what sense can we read the one hundred tales as a kind of self-portrait?

17. The aesthetic of the Renaissance often valued works that were finished, perfected, not to be changed. How does that aesthetic appear in our poems and how do those poems debate with that aesthetic? After some well-focused general comments, look closely at one or two key works. Feel free to range to other works that help explore and non-brutally- interrogate that aesthetic.

18. In what sense are most of our works implicit dialogues for which Marvell’s “Dialogue of Body and Soul” provides a paradigm? Select a few poems that seem particularly dialogic.

19. Read one or more short pieces by Herrick, and demonstrate the "seriousness" of Herrick's art.

20. Sidney and Shakespeare explore the divine dimensions of love in ther poems. Herrick celebrates the world of romantic dream and desire. Is their poetic vision in opposition or parallel? If united in our imagination, would they annihilate each other, like particles and anti-particles, or would they reveal a long-hidden wholeness?

21. Celebrate metonymy!

21A. Celebrate Otium*. What is it? Why is it central to understanding Classical and Cavalier verse? Is Otium limited to a specific slice of culture and politics? A poetic Fantasia on the theme of Otium would be grand.

*The idealized leisure that lets the individual explore and create beyond the mundane and practical.

 

21B. Without falling into the clichés of self-help books, celebrate the on-going value and utility of one of our poets.

21C. Is the “Pastoral” a literary form that fears and tames the forest?

 

COLUMN C

22. In what important ways do many of our works explore the story of a man who falls and is transformed by his persistence in that fall and by his stubborn clinging to his sense of imaginative creation that produces an alternative to the CREATED and the CREATING. That man becomes a creature who forgoes the divine and even the human in himself. He is finally reduced to a figure fatally ensnared in his own reductive images. (This is a question for those of you who like a challenge.... And for those of you who don't, you may want to try it anyway.)

23. Compare/contrast a modern poet’s’s appreciation of human beauty with the appreciation of the same in the works of one of the following poets: Donne, Herrick, Shakespeare or Marvell- or Petrarch or Dante—.

24. If Petrarch or Boccaccio or even Dante had lived four hundred or four hundred and fifty years later, would he have written a novel instead of the works we encountered? In what ways would the conventions of the novel have altered Petrarch’s poems or Boccaccio’s narrative or Dante’s poems about Beatrice as he is striving to celebrate her? Is the novel as traditionally practiced a form amenable to their interests?

25. Using Forest and Garden as deep and broad metaphors, assign some of our authors as “Gardeners” or “Foresters” How are the authors creating spaces that let us examine loss, or, perhaps, more accurately, not having, or wanting what can't be had. How do the authors deal with this both specifically and generally? How are works about what can't be had? Is that the easy answer, that what can't be had becomes attractive in its absence?

26. In what sense is The Decameron a metaphor for a world "Unperfected"? How does the very texture of tale-telling and issues of agency suggest a world of “dis-ordered” creation- not a fallen world, but a world open and partially transformable?  What creates meaning? How stable and wide-spread is that meaning. How does literary form explore openness of form?

27. Can we read a sequence or collection of poems as a plain tale, as a narrative without symbolic reference? Can we retreat from meaning and find comfort in Character and Event-  or perhaps Rhetorical Craft?

28. How is Eliot's “Prufrock” or “Wasteland” a kind of response to Renaissance notions of idealized gardens and communities?

29. In what sense is Herrick living in the Forest of Magic and mystery or perhaps a manifestation of a Platonic forest.

31. Read with care one of Shakespeare’s sonnets

32. Read Wyatt’s “They Flee from Me”

32a. Read a sonnet by Petrarch.

33. Wyatt’s translations ask challenging questions about Imitatio and originality [Invention]. Where is the real invention in Wyatt or Shakespeare or Donne or Marvell? How is that invention a dialogue with Imitatio?

34. It is often said that the story of the fall is an effort to understand the psychology of the fallen. How is this true for Wyatt, Herbert, or Marvell? How do the poems attempt to explain and represent the weak and fallen who inhabit a world they did not fully create and one they do not fully control?

 

COLUMN D

35. Argue that the artist actually finds immortality!

36. Think back to Boccaccio. Is the first story of the Decameron an “Inverse” of poetic idealism?

37. Argue that a poet’s women are a comment on and critique of the women we have encountered in other readings? That is- explore, possibly, whether poet’s vision is finally more comprehensive and transcendent that other traditions with their deep doubts and fears.

38. Which of our author’s sense of self and selfhood is the most modern we have encountered? Does his fascination with the ego-driven self and his attention to the many faces we have, the many roles we take on, the multiple and contradictory lives we choose to perform, mark him as a post-modernist visionary?

39. If, as people like C. S. Lewis sometime argue, Dante and his predecessors and his culture “Invented Love,” What might have served the role of love before they invented it?

40. The question of author’s innerlife- the question of the author’s belief- How and why does the faith of Dante or Boccaccio or Eliot or Lawrence or Wordsworth matter?  If he is an atheist or a faithful son of mother church, what does it matter? How does it matter. When the author sends off the work to the public- like one of Dante’s Envois- does that “child” now have its own life and its own DNA?

41. Is Hamlet a variation on themes in one of our readings?

42. Boccaccio acknowledges the plague and the troubles of “actual life,” but almost at once we are in an enclosed garden, as it were. Working with Boccaccio and a few others, explore how our authors confront the practical difficulties of life.

42a. Is Plato right when he wants to exclude poets from the good state? What do the poets have to offer? Does the good state want or need Boccaccio, Rilke, Donne, Herrick, and any poet? Does the artist do best when Blast-ing the surrounding world?

42b.  Philip Sidney argues poetry can tell greater truths than history. By looking at a specific text, does that provide a kind of answer to 42a?

43. For Dante, Immortality is the eternal vision of God, how would Sappho or Guillaume or the Boccaccio of our selections define immortality?

44. Explore a dimension of one of our works that calls your name- a dimension we have neglected or given insufficient attention.

45. “This, too, must be said with sadness- the Duchess herself is dead”. How is the Nostalgia for the past a kind of Nostos- a journey home? Is that idealized past merely a dream world, or is it a world of the safely dead who remind us of the fear and doubt with which we live each day? How do our readings interrogate our idealizing of the past which we hope to see reborn? What comfort is there in the wish to reanimate the past? Is the Forest and Garden the true home that embraces and transforms the Duchess and Beatrice and Laura and all the mortal selves we know and love? Is the Portrait the unconscious wish to be transported to the real home where we become truly ourselves in Forest or Garden?

46. Renaissance Neo-platonism- Pico della Mirandola, seems to suggest that humans have unlimited potential, that we might soar beyond angels and transform the very stuff of our being into some greater numinous whole. Can the deeply drinking reader really transcend the world itself and become, though serving, a higher being.

47. “Come the revolution, there’ll be no more strawberries and cream!” find avatars of the revolution in our readings. How do the readings express indirectly ideas beyond the practical scope of the speaker and perhaps even beyond the rational logical-positivist poetic self of the writer? In what sense is the artist a prophet of revolution covertly imaging forth those powers suppressed still for decades if not centuries.

48. Beauty seduces, beauty transforms, beauty is an attribute of the divine, beauty is spirit and matter in ecstatic fusion. How does the poetic escape and transform the narrow confines of the “beautified”? How does the poetic get beyond the painted chair and the plain chair to the searing heat of the desert to the cobbled ugly spaces and places that are equally profound and beloved if only our voyaging Odysseus would share with us the seductive magic that keeps him bound so tightly to the mast?

49. In a final retrospective mastery- what is “the good life” our literature offers to share with us?

 

But what

Loved the stones and spoke stone?

They seemed to exist too

And what spoke that strange silence

After his clamour of caws faded?

 

A question of its own to substitute for any column

Another Chance to Explore

We have spent much of the semester looking at dichotomies, dialogues, and multiplicities. It is easy to take a dichotomy and declare it to be the meaning or center of a poem or work. For example, we can talk about our literature as being about a conflict between the non-physical idealizing of love and a cynical interest in the sexual and the erotic. But I find this NOT an answer, not the disease but a symptom. There are other symptoms: Body/Soul; Male/Female; Heaven/Earth; Heaven/Hell; Light/Dark; Thinking/Feeling; Nature/Artifice; Real/Ideal, and almost all those other operations that seem to "govern" poetic language and thought. But, it seems to me, there is a deeper interplay, deeper dialogue or complex concern that generates these symptoms. We may not be ready to get all the way to Original or Primary Cause, but we can get closer. So, the question might be this: Why do our authors want to generate and examine the kinds of oppositions that show so obviously in most, if not all, of our works? What purposes do such oppositions serve? How do they let artists, and other thinkers, explore possibilities yet more complex and rich? What is the evidence that the artists have doubts that these oppositions actually exist in nature? How do our readings MAP and Illuminate worlds of causality and meaning worthy to explore?

 

A kind of Bonus

List three or four of your favorites from our readings- specifics are good. And briefly but intently suggest why they are your favorites.