All Episodes

Mont Blanc continued: Brain or Sky

Songs from the Plays: Nashe, Kenneth Koch, Daniel

Mont Blanc: which is to be master

More on Astrophel and Stella; then some Shakespeare

Paradise Lost, The Intimations Ode, Mont Blanc

Last class on the Intimations Ode

Continuing on with the Intimations Ode

Astrophel and Stella, part 2

First class on Astrophel and Stella

Intimations Ode rebooted and general remarks on the Romantic sense of Milton 2_27_12

Vacation bonus: talk at UCLA

Wordsworth reboots the Intimations Ode

Southwell and Marlowe - 2.13.12

The Intimations Ode proper - 2.13.12

Heavy as Frost 2-9-12

Some moments from the Faerie Queene 2-8-12

Versions of the Intimations Ode

A desultory class on Spenser 2/6/12

Poetry and the personification of Love - 2/6/12

The burning boy: Metaphor and personification 2-2-12

Two poems of Surrey: "The Soote Season" and "Ye Happy Dames"

More on Blake's speakers and Bishop's version of Casabianca 2/1/12

Some versions of Petrarch and the allegory of love

More on Blake and the play of voices in his poems

Close reading: the Nurse's Song from Songs of Experience 1-26-12

Skelton's rhymes, Cole Porter's, Wyatt's

Tripartite relations in lullabies

Last class on Lullaby 1-23-12

Love (III) as a version of They Flee From Me 1-23-12

Close reading 1-19-11 Auden and Yeats

Renaissance Poetry - First Class: Wyatt

Close reading: lullabies

Last class: Samson, blindness, closet drama

Temptation in Areopagitica, Paradise Lost, and Paradise Regained

How human think things through

Moral typologies

Dreams, allegory, other minds

Prayer and Invocation

Paradise Lost, 5

Who judges God's ways?

Paradise Lost, III

Paradise Lost, II

First class on Paradise Lost

Comus, rape, and freedom

Lycidas, concluded, and Comus

Contrasts and debates in Milton

First class on Milton: Lycidas

Scopophilia and narrative

More on Book VI as Pastoral

Variety and uniformity

Justice and Courtesy

Varieties of justice

The Temple of Venus

The friend as second self in Book 4

Faerie Queene, Book IV: Love and Friendship

Matter and form in the Garden of Adonis

What it's like to live in the Land of Faery

Amoret and Belphoebe, and what the House of Busirane is for

More on Book 3

Faerie Queene III Britomart and allegory

Faerie Queene, Book 3, beginning

A lovely lay and the Bower of Bliss

Temperance and self-restraint

Temperance and certainty

Spenser: allegory and character

Allegory and character

Second class on Spenser: I. 1-4

First real class on Spenser, with attention to Milton

Last 18th c poetry class: Pope and retrospective

Wordsworth and Coleridge in 1798: Frost at Midnight and Tintern Abbey

Last class on Paradise Lost and of the Semester

Freedom of conscience and guilt in Paradise Lost

Burns, Blake, and perspectives on the innocent

Paradise Lost I: Antecedents

Barbauld and Baillie

Goldsmith and Cowper

Paradiso and Paradise Lost

Paradiso and the universe and everything

Christopher Smart: Prayer and Praise

Young, Gray, and the advent of Romanticism

Purgatorio and beginning of Paradiso

Purgatorio part two

Thomson and Collins

Inferno and start of Purgatorio 11-5-10

Doctor Johnson

Last class on Pope

Second class on Dante: More on the Inferno

Pope's satires and To the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady

First class on Dante -- 10/29/10

Last class on Virgil - his versions of Homer

Third class on Pope: How pure poetry becomes topical

2nd class on Virgil: his sublimity

Pope: Essay on Criticism concluded, Eloisa to Abelard and Rape of the Lock begun

First class on Pope, 10/19/10

Virgil and Homer. Ovid.

Ovid and the Ovidian Milton

Swift on himself, to Stella, and to the world, 10/12/10

Plato's Socrates and Aristophanes's - 10/12/10

Second class on Plato: the Cave, Socrates's argument with poetry early and late

First Swift class-NSFW: very scatalogical