This course of twenty-four lectures will introduce students to a subject about which they already know—or remember—something. Even though most educated people can recall poems from childhood, from school, even from their university years, most of them are no longer fans or readers of poetry. There are many explanations for the drop in poetry’s popularity since the nineteenth century: families no longer practice reading aloud at home; various forms of prose have gained preeminence; “free verse” has made many people think that poetry has lost its music; the heady days of “modernism,” along with T. S. Eliot’s insistence that poetry be “difficult,” confused and troubled people who wanted things to remain (or so they thought) simple. Many undergraduates, like many adults, are suspicious of poetry: they think it requires special skills and an almost magical ability to “decipher” it or to discover its “hidden meanings.” This course will allay your fears and encourage you to respond to many different kinds of poems; it will inspire you to continue to read and to listen to poetry. We will be less interested in those (perhaps nonexistent) hidden or “deep” meanings in poetry, and more concerned with how poets go about their business of communicating thought and feeling through a verbal medium that we all have heard since childhood. Although the course will cover a range of poems—from Renaissance England to contemporary America—it will not really be a historical “survey.” Instead, it will focus on poetic techniques, patterns, habits, and genres, and it will do so with a special concern for the three areas which, taken together, can be said to define what poetry is and what distinguishes it from other kinds of literary utterance: figurative language, music and sound, and tone of voice. The course has been arranged to consider aspects of the three major areas above, but each lecture (and the discussion of most of the individual poems) will deal, to some degree, with all of the areas, veering among them to produce the fullest readings of the works at hand.
How to Read and Understand Poetry
Learn to savor all the pleasures of poetry—the joys that come from “the best words in the best order” —to a fuller degree than you might have thought possible.
01: What to Look (and Listen) for in Poems
What's the difference between verse and poetry? What is the crucial determinant of poetic utterance? What gives a poem its “sound” or “music”? Short lyrics by Robert Herrick (“Upon Julia's Clothes”) and A. R. Ammons (“Beautiful Woman”) will help you answer these and other questions.
02: Memory and Composition
Two famous poems by William Wordsworth— “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” and “The Solitary Reaper” —mirror each other as they speak of time and memory, experience and eternity.
03: Poets Look at the World
The poets include Shakespeare (Sonnet 130), Yeats (“The Lake Isle of Innisfree”), Edna St. Vincent Millay (“The Buck in the Snow”), and the New Jersey obstetrician-poet William Carlos Williams (“The Red Wheelbarrow”). Our focus is on how they combine visual imagery with sound to create unique poetic effects.
04: Picturing Nature
We consider how four poets from the 19th and 20th centuries render various aspects of the natural world. The poems are by Hilda Doolittle, Tennyson, Thomas Hardy, and Gerard Manley Hopkins.
05: Metaphor and Metonymy I
Description and imagery (the material of Lectures 3 and 4) begin to assume more important and suggestive dimensions for both poet and reader. Poems by Burns, Shelley, Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, William Blake, and Randall Jarrell.
06: Metaphor and Metonymy II
We continue the investigations of the preceding lecture by looking in depth at Robert Lowell's “Skunk Hour” and Keats's great sonnet (and first great poem of any kind), “On First Looking Into Chapman's Homer,” written when he was only 20 years old!
07: Poetic Tone
What are the two meanings of the word “tone” as applied to poetry? What does a poem's subject have to do with its tone (in either sense)? Poems by Wallace Stevens, George Herbert, Donald Justice, Ben Jonson, and Wordsworth.
08: The Uses of Sentiment
What separates an original, persuasive, and appropriate appeal to feeling from mere poetic “gush” or sentimentalism? To answer this question, we turn to the work of seven very different poets, from Elizabeth Barrett Browning to W. H. Auden.
09: The Uses of Irony
What is this ancient rhetorical device? Why and how do poets use it, and to what effects? Poems by Dorothy Parker, William Blake, D. H. Lawrence, Henry Reed, and Thomas Gray.
10: Poetic Forms and Meter
This lecture, the first of four on traditional poetic forms and meters, will teach you how to identify the predominant meter (or rhythm) of any poem.
11: Sound Effects
Poems by Matthew Arnold, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Emily Dickinson, Robert Browning, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and others serve to illustrate how poets use a variety of devices—and especially rhyme—to play upon the reader's ear.
12: Three 20th-Century Villanelles
The villanelle is a demanding 19-line form that many poets of the 19th and 20th centuries have handled. The three considered here are by widely differing authors, yet in each case Dylan Thomas, Theodore Roethke, and Elizabeth Bishop produced a classic.
13: Free Verse
Robert Frost compared it to “playing tennis with the net down,” but free verse might also be thought of as an attempt to play a new poetic game with new rules. Examine its roots in 18th-century verse that echoes the cadences and repetitions of the King James Bible, and look at its fuller development by Walt Whitman, e. e. cummings, Alan Ginsberg, and others.
14: The English Sonnet I
The first of three lectures on the most enduring of lyric forms. Invented by the Italian poet Petrarch in the 14th century, it is still being used by poets today. Sonnets by Sir Philip Sidney and Shakespeare are among those you'll read in this lecture.
15: The English Sonnet II
Continue your study of the sonnet form with two by Shakespeare's younger contemporary John Donne, two by Milton, two by Wordsworth, and one by Shelley, whose sonnets are few in number but remarkable in quality. Finally, learn which poet has written the most sonnets in English.
16: The Enduring Sonnet
Twentieth-century sonnets by William Butler Yeats, Robert Frost, and Marilyn Hacker reveal the continuing vitality and flexibility of a form that must have 14 lines but can (as in the case of Frost's “The Silken Tent”) have as little as one sentence.
17: Poets Thinking
What do poets do when they want to introduce abstract thoughts, make logical or figurative arguments, or reach philosophical conclusions? Donne, Andrew Marvell, and Alexander Pope all turned their hands to these tasks, versifying with wit and cogency about serious subjects.
18: The Greater Romantic Lyric
What did the critic M. H. Abrams mean when he coined the phrase that forms the title of this lecture? How do Wordsworth's “Tintern Abbey” and Coleridge's “Frost at Midnight” exemplify this type of lyric? What are the vastly different effects that it can achieve?
19: Poets Thinking—Some 20th-Century Versions
Proceeding from the previous lecture, this one shows how poets can express thought (or particular thoughts) through an array of means that includes, but is hardly limited to, direct statement. The examples you will ponder include works by Robinson Jeffers, Wallace Stevens, and Robert Hass, as well as Yeats's “Among School Children.”
20: Portrayals of Heroism
Ever since Homer, poets have sung of heroes and heroic actions. While epics are beyond the scope of these lectures, we can look to shorter lyrics on heroism, including the anonymous ballad of Sir Patrick Spens, Dryden's elegy on his friend John Oldham, and Tennyson's stirring and unforgettable “Ulysses.”
21: Heroism—Some 20th-Century Versions
Although often thought of as a time when heroism has been rendered obsolete, the 20th century has seen poets from Yeats to Adrienne Rich pondering types of heroism and harnessing their ideas about it to their poetic craft. Elizabeth Bishop's “The Fish” and Robert Lowell's “For the Union Dead” are also studied in this lecture.
22: Poems Talking to (and for) Works of Art
One of the glories of poetry is its ability to speak to, of, or for an otherwise-silent work of art. Poets have been doing this at least since Homer described the divine shield of Achilles in “The Iliad.” Here you will consider Keats's famous “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” a particularly beautiful example of this species of poetic utterance.
23: Echoes in Poems
Poetic echoes can be as obvious as the repetition of words within a single poem, or as subtle as allusive gestures that one poem may make toward earlier poems with which it shares a common theme or trope. Poems that “echo” one another in this way form traditions. One such tradition, in fact, is woven precisely around what the poet and critic John Hollander calls “the figure of echo” itself. You'll examine it in this lecture as you read poems by Wordsworth, Frost, Elizabeth Bishop, and Hollander himself.
24: Farewells and Falling Leaves
Among the most richly suggestive and often-echoed tropes in all of Western literature is that of the falling leaves. In this lecture, you will trace this figure of natural change and human finitude from its first appearance in Homer through Virgil, Dante, Milton, Shelley, Ezra Pound, and Howard Nemerov, all the way to A. R. Ammons, whose lapidary “Beautiful Woman” closes—as it opened—this course.
Overview Course No. 268
About
Dr. Willard Spiegelman is Duwain E. Hughes Jr. Distinguished Professor of English at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. He earned his A.B. degree from Williams College magna cum laude and with highest honors in English. He did graduate work at Harvard, where he held Woodrow Wilson and Danforth fellowships and earned an A.M. and a Ph.D.
Professor Spiegelman has won three fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, as well as major grants from the Rockefeller and Guggenheim Foundations.
He has been twice named an “Outstanding Professor” at SMU, and all of his books have been named “best faculty publication” by the university. He is also the recipient of the Perrine Prize of Phi Beta Kappa for distinguished intellectual achievement.
Professor Spiegelman is the author of two books about the English Romantic poets: Wordsworth’s Heroes and Majestic Indolence: English Romantic Poetry and the Work of Art. He has also written The Didactic Muse: Scenes of Instruction in Contemporary American Poetry and dozens of scholarly articles on English and American poetry. He is a regular contributor to the “Leisure & Arts” page of The Wall Street Journal, and since 1984 he has been the editor-in chief of The Southwest Review, the country’s fourth-oldest, continuously published literary quarterly.
