Ode on a Grecian URL

Emily S. has pointed out to me that the 2,000 to 2,500 words I ask for on this essay would come to about 7 or 8 pages. I did the math wrong, unsurprisingly. You should be aiming for about 1,250 to 1,500 words. Sorry!

I think we will be best off saving Keats for our discussion next week. For tomorrow, please bring Middlemarch.

To behold the third hebdomadal assignment, cast thy eyes downward.

I've failed to illustrate our poems since Wordsworth; of course, it's hard to find good pictures of Death-in-Life and Life-in-Death playing craps.

Anyway, as we are reading poems about fairly specific, often obscure objects it is good to remind ourselves of what these objects look like.

First, click here a picture and short description of an Eolian harp; there's also a link to an amazing sound file of the harp playing.


Athenian red figure calyx krater dated to the 5th century BC; in the Getty Museum, photograph by Mharrsch.

This is not the precise urn Keats had in mind - in fact, no urn matches Keats's description. It is the dramatic style of these red-figure vessels that affected Keats more generally: the dynamic figures frozen in mid-action; the exquisite pace of the narrative and scene as it is set around the circumference of the pottery.

If you get a chance, visit our Chazen Museum to see some beautiful examples of this kind of pottery.


The frieze from the Parthenon (Athens, 5th century BC), acquired by Lord Elgin; displayed at the British Museum, photograph by Furcafe.
Some of Flickr's better pictures of the Elgin marbles understandably have stricter copyright protections. To get a better sense of what Keats may have been responding to, consult Zambizi Prime's dramatic detail of a metope and Trenchfoot's photograph of the Parthenon's partially reconstructed pediment.

The third hebdomadal topic is below, but I'm sure you know that.

A number of you have asked about how to structure an essay if the AP English five paragraph format isn't what I'm looking for. This is a very good question, and here is the answer: an essay should be structured so that every paragraph after the introduction builds closely off of the paragraph that preceded it - in toto, these paragraphs should address a single important question and should suggest something about the consequence of the answer. (Often, the answer is just a better question. That's good.)

Another way of putting this is that your essay should follow a question, evidence, analysis, question structure. (It's too bad that QEAQ doesn't make a good acronym.) Let me spell this out:

1. Your first paragraph should introduce, immediately and in detail, the question you want your essay to answer.
2. Your second paragraph should offer some evidence - usually a close reading of a passage or stanza - that begins to answer this question. Furthermore, it should begin to analyze that evidence: what does it mean? What is its importance?
3. Your third paragraph should further that analysis and return it to the original question: how does your analysis begin to answer the question? How does it complicate the question? Within this paragraph you should begin to ask how this evidence and analysis suggests a new, broader question. You can ask this new, broader question in this paragraph, or maybe you'll want to take the whole fourth paragraph to describe the new question.

This isn't a formula - many questions will take a full paragraph of evidence and two of analysis before you can get anywhere, for example. Sometimes you will be able to do all four steps inside a single paragraph.

The goal here is to think of an essay as progressive, each idea building off of all the ideas that precede it. Your essay, like Middlemarch, is a kind of experiment: determine the question you want to ask and the parameters by which you wish to constrain it. After that, it's just scientific method: formulate a hypothesis, challenge it with experimentation (evidence and analysis), and formulate a new hypothesis to replace the old one.

Many of the hebdomadals I received last Friday were just fantastic - so many of you immediately grasped the meditative pace and investigative ambition of these assignments. I'd just like to share two of the many great ones that came in.

Erin from 301 has a wonderfully precise close reading of "Frost at Midnight" - detailed without being overlong:

I chose to write about Coleridge’s poem Frost at Midnight, lines 44-64. The first break in this stanza actually comes mid-sentence in line 51, Coleridge switches from talking to his sleeping child to reflecting on his own upbringing. Then in line 54 he switches back to talking to his child, and in line 60 Coleridge switches the direction of the poem from nature to the divine. The words ‘babe’ and ‘my’ tend to crop up in the first division that was delineated (lines 44-51) as well as the third segment of the poem (lines 54-59). Those two sections of the poem are when Coleridge is talking to his sleeping child. In the second section of the poem (lines 51-53) the words ‘I’ and ‘reared’ indicate that the poet isn’t talking to the child anymore but about his own childhood. The nature to divine switch can be found by examining such words as: lakes, shores, mountain (lines 55-58), eternal, God, Himself, Great universal Teacher, and spirit (lines 60-64). As one reads the text you get a sense of the life Coleridge wishes for his child to have, a life of “lovely shapes and sounds intelligible” instead of a life “’mid cloisters dim” as he had. Through nature Coleridge hopes that his child will grow closer to God and that God “shall mould Thy spirit”, yet another wish for how his child grows up.

Observe particularly the last two sentences there, into which Erin fits a good deal of lingual detail.

Following in Evie's vein from last week, Jessica (301) offers a creative, conversational meditation on imagination and "Eolian Harp":

I want to write a poem about a blue tree. I’ve never seen one – to my knowledge they don’t exist. I’ve never heard someone talk about blue trees or ponder quietly about their mythological importance. No, I daresay a poem about a blue tree could be my own original creation, just because I want to create it. But would it be poetry? Aristotle claims that poets are imitators, that everything and anything a poet writes “necessarily” imitates one of three specific objects: things as they once were or now are; things as people say or suppose they were or are; or things as they ought to be. Yet despite his notable interest in the infiniteness of the universe, Aristotle falls short of consistency and fails to realize the infiniteness of those within the universe and the artistic capabilities of imagination.

Romanticism embraces, to what I’m sure is Aristotle’s rather exquisite dismay, radical concepts like “feelings” and “imagination,” tied, ironically, into the permanence of science and omnipresence of nature. Be that as it may, Aristotle believed in the truth of imitation – in the direct representation of life through art – while the Romantics believed in pleasure and the beauty of reason. Do the two coincide? Are they mutually exclusive? In John Keats’s Ode on a Grecian Urn, it’s written that “beauty is truth, truth beauty” – but what is “truth” in the aesthetic of poetry, and in the mind of the poet? Is it only an imitation of life as our five senses reveal and conformity confirms, or the reasoning of one’s own self and imagination?

Though with no definite answer in clear sight (for some critics will question infinitely), the text in Samuel Coleridge’s Eolian Harp can reveal a few aspects of the Romantic interest in poetic imagination. To wit: though Coleridge admittedly daydreams – “whilst through my half-closed eye-lids I behold... many a thought uncalled and undetained, and many idle flitting phantasies” – allowing his mind to wander where it will, he invariably watches where it goes, often developing coincidences of thought into original revelations about life. In Eolian Harp, his thoughts converge on the idea that “all of animated nature” could be like any number of “organic harps diversely framed,” emboldened to think as they’re swept by “one [vast] intellectual breeze.”

Coleridge’s intimations of the infinite interconnectedness of nature, paired with his own harp metaphor, are no more truth than tangible – (think blue trees) – yet manifestly reflect the self-engineered art of a true poet’s imagination, Aristotle’s imitations be damned.

Because I just finished replying to the last hebdomadal a few minutes ago, I'm thinking I will need to cut back a little on the depth of my comments just so I can get them back to you more quickly.

This doesn't mean that I find your work unimportant or uninteresting - please, if you have even a single question about or reaction to my comments write me back as much as you like. I love hearing from you! This class should feel extremely interactive: you should never feel that you are shooting your readings and interpretations and ideas off into the void, never to hear back about them again.

Topic 1

Craft a sophisticated, interesting thesis that responds in depth to the surface and subsurface issues raised by one of the essay questions you received last week. Accompany this thesis with remarks about its consequence: what does your answer to this question reveal about one of the larger topics in this course - the invention of the self, the growth of Romantic aesthetics, the differences between the poets, the reading practice Middlemarch identifies for itself, etc.

Your hebdomadal should go on to

• identify the nuances of the question and text you're considering,
• the ways this text and question intersect with other texts and other questions,
• and what sorts of close readings you will deploy to support your argument

I can't give you a foolproof formula for writing this one, but I can give you some ideas about how I craft my theses, and about how I have seen students do the same in the past:

1. As you've probably observed, there is a certain flexibility about essay topics: if you can tweak one of these essay topics in such a way that it will interest you more, go ahead and do it for now. However, be sure to be explicit about this change and its value: "While it is valuable to compare Keats's sense of 'imagination' to Wordsworth's, our understanding of the difference of their aesthetic systems might be better advanced by looking at how these two poets incorporate metaphor differently into their descriptions of the natural world." And don't get huffy if I ask you to tweak your alternate topic a little more... =)

2. You don't have to think of a thesis as a thesis sentence: often, a good thesis will take you two or three sentences - or a lot of semicolons - to explain well. Many of the greatest theses are actually questions: "If we can meaningfully understand the Romantic 'imagination' in contrast to Aristotelian 'imitation,' how do we cope with both aesthetics' interest in portraying an idealized future?"

3. There is no obvious answer; there is no right answer. Throw out the idea that there is a correct solution to the essay topic. Often a good thesis recognizes that an important literary context is just an irresolvable mess: "While the Romantics clear prefer the pre-industrial country to the increasingly dehumanizing and mechanized city, they also recognize the inevitability of urban development and are ambiguous about its value." But that doesn't mean a thesis can just throw up its arms in defeat - it should still suggest an interesting conclusion: "...but this Romantic ambiguity about the city suggests that the power of the Romantic imagination wouldn't have been possible in a pre-industrialized state. Only with the city in the background can the poet appreciate the country."

4. If you see an obvious answer, or an uninteresting answer, or a superficial answer - avoid it. For example, while you could easily argue "Coleridge functionally subscribes to the same aesthetic system as Wordsworth but he happens to write different kinds of poetry," that's not a terribly interesting answer, and it misses a lot of subtleties. Better: "Wordsworth believed Coleridge was writing poetry less effective than his own because of X; however, this is merely a superficial difference - in fact, both Coleridge and Wordsworth aimed to do Y with poetry, as we can see by looking closely at Z."

Topic 2

Practice the close reading technique we saw Prof. Ortiz-Robles model in class today:

1. identify an image in a paragraph from Book II of Middlemarch;
2. explain how that image constructs meaning beyond the surface meaning of the words Eliot uses (that is, how the image turns into a metaphor);
3. explain what comparison or relationship that metaphor illuminates;
4. identify how the method of the metaphor is imitated within the organization or text of the paragraph itself (as Lydgate's "threads of investigation" repeat the threads of origin that carry organs back to the "primitive tissue");
5. and look into how the metaphor is problematized within the text.
6. Finally, briefly identify how this metaphor is important to our understanding of the broader themes and methods of Middlemarch.

These conferences are completely optional. I should add that meeting with me doesn't guarantee you'll do better on your essay; however, it's almost certain to give you some direction and immediate feedback if your argument sounds a little bit wonky.

If you would like to sign up for a short conference send me an email listing multiple empty slots from the list below and I'll get back to you as soon as I can. These conference times will be filled on a first-come, first-served basis. If you simply cannot meet with me during any of the listed times, contact me right away and we'll arrange an alternate time.

When you come to our conference, you should have with you at least a page of notes and ideas plotting out an answer to the essay topic you've selected.

All conferences are at the State Street Steep & Brew.

Wednesday 28 September
9:00 am - Danielle
9:20 -
9:40 -
10:00 - Mark
10:20 -
10:40 -

Thursday 29 September
10:00 am - Amy
10:20 - Emily S.
10:40 - Samantha
11:00 -
11:20 - Kevin
11:40 - Lindsay

4:00 pm - Emily C. (301)
4:20 - Erin
4:40 - Mallory
5:00 - Melanie

Wednesday 5 October
9:00 am - Joe
9:20 - Allyson
9:40 - Emily C. (302)
10:00 - Caitlin C.
10:20 -
10:40 - Stacey

1:00 pm (Espresso Royale) - Bailey
1:30 pm (Espresso Royale) - Jenny

Come visit me at the State Street Steep & Brew between 9:00 and 11:00 this (Wednesday) morning! The coffee is fantastic and the advice isn't so bad either.

My goal for today is to get the essay topics written, so if you want some say in them or just want a preview of what they might be I hope you will take the time to stop by and chat.

On your lecture syllabus, and in lecture itself, Prof. Ortiz-Robles has repeatedly remarked upon a One-Page Paper due in discussion this week.

For you guys, there is no such thing.

Another way of thinking about it: you have such a thing - hebdomadals - but it's due every week as opposed to just this week.

I should remark that the second hebdomadal assignment is posted down below.

Also, you will be getting a more serious essay assignment in class this week. This essay will be four to five pages long, due two weeks from this Friday.

Laura, in section 302, wrote the following investigation of "Michael." Pay attention to how she limits her discussion of the poem and how she incorporates that discussion into the larger framework of Wordsworth's poetic project:

Wordsworth’s poem “Michael” is a clear example of the effect the poet hoped to achieve with his audience through his experimental volume of verse. The text addresses a familiar “you” that places every reader in a spot around Wordsworth’s fireside. In this way Wordsworth provokes us to see the wonder in everyday existence.

The first stanza of “Michael” is a very personal invitation to the audience as individual readers. Wordsworth speaks as he would to an acquaintance or friend. This form of beginning is highly effective as a means to draw the reader into Wordsworth’s own feelings and appreciation for hardworking Michael’s simple but profound history.

In relating this provincial tale, Wordsworth is asking us to appreciate the power to be found in every human’s heart, whether they are a famous poet or a simple shepherd. We are to look up to and be guided by Michael’s family as our own “morning star,” just as the family’s peers did; through Michael’s love of nature and his devotion for his son, we are being shown a model of how to cherish the ordinary things in life.

On reading such a story, how can we help but be sympathetic? Wordsworth knew that his audience would see the beauty and depth of Michael’s life and legacy.

Through his poem “Michael,” Wordsworth asks us to appreciate his poetic experiment of making the ordinary experiences of life extraordinary. Michael fully invested his soul in the common objects that surrounded him, from the striking landscape he inhabited to his simple family life, with a son whose place in Michael’s heart was always secure. Even the heartache of the ending is beautiful in that it serves to further the reader’s awareness of the magnificence of the human soul. A poem that feels personal to each reader, “Michael” certainly persuades the audience to adopt Wordsworth’s ideas about poetry as their own.

Laura begins her first paragraph with the broadest level of her hebdomadal's investigation by immediately introducing her intent to read the poem within the context of Wordsworth's poetics. In the second sentence she details this context somewhat by reading the "you" of the first stanza of "Michael" in the light of the poet's commune with his audience. She follows this up, in the second paragraph, by pointing (generally) to instances of "you" in the first stanza.

By the end of the third paragraph, she has identified a reason local to the poem that Wordsworth calls on the second person pronoun. In the fifth paragraph, then, Laura synthesizes the ideas from her first and third paragraphs into a reading that positions "Michael" clearly within Wordsworth's larger poetics.

This is not to say that this hebdomadal is flawless - I would have really liked for her to have engaged a little more closely with the text: she could have supported her claims about the character of the first stanza with a quotation of a line or two of Wordsworth's text, which she could then have subjected to slightly more concrete analysis.

Moreover, like most writers first entering into a new genre, Laura's prose is slightly prone to cliche, repetition and summary. I understand that it's difficult to write about poetry unpoetically, but the last paragraph here is just a touch maudlin.

Evie, from section 301, gives us an interesting model of the kind of conversational prose possible within a hebdomadal:

In a rather preachy, religious way Wordsworth does present an “us” in Ode. In fact, he directly says “us” and other such words which refer to said “us”. Though he is speaking of his personal experience it is clear that, in Wordsworth’s opinion, all men naturally experience the cyclical existence he describes throughout Ode... or at least if they are as fabulous as Wordsworth is they do.

[...]

I [...] took it to be insinuated that the only way to return to this position of knowing heavenly truth/immortality is by death. Wordsworth was probably a pretty religious fellow, or at least pretty effected by religion as were most others at this time, and it seems pretty likely most hoped or believed they would return to heaven upon death. This brings a bit of exclusivity to Wordsworth’s “us”. This seems to entail that the “us” is only those of the righteous religious life. Clearly this leaves out all uncivilized, non-Christian heathens. Also, Wordsworth draws in a little exclusivity in that he has a rather pompous and conceited way of writing that gives me the lurking feeling that it is not just anyone who has the strength to, in old age, remember these bright, glorious moments of youth, though we all have them. Only those with the poetic and imaginative skills of someone like Wordsworth can have that, excluding many of more laymen like thinking.

However, for the most part, I think we can say we are all included in the smarty-pants part of Wordsworth’s “us”. We are all taking English 167... Clearly this require a certain amount of imaginative brains.

It sounds for all the world that Evie is just having a conversation with the poet.

For all that Evie's prose differs from Laura's, you can probably observe that both keep high above both poems. After they identify the contextual purpose of their selected pronouns, both devote a paragraph to discussing how that purpose fits into the larger project of the poem and then the larger project of the poet.

These are not the only ways to write hebdomadals; however, they illustrate the sorts of analysis I am looking for. Though, as I hope came across on Friday, I don't object to a closer reading of the words themselves. If Laura or Evie had pulled out a list of words, or a particular line, and subjected them to close analysis - well, that would have been even better.

Other ways of answering hebdomadal questions include

• analyzing lists (of words, of themes, of rhymes)
• asking more detailed questions
• comparing poets
• identifying the key line(s) of a poem and discussing them as synecdochically representative of the whole.

Be creative! Be personal! Hebdomadals are your space to interact aggressively with the reading and the lectures; I'd love to see you explore extremes.

I'm still working my way through your first hebdomadals; if you haven't heard back from me yet, please wait until you get an answer so you can fold my comments into your new writing.

Choose one of these two topics to write on this week. The first topic might be superficially easier, but the second topic will prepare you to answer questions that might well come up on the midterm or even in the first essay assignment.

1. The goal for this hebdomadal is to practice connecting close reading to a larger sense of a poet's aesthetic project.
   
   Thinking about how Wordsworth connects nature to imagination to pleasure to enlightenment / knowledge in the "Preface" to the Lyrical Ballads, provide a close reading of a short Coleridge stanza that we haven't covered in lecture or discussion. (If you want to work with "Rime of the Ancient Mariner," choose a whole part.)
   
   Your analysis should begin by paying careful attention to the language and structure of the stanza: how does the stanza break into sections? what types of words appear in which parts of the stanza?
   
   Then offer one or two sentences describing how this word choice and structure gives the reader a sense of the theme of the stanza.
   
   Conclude with a discussion how this stanza does or does not fit into the aesthetic system Wordsworth suggests in his "Preface."


2. (Thank Rebekah for this question.) I suggested in class on Friday that we might think of the Romantics' imagination as opposite the Platonic Aristotelean imitation.*
   
   Here is what Aristotle has to say about the poet:

   Since the poet is an imitator, exactly like a painter or any other maker of images, he must necessarily in every case be imitating one of three objects: things as they once were or now are; or things as people say or suppose they were or are; or things as they ought to be. (74-5.)

   In your hebdomadal, describe one way in which the Romantic poet's imagination differs from the Aristotelean poet's imitation. You may build your argument off of what we've said in lecture and discussion. You might also want to refer to Wordsworth's "Preface." Consider looking the words up in the Oxford English Dictionary to see if they have changed in meaning over time.
   
   Then choose a stanza from a Coleridge poem (or a full part if you write about "Rime of the Ancient Mariner"). Reading this stanza closely, explain how it reflects the Romantic interest in the poet's imagination. How does this imaginative interest differ from Aristotle's interest in imitation?
   
   * Plato was the first to call the poet's art imitative; however, Aristotle was really the first to codify that argument within an aesthetic system. It is against Aristotle's poetics of art-as-imitation that Wordsworth began to codify his poetics of art-as-expression.
   
   Work cited: Aristotle. Aristotle's Poetics. Trans. James Hutton. New York: W. W. Norton, 1982.

From The Perry Bible Fellowship by Nicholas Gurewitch.
Please, friends, it's spelled hebdomadal. These Latin nouns are fairly old - be kind to them.

The first hebdomadal assignment is still below.

So sitting in the lecture hall this afternoon, I was a little distressed to see the students around me (none of you, thank heavens) casually reading Middlemarch - the student next to me was at page 21. Now, it's possible that these students were conscientiously reviewing the text before class, but something tells me that such optimism is a little unfounded.

I realize that in your crazy lives it might be difficult to find the time to enjoy the delicious prose of Middlemarch properly, but I hope that you are at least able to get through the reading assignments in a timely way. This book is as important as it is massive, and it will appear on both essay topics and on both exams, and it's not the kind of book you want to cram in the weekend before finals. (To say nothing of the fact that it will be almost impossible to get a sense of the beauty that lies just under the surface of Eliot's prose and her characters if you are skimming the book frantically.)

Strategically, it's important to think about Middlemarch as a semester-long experience: because you might not remember every detail from Book I in December you might begin, now, to think about techniques for remembering its details three months hence.

Here are a couple quick recommendations of things you can do now to make reviewing for the tests and note-preparation for your essays a good bit easier:

1. KEEP A DETAILED CHARACTER LIST. Because Middlemarch sports a cast of several dozen important recurring characters, and because four weeks might intercede between a single character's disappearance and return, it's really really helpful keep a list of at least the major actors. Many readers use the blank pages at the beginning and end of these books; I'd actually recommend sitting down with the book after you've read a section and writing / typing out something like ~
   
   Fred Vincy: Father wanted him to enter the church - Fred dropped out - in love with Mary Garth? - gambling debts? - expects to inherit from Featherstone - pampered by his mother... (And be sure to leave plenty of room to document more information as it arrives.)

Here's a quick list of important characters: all three Brookes, Sir James Chettam, Edward Casaubon, Will Ladislaw, Dr. Tertius Lydgate, Fred and Rosamond Vincy, and Mary Garth. After Book II, be sure to add Nicholas Bulstrode and Rev. Farebrother. There are probably at least another 30 characters who come and go, but those twelve are the really important ones.


2. RECORD CRUCIAL EVENTS AND MOMENTS OF EPIPHANY. There are only a few really important events in the novel - the proposal letter from Casaubon is one of them - but you should probably note them as they pass. Prof. Ortiz-Robles will doubtlessly mention these events in class too; if you find him dwelling on a particular passage (as the one today about Mrs. Cadwallader and the metaphor of the microscope) you might mark the page with one of those 3M marker flags.
   
   You might also want to mark moments where you think characters might begin to change. This usually happens in fits and starts - Fred seems chastened by Featherstone's lecture about gambling and debt, but you might find that he ends up back at the gambling table soon. Still, major character developments are generally worth noting, as much of the soul of the novel is revealed in those spaces.

An enthusiastic note from the Writing Center:

Just an FYI that there is still room in many sections of the Writing Center class, "Literary Analysis: No Problem!" Perhaps, with due dates fast approaching for your papers - the first one is due October 7th, just three weeks from this Friday - you may wish to capitalize on this opportunity for some preperatory help.

Literary Analysis: No Problem!

This two-session Writing Center class will focus on writing a critical analysis assigned in beginning literature courses. In this mini-class, you'll

• explore organizational strategies that work best in writing papers about literature,


• look at strategies for doing a close reading,


• find ways to make a comparison paper seamless, and


• examine critical strategies as well as organizational ones.

Offered at these dates and times:

Thursdays, Sept. 15 & 22 from 3:30 to 5:00 pm, Sec. 1
Tuesdays, Sept. 20 & 27 from 3:00 to 4:30 pm, Sec. 2
Wednesdays, Sept. 21 & 28 from 4:00 to 5:30 pm, Sec. 3
Fridays, Sept. 23 & 30 from 1:30 to 3:00 pm, Sec. 4
Mondays, Sept. 26 & Oct. 3 from 3:30 to 5:00 pm, Sec. 5
Thursdays, Sept. 29 & Oct. 6 from 3:30 to 5:00 pm, Sec. 6

Please register. It's easy.

You can register online 24 hours a day at www.wisc.edu/writing (or click here), call 263-1992 when the Writing Center is open, or stop by the Writing Center in 6171 Helen C. White Hall.

And for those looking for someone to help critique their papers, the Writing Center offers individual conferences with experienced writing instructors. Call 263-1992 to make an appointment!

The UW-Madison Writing Center

The first hebdomadal assignment is still very much listed down below.



Observe the lovely, trim search field over on the sidebar there. It accesses the University's online subscription to the Oxford English Dictionary, the premiere dictionary of our language. In physical form, the twenty-volume OED costs around $850 and weighs just over 150 pounds; we academics of the information age should seriously appreciate the online version.

Play around with searching the OED for a few minutes; get comfortable with its interface and the glorious depth of its definitions. Use the Etymology button to see where our words come from; play with the alphabetical list of entries on the left-hand side of the screen to visit words' neighbors. If you don't have a serious, thick dictionary to keep beside you as you read, and if you have a computer in your room, you should get used to using the OED to look up the words you aren't familiar with.

And even if your SAT studying taught you obscure terms like parterre, practicing looking up particularly crucial terms to discover the nuances of their multiple meanings, to check out their etymologies, and to see whether its meaning has changed since the Nineteenth Century.

For example, did you notice affections in line 42 of "Tintern Abbey"? Here's its context: "that serene and brightened mood, / In which the affections gently lead us on" (ll 41f). What could "affections" mean in that context? Check out the OED definition, and scroll down to meaning IV.

You should be reading Wordsworth and Eliot with a dictionary open beside you, or at least available via wifi on your laptop.



...and if you have a birthday coming up, consider asking for the American Heritage Dictionary, 4th edition, or - if you don't want 7.9 pounds of lingual history sitting on your lap - consider the 3.8-pound American Heritage College Dictionary.

The first hebdomadal topic is available below.

It's fun to get to read and talk about books, it's always good to learn from others' worldviews, but for me the thing that makes teaching eternally worthwhile is getting to know, and to work with, you guys. I'm not being (merely) a sappy schmuck when I tell you that I really, really enjoyed meeting you Friday morning and that I'm excited about our opportunity to work together this semester.

It'll take me a couple weeks to memorize your names, so please be patient with me. I'll be using those index cards with your names like flash cards to memorize with whom, exactly, I can gossip about the OC.

If you would like to help me along in this getting-to-know-you process, I'd love for you to stop by my office hours on Wednesday morning (9 to 11 am at the Steep & Brew).

If that's not an especially convenient time slot for you, consider sending me an email to say hello. I'd love to hear more about you than you had a chance to write on the index card -

• What kind of music do you listen to? (I'm in the middle of a desperate campaign to develop taste in music - if you can help me out, I'd be much obliged.)


• What do you most love/hate about reading? Writing? What are you most looking forward to doing in class this semester? What are you most dreading?


• What are your learning goals for English 167 this semester? How to write more clearly? more livelily? How to become a sensitive reader of subtle and complex texts? How to judge a good book from a bad one? How to enjoy literature?

I'm really looking forward to getting to know more about you!

Your hebdomadal is due, via email, no later than a minute past midnight Friday September 16. (For most of us that means Thursday night.)

Compose your hebdomadal in a word processor but please send it in the text of the email, not as an attachment.

Choose either one Wordsworth poem that we will have covered in lecture by Sept. 16 - "Tintern Abbey," "Michael," or "Ode: Intimations of Immortality" - or a favorite song of your choice* and answer one of the following groups of questions about it:

1. Who narrates or speaks this text? Are there many "I's" or only one? What does the text tell us about what a self can know or do?


2. Does the text address a "you"? If so, does it mean to address you, the reader, or some other audience, a "you" within the text? What does the text ask the reader to do and to know? Does it imagine "you" as sympathetic or as distant, and how can you tell?


3. Does the text imagine an "us" - a group? If so, what are the boundaries of this "us"? Who is included?


4. Does the text imagine a "them" - an other - something or someone that cannot be assimilated or absorbed? What kinds of groups or figures does the text go out of its way to exclude?

* I find that songs by The Killers work extremely well for these questions. In any case, if you choose to analyze one of your favorite songs please include a copy of the lyrics in your hebdomadal.

Picture of the Humanities Building hallway by Catherine Price.

I'm excited about meeting you tomorrow morning! 301eers, I'll be seeing you bright and early in Humanities 2637 at 8:50 am - bring coffee if you need to stay awake. 302eers, you and I get together at the slightly saner hour of 9:55 in Humanities 2625.

If you're new to the Humanities building - I'm sorry. You should schedule an extra 5 minutes of Getting Lost time.

For our first day of class you won't need to bring any of the textbooks; however, you might find it worthwhile to look over your notes from today's lecture for a few minutes before class.

Incidentally, the section syllabi linked on the left have been updated slightly. If you've downloaded one already, you might want to get the more current version.

Want to make your next week a little bit easier? As you read "Tintern Abbey" - and do so at least twice, and carefully - mark the pronouns that you encounter: I, thou / thee, and so on. And think, just for a minute or two, about how Wordsworth uses these pronouns to constitute his audience.

...and so it begins! Today was all about establishing the goals and standards of the course, but on Thursday we get to dive directly into some of the most influential poetry in the history of English literature. I'm not sure whether Prof. Ortiz-Robles plans on focusing Thursday's lecture on "Tintern Abbey" or the "Preface," but we will be returning to both these texts in class this week, next week, and often thereafter.

For those of you waiting for your copies of the Norton Anthology 2A: The Romantic Period to arrive from Amazon, say, there are Bartleby versions of this week's Wordsworth reading online: "Tintern Abbey" and "Preface to Lyrical Ballads."

If you want a sense of the countryside Wordsworth (or his speaker) inhabits in "Tintern Abbey," you might want to browse the Flickr tinternabbey and wye tags. Here are some particularly impressive photographs ~


Tintern Abbey by Kittenry. (You might also want to look at Simon Harb's impressive photograph of the Abbey from above.)


The River Wye by SKW.


The Wye River valley by BabyDinosaur.

You can also take a Flickr tour of Wordsworth's life: Dove Cottage by Miyoko, Wordsworth's writing bower at his summer home by Johnnone, Wordsworth's grave by Ennor.

Our semester begins tomorrow (Tuesday), 1 pm, in 145 Birge Hall, with an introductory lectury by Prof. Ortiz-Robles. Where's Birge? Just to the left of Bascom as you come up the hill. Here's a map. Here's another (Birge is #19).

From without:

And from within:

Welcome, 167eers (discussion sections 301 and 302), to your class blog! Please be patient as I work on putting this site together here at the start of the semester.

Incidentally, if you have any suggestions for a better title, I'm all ears. I'm also happy to adjust the content of the site to meet your needs - shoot me an email with any comments or suggestions about resources to include on the sidebar, etc.

As a first bit of content, check out this fantastic, legally-downloadable, completely-unrelated-to-English-167 song by Of Montreal: "Wraith Pinned to the Mist (and other games)" available here.