Ode on a Grecian URL

Sunday, September 18, 2005

Hebdomadal 2 (updated 9/18)

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.

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."

(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.