Syllabus Bleg: Poetry & Social Crisis

[X-posted.]

As her name suggests, The Little Womedievalist lives in the sparsely populated academic “ghetto” known as “medieval studies.” (A wonderful place to visit, but I didn’t want to live there.) Thing is, when medievalists tip-toe into the 15^th Century, they’re often paralyzed by the unfamiliar literary landscape.  “Whither my rigid poetic forms?  And feudalism!  What have you people done with feudalism?” Medievalists are confused, nay, mortified by the shiny baubles and the steam which periodically issues from them. 

So sometimes they need us soon-to-be-unemployed/forever-unemployable modern-types after all, like when they want to write a syllabus on “The Poetry of Crisis.” Below the fold you’ll find The Little Womedievalist’s skeletal syllibi.  Lots of war, lots of plague.  The word “pandemic” appears no less than seventeen times.

She’d appreciate any advice that’ll help her “flesh it out.”  (O how quickly our dead metaphors are enlivened!) 

Here (in no particular order) are the topics she wants to address:

Irish potato famine

WWII

Vietnam War

Influenza pandemic of 1918

Revolutionary War

French Revolution (poems written in English)

AIDS pandemic

Cold War/ Communist Scare/ McCarthy

States of anarchy/ regime changes

Great Depression (I only have Agee and Evans so far…)

Current “war on terror”/ Iraq/ Afghanistan/ post-9/11

Any other major political/social/religous crises

Here is what she has so far:

Weeks 1 – 3 (Social and political crises)

William Blake - “The Tyger,” ; Selections from Prophet Against Empire (David Erdman)

Middle English Plowman poems

Agee and Evans, selections from “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men”; background reading on the Great Depression

“Tax Hath Tenet Us Alle” (Short ME macaronic poem)

“Introduction” from The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry, ed. and intro by Jon Silkin (on reserve). [Though we won’t be covering all of the poets discussed in Silkin’s intro, this will outline a number of the critical questions and issues we want to ask about the poems we will be reading during weeks 4 and 5.]

Weeks 4 & 5 (War, Rebellion, Unrest, Protest)

Michael Drayton, “The Battle of Agincourt”  (ERP 261)

Milton, “On the Late Massacre in Piedmont” (Background Reading.)

Yeats – “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death”

Melville – “The Portent,” “Shiloh”

Walt Whitman – “Vigil Strange I Kept on the Field One Night,” “Twenty-eight Young Men Bathed By the Shore,” selections from “Drum Taps”

Thomas Hardy – “Drummer Hodge,”

Wilfred Owen – “Dulce et Decorum Est,”

Siegfried Sassoon –

Charles Hamilton Sorley – “When You See Millions of the Mouthless Dead”

Edward Thomas – “A Private”

Weeks 6 & 7 (Pandemics, Poverty and Famine; mortality & carpe diem poems)

Lydgate

Thomas Nashe – “In time of plague,” “Autumn Hath all the Summer’s Fruitful Treasure”

Robert Herrick, “To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time”

The AIDS pandemic – the poetic response

The 1918 Influenza pandemic, and poetic response

The Irish Potato Famine, and poetic response

Weeks 8 & 9 (Crises of conscience)

Fulke Greville

John Donne (esp. the Holy Sonnets)

Emily Dickinson – From “Time and Eternity,” “TO know just how he suffered would be dear” (XIX), “I ’VE seen a dying eye” (XV),

Robert Browning – “Caliban upon Setibos”

Week 10 (Formal crises)

Sidney, “In Defense of Poesie”

Advise away!  C’mon!  You know you love nothing more than poking holes in other people’s syllabi.  Normally all that effort goes for naught.  Here, you have a chance to make a difference.  Go for it! What are you waiting for?  Act now before your influence expires! 

Comments

[Flavia]

What a wonderful idea for a course! I *wouldn't* have gone and criticized anything here, but since you ASKED, here are some suggestions, mostly on the Renaissance end.

"Late Massacre in Piedmont" - gah. Not a great sonnet. I'd recommend either of Milton's two sonnets on Cromwell instead (and if you wanted to work in "When I Consider" or "Methought I Saw" under the personal crisis category, so much the better. (Just trying to make my boy Johnny M. look good, here.)

For Donne, I'd probably do a couple of the Hymns or other devotional verse rather than/in addition to the Holy Sonnets: "Hymn to God My God in My Sickness" and "Hymn to Christ at the Author's Last Going into Germany," esp.

And how about Lovelace, "To Lucasta, Going to the Wars"?

And for "formal crises," Herbert's "Jordan (1)" or "Jordan (2)" are both good.

On a non-Early Modern note: what about Auden? His "September 1, 1939" got emailed around a lot in the wake of 9/11, although obviously it's about a quite different war, and "Stop All the Clocks" would also be good for the section on mortality.

Lowell also seems like he should be in here. "For the Union Dead," perhaps?

And in addition to Sassoon, you might consider Rupert Brooke. His poems haven't aged well (and were probably always overrated), but they might be useful for just that reason--as a response to war that doesn't seem as useful or authentic to us any more.

Okay, that's enough from ME. Good luck--and I'd love to see the final syllabus, whenever it might be complete.

[prefer not to say]

For modern disaster, Carolyn Forche has a sexy anthology called something like "Against Forgetting" that pretty much covers everything bad the 20th c had to offer. Her own stuff on El Salvador in _The Country Between Us_ is very important too (although I grow exhausted trying to imagine teaching the nuances of mid-70s El Salvador to post-9/11 college students).

For Irish potato famine, Chris Morash has a good anthology, as well as an earlier book on styles of poetic commemoration of the famine that would be a great cheat-sheet to teaching some of the stuff. Eavan Boland has some stuff on the long view of Ireland's tragic side in _The Lost Land_.

For Depression-era disasters that led to labor movements, Muriel Rukeyser's "Book of the Dead" is pretty much indispensable.

[Dr. Virago]

Ooh, what an excellent idea for a syllabus. First, I just wanted to say: way cool, Little Womedievalist!

Second, what about:
- Wulfstan's "Sermo Lupi" for the war/rebellion/unrest section
- Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath (I know, obvious and high school-y, but can you do the Great Depression/Dust Bowl without it?)

Third...I work on 15th century texts and I'm pretty sure I'm a medievalist. Then again, I was sure until today. Maybe I don't live in the ghetto after all! Woo-hoo! :)

[forgottenboy]

Get ready for the obvious, because a few famous poems came to mind that would be wonderfully suited.

First of all, Langston Hughes' "Harlem," for social and political crises. ("What happens to a dream deferred? [...] Does it explode?)

Also, for crises of conscience, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" by Eliot. ("Should I, after tea and cakes and ices / Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?")

On the French Revolution: Wordsworth's "...Tintern Abbey."

So, like I said, famous poems, but not less affecting for it. Though much is taken, much abides.

Thanks for putting out the call! This was fun.

[forgottenboy]

Oh, for heaven's sake, Wikipedia, when time is short and anthologies scarce, don't mislead me.

The Wordsworth poem is "The French Revolution, As It Appeared..." and not "Tintern Abbey."