Syllabus

Term 1

1. Introduction: lyric and the affective turn

Unit 1: Romanticism

Critical reading for Unit 1:

Required: Isobel Armstrong, 'Thinking Affect', in The Radical Aesthetic (Blackwell, 2000) (PDF Document)

(PDF Document)

Supplementary: Adam Potkay, 'What is joy?' in The story of joy: from the Bible to late Romanticism (2007) (PDF Document)

(PDF Document)

2. William Blake, Walt Whitman

Blake, 'To my friend Butts I write'; extract from 'Milton'

Walt Whitman, 'Song of Myself'; 'A Sight in Camp of the Day-Break Gray and Dim'

3. William Wordsworth, S. T. Coleridge

W. Wordsworth, 'There was a boy'; 'A slumber did my spirit seal'; 'The Last of the Flock'

Coleridge, 'The Eolian Harp'; 'The Pains of Sleep'

4. John Keats and Felicia Hemans

Keats, 'This living hand'; 'Bright star'; 'Ode to a Nightingale'

Hemans, 'Properzia Rossi'; 'The Grave of a Poetess'

5. John Clare, Dorothy Wordsworth

Clare, ‘Langley Bush’, ‘To a Fallen Elm’, ‘The Mores’; 'To John Clare'

D. Wordsworth, The Grasmere Journal

6. Reading week

Unit 2: Nineteenth-century affect

Critical reading for Unit 2:

Required: Thomas Dixon, 'From passions and affections to emotions', in From Passions to Emotions (2006) (PDF Document)

(PDF Document)

Supplementary: Jonathan Bate, 'What are poets for?' in The Song of the Earth (2000) (PDF Document)

(PDF Document)

7. Alfred Tennyson and the spasmodic school

Tennyson, 'Break, break, break', 'The Merman', 'The Mermaid'

Sydney Dobell, 'Wind'; Balder: Scene XXXVIII

8. Christina Rossetti and Emily Dickinson

Rossetti, 'A Coast Nightmare'; 'Autumn'; 'The World'; 'Summer is Ended'

Dickinson, 'I felt a funeral in my brain'; 'Wild Nights! Wild Nights!'; '"Nature" is what we see'; 'At half past three'

9. Gerard Manley Hopkins, A. C. Swinburne

Hopkins, 'No worst, there is none'; 'Binsey Poplars'; 'That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire'; Selections from the Notebooks (1937)

Swinburne, 'A Ballad of Death'; 'Dolores (Notre-Dame des Sept Douleurs)'

10. Rainer Maria Rilke, C. P. Cavafy

Rilke, 'I Am, O Anxious One', 'You who never arrived'; 'Falling Stars', 'The Vast Night'

Letters to a Young Poet, letters 7 and 8

Cavafy, 'Body, remember'; 'Come back'; 'Outside the house'; 'Prayer'

Term 2

1. Introduction: lyric and modern affect

Unit 3: Modern lyric

Critical reading for Unit 3:

Required: James Elkins, 'The Ivory Tower of Tearlessness', in Pictures and Tears: A history of people who have cried in front of paintings (Routledge, 2001) (PDF Document)

(PDF Document)

Supplementary: Martha Nussbaum, 'Ladders of Love', in Upheavals of thought: The Intelligence of emotions (2002) (PDF Document)

(PDF Document)

2. e. e. cummings, Amy Lowell
cummings, 'i like my body'; 'since feeling is first'; 'i am a little church'; 'somewhere i have never travelled'

Lowell, 'Opal'; 'Superstition'; 'Autumn'; 'Poetry'

3. Robert Frost, A. R. Ammons

Frost, 'Home Burial'; 'Birches'; letters, to John Bartlett, to Sidney Cox

Ammons, 'Poetics'; 'The City Limits'; 'Winter Scene'

4. Elizabeth Bishop, Sylvia Plath

Bishop, 'The Man Moth'; 'The Moose'

Plath, 'Tulips'; 'I am Vertical'; 'Blackberrying'

5. Allen Ginsberg, W. S. Merwin

Ginsberg, 'A Supermarket in California'; 'Sunflower Sutra'

Merwin, 'Fox Sleep'; 'Unknown bird'; 'Another River'

6. Reading week

Unit 4: the lyric and late capitalism

Critical reading for Unit 4:

Required: Teresa Brennan, 'Introduction', in The Transmission of Affect (2004) (PDF Document)

(PDF Document)

Supplementary: Antonio Damasio, 'Emotion and feeling', in The feeling of what happens : body and emotion in the making of consciousness (2000) (PDF Document)

(PDF Document)

7. Charles Bukowski, Eileen Myles

Bukowski, 'The Man with the Beautiful Eyes'; 'The Feel of it'

Myles, 'An American Poem'; 'Twilight Train'; 'Peanut Butter'

8. Denise Levertov, Susan Howe

Levertov, 'A cure of souls'; 'A time past'; 'Clouds'

Howe, extract from 'Chanting at the Crystal Sea'; 'That This'

9. Peter Larkin, J. H. Prynne

Larkin, 'Sparse reach stretches the field, 2'; ‘praying // firs // attenuate’ (PDF Document)

(PDF Document)

Prynne, 'The Holy City', 'Moon Poem', 'Charm against too many apples', 'Shadow Songs' (PDF Document)

(PDF Document)

10. Jennifer Moxley, Alice Oswald

Moxley, 'There is a birdsong at the root of poetry'; 'On this side nothing'; 'Fixed Idea' (PDF Document)

(PDF Document)

Oswald, 'The Apple Shed'; 'Autobiography of a stone'; 'Birdsong for two voices' (PDF Document)

(PDF Document)

'I have said that poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity: the emotion is contemplated till, by a species of reaction, the tranquillity gradually disappears, and an emotion, kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind.' - William Wordsworth, 1802 ‘Preface’ to the Lyrical Ballads

'The poet’s emotional signature is retained in the poem. Aristotle, in his bipartite model of the soul, places the emotions under the obedient, illogical part, reason with command and logic. Yet both parts are cognitive and partake in the logos. Thought is the efficient cause of emotion. This is why a poem’s intelligence is more moving than its heart.' - Jennifer Moxley, 'Fragments of a Broken Poetics' (2010)

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