Week 4

Everything speaks.–James Joyce, Ulysses

Good day!  Hope you are well.  I will return essay #2 today and we will continue discussion, playing a little catch-up with some pieces we have yet to cover, including the ballad "Woodstock," by Joni Mitchell, which we'll watch Mitchell perform on Youtube.

We will discuss also the free verse poem "The Red Wheelbarrow," by William Carlos Williams, a poet who strove for simplicity and directness of language, which is one means of making poetry more accessible and of showing how everyday, ordinary experience speaks to us, or can, in poetry.  The still life scene of a barnyard, "red wheel / barrow/ glazed with rain / water" (lines 3-6) at its center, arrests our eye in an act of pure contemplation.  The "white / chickens" of the final lines enliven the scene.  In what sense can the poet claim "so much depends / upon" (lines 1-2) these humble elements?  One answer is that art depends upon our immediate sensations and perceptions of the animate and inanimate alike, and our ability to make some sense of it all, or to order it in seemingly meaningful ways.  The Imagists were a group who drew inspiration from the poetry of the East, including haiku and tanka, poetic forms in which precise, concrete images, strictly limited by syllable number and line length, tell the whole story, however indirectly.  

Poet Mary Oliver writes of "The Red Wheelbarrow"  that it "might serve as a 'text' for a discussion of free verse", that it "has passed through endless scrutiny, and still it refuses to give up all its secrets."  Williams famously said "no ideas but in things."  The Imagists focused on the object world, the act of attention,  the play of imagination, and language. 

We are fascinated by objects ("materialism" to the side) and our emotional ties to objects remains strong.  Size, shape, color, number–each is a marker, meaningful, bespeaking our collective history and language itself.  The particular is important, and just as life is lived in detail, art lives by it.  Imagery is the collective pattern of images–representations of one thing by another (here language).  The term Figurative language also refers to imagery–specifically a metaphor, simile, personification, symbol, or other used to convey an image by means of identity or comparison.    "Presentiment–is that long Shadow–on the lawn/Indicative that suns go down" (lines 1-2) writes Emily Dickinson, as she defines the word by means of reference to a concrete particular we have all seen–the sun descending, casting long shadows, foreshadowing something . . . rather ominous in her equation, a symbolic darkness.

Week 3

Welcome Back!

      Joni Mitchell's ballad "Woodstock," is a song/poem about a touchstone event in the lives of a generation of American youth that makes a theme of the journey through life, innocence and experience, and the yearning for core experience and truth.  The symbol of the Garden, familiar to most of us through the biblical story of creation described in Genesis, recurs in the poem's refrain:

            We are stardust

            We are golden

            And we've got to get ourselves

            Back to the garden.  (lines 9-12)

Perhaps we are transported to the biblical Garden of Eden, the first world of Adam and Eve, according to the Old Testament.  But what does the garden suggest, as symbol, to us today?  What kind of relationship(s) do we maintain with the natural world, with each other?  The subject is one that strikes to the core of our existence.  Often we speak of heaven and hell, metaphorically, to describe states of being, not literal places, and thus the images evoked are always open to investigation and interpretation, as are our experiences and states of being.  Figurative language–symbol, metaphor, personification-allows us to link the known with the unknown, and to discover through implied comparison or identity the nature of our experience.  

       "I wandered lonely as a cloud," writes William Wordsworth.  Literal and figurative language reflects the actual world of our senses and mind, our sensations and and responses to them:  "It is the East, and Juliet is the Sun!" cries Romeo, and we understand how she blazes forth from darkness, just as does the familiar sun.

Identify some of the figurative devices that appeal to you and think about how you might organize an essay on the rich resource that figurative language provides in several literary pieces.

See an outline of Joseph Campbell's description of the Hero's Journey here:  http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/smc/journey/ref/summary.html

Week 2

Welcome back to the site, and to class.  Melville Cane's poem "Snow Toward Evening" is a short, rhymed poem of varying meter and line lengths.  The poem illustrates nicely the musical effects of sound devices such as end rhyme, internal rhyme, alliteration, and assonance, particularly in the last lines with the repetition of i and e vowel sounds, and l, t, and f consonants, which lend an airy crispness to the image of falling snowflakes.  The poem describes an unexpected moment of grace which makes for an epiphany, for speaker and reader alike.  The epiphany is a moment of insight or grace, when one becomes aware of something divine breaking through to consciousness.  The late poet Czeslaw Milosz writes in A Book of Luminous Things that in ancient Greece (circa 5^th century B.C.), 

a polytheistic antiquity saw epiphanies at every step, for streams and woods were inhabited by dryads and nymphs, while the commanding gods looked and behaved like humans, were endowed with speech, could, though with difficulty, be distinguished from mortals, and often walked the earth.  Not rarely they would visit households and were recognized by hosts.  The Book of Genesis tells about a visit paid by God to Abraham, in the guise of three travellers. Later on, the epiphany as appearance, the arrival of Christ, occupies an important place in the New Testament. (4)

Indeed, the pantheon of ancient Greek gods and goddesses may be seen as personifications of the human psyche, and their storied endeavors and exploits among themselves and mortals reflect our own aspirations and temptations, our own light and the dark forces, conscious and unconscious realms of experience and imagination.  As Arianna Huffington writes in The Gods of Greece,

[ . . . ] the classic conflict that has dominated Western   literature and has even entered our everyday language is he conflict between Apollo and Dionysos­–between the Apollonian and Dionysian powers in man, between the need for order, balance and clarity, and the instinct for freedom, ecstasy and exultation.   (16)

Whether the god or goddess called Olympos home, or Hades, each represented something alive, real, and open to change.  All could trace their origin to the Great Mother archetype, goddess, called Gaia.  As Earth Mother, she represents the primordial feminine power of generation and renewal.  The goddesses Athena, Artemis, Aphrodite, and others represent individual aspects of the totality of Gaia.

Speaking of symbols and stories, the myths and legends, whether of ancient Babylon, Egypt, Greece, India or the Judeo-Christian world, Joseph Campbell wrote that they refer “primarily to our inner selves” and not to “outer historical events” (Thou Art That 28), that they are psychological archtypes known to all mythologies.”  Beyond the necessities imposed by our animal nature, he writes, is “another order of living, which the animals do not know, that of awe before the mystery of being, the mysterium tremendum et fascinans, that can be the root and branch of the spiritual sense of one’s days” (29).

And so when we read “To see a World in a Grain of Sand,” by William Blake, we may sense the great mystery of the heavenly, infinite, eternal realms evoked by his words and images. By metaphor and symbol we bridge in language inner and outer worlds, subject and object, the personal and the cosmic.

The following URL provides a link to Joseph Campbell's description of the Hero's Journey:  http:  //www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/smc/journey/ref/summary.html

The links below discuss and illustrate the matters of presenting textual sources in direct quotation and paraphrase, and avoiding the dreaded plagiarism:

http://www.writing.wisc.edu/Handbook/QPA_quoting.html

http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/747/03/

http://www.writing.wisc.edu/Handbook/QPA_plagiarism.html

http://www.writing.wisc.edu/Handbook/QPA_paraphrase2.html

http://www.writing.wisc.edu/Handbook/ReadingPoetry.html

Week 1

Welcome to the Introduction to Literature (ENC1102) class here at the Art Institute.  As your instructor, I will post description of course material and assignments and discussion of key terms and selections presented in class (and additional material too, perhaps).  You should visit the site to stay abreast of material and apprised of any changes to assignments or selections to be covered.

       This first page may be updated to cover week one's lecture and discussion before we meet again for class week 2.  Until then  . . .

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One of the poem's in this week's selections is titled "The Birds Have Vanished," written by an 8th century poet named Li Po.  In four lines, two unrhymed couplets, each a complete sentence, the poet describes in present tense a mountain view.  In the first couplet, the mountain has not yet made its appearance; we see a sky from which "the birds have vanished" and "the last cloud drains away"(lines 1-2).  We are perhaps made aware of the evanescence of things, that what is here is transient, changing, disappearing right before our eyes.  In the second stanza (also a couplet) the speaker's presence and that of a mountain appear together:  "We sit together, the mountain and me, / until only the mountain remains"(3-4).  The reader becomes aware, again, of presence followed by an absence.  It seems a riddle, what to make of this sitting and of the speaker's disappearance.  Certainly the mountain will not fly nor drain away and in that it becomes, in this interpretation, a feature of the landscape that invites us to contemplate what endures, and all that a mountain and birds and clouds may suggest metaphorically.  Imaginatively, we may lose our ordinary sense of self and of space and time by meditating upon these images.

We are born, grow to youth and maturity, age, and die . . . uncaged we hope!, and in this our lives reflect the age old succession of the seasons and life elemental.  We live in time, and in space, and the phases of life and nature provide rich subject matter for writers reflecting on the experience of living.  Nature, in fact, often becomes a mirror of ourselves and the phases we find ourselves experiencing.  We are part of universal nature, and we bring our particular human nature to it, with our griefs, our joys, our forebodings, aspirations, and imaginings.  The Book of Nature informs us to the extent we take the time to read it and to acknowledge how it shapes us. A falling leaf, a sudden snowfall, the stars shining in the blackness of space–these speak to us.  Look at the poem "Music of Spheres," by Jean Follain, and ask yourself what the various elements in the poem bring to mind.  Jot down your responses, pinned to the various images you find in the poem, and of course the narrative arc of the poem.  Google the title phrase.  What kind of experience do you read here in the poem, taking all its details into account?

You will notice in the first paragraph above that I reproduce lines of text to illustrate and to ground my reading in the precise language used by the poet.  You will want to present portions of the text to readers and show how you have arrived at your conclusions about its construction and meaning.  Use quotation marks around the word-for-word phrasings and lines and a slash or virgule to separate lines of text that run no more than three successive lines.  Blocks of text four or more lines in length should be indented or offset 10 spaces, without use of quotation marks.  In "Snow Toward Evening,"  Melville Cane shows the surprise and delight of an unexpected turn in the weather.  The poem begins thus:

         

          Suddenly the sky turned grey.

          The day,

          Which had been bitter and chill,

          Grew soft and still.     (1-4)

                                         

The lines above, by virtue of end rhyme, appear as couplets of uneven length that come to a hushed, extended close with the words "soft and still."  The next line is a single word, "Quietly," from which the remainder of the poem hangs, as if suspended, like the "petals cool and white," the snow that falls "from some invisible blossoming tree" (lines 7, 6).   The airy dance of flakes is wonderful, a kind of epiphany, a manifestation of divine grace.