Wednesday, 3/25

* Open

*  Alfred, Lord Tennyson

•  Tennyson: A Brief Biography (1809--1892)

• Break, Break, Break
• Crossing the Bar
• The Eagle  

• Compare with Robert Browning (1812--1889)
• My Last Duchess
• Meeting at Night 
• Parting at Morning

HW: Read; J14 Due Tuesday

Lord Alfred Tennyson

Robert Browning

Tuesday: Victorian Gardens

* Open

• Read this excerpt from Men and Gardens (1959) by Nan Fairbrother on the gardens of Versailles (late 1600s) with quotes from a Victorian art critic, Walter Pater (1839-1894):
• "Most of us nowadays have an unquestioned idea of a garden as a place for growing flowers. But it is a humble conception, and we must get rid of it before we go to Versailles or we shall certainly be disappointed. Versailles is not a garden in this sense, but rather a work of art which uses plants as its medium, as a painter uses the appearance of objects, and a poet the words of human speech. Like most other mediums of art, it is impure: gardens can be used for growing flowers in, as words are used to state facts and painting to illustrate views. But none of these functions is art. Of all the mediums of artistic expression, only music is pure in this sense that it has no other meaning, and all art, says [Walter] Pater, “constantly aspires towards the condition of music. For while in all other kinds of art it is possible to distinguish the matter from the form, and the understanding can always make this distinction, yet it is the constant effort of art to obliterate it.” So that it is as perverse to go to Versailles to look at the plants as to use Cezanne’s landscapes as guide-book illustrations to Provence, or Shelley’s “Ode” as a scientific statement of the habits of the skylark. We must think of Versailles as music. The great central vista is the main theme, an untroubled progress to the horizon, simple, noble, and mysterious. Then there are variations, developments, lesser themes, smooth passages of water, gay effects of flowers, fanciful interludes in the bosquets [formal, planned, woods]. But all is music, calm and confident, with no doubtful effects or random charms, no chance felicities which may or may not succeed. We share the intellectual tranquility of perfection, a conviction of the inevitably right, which sways our spirits to peace, as Duns Scotus swayed Hopkins.
  
  But I am incurably English. I do not like Versailles except to think about at a distance. I do not particularly enjoy the sensation of being what Corneille calls saoul de gloire [drunken glory]; for me the peace too easily becomes boredom. I believe that Le Notre [designer of the Versailles gardens] is the greatest of gardeners, but it is a judgement outside my personal liking.
  
  “The basis of all artistic genius” (it is Pater again) “lies in the power of conceiving humanity in a new and striking way, of putting a happy world of its own creation in place of the meaner world of our common days.” Most modern artists seem to ignore the happy, but certainly Versailles puts a world of its own creation in place of our meaner one. But how does it create this other world? Its finished order may seem inevitable, but even an imitation of the Grand Manner is difficult for those not born to it, as we can see by considering the fussy and pretentious triteness of most public parks and formal gardens laid out in England since the early nineteenth century."
  

* Review Our Notes Together

• Alfred, Lord Tennyson
• Break, Break, Break
• Crossing the Bar
• The Eagle 

* See our books

HW: Read at least 100 more lines of Tennyson.  Be prepared to discuss what you read tomorrow. Begin J14.

Tennyson (1809-1892)

Prayer

Please pray that if there are any people still alive in the debris from Saturday's landslide in Oso, Washington, that they would be found and rescued.  Pray for the families affected.

John Keats

"A thing of beauty is a joy forever: its loveliness increases; it will never pass into nothingness."

" 'Beauty is truth, truth beauty,' - that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."

I. Essential Questions

• How did the aesthetic focus on beauty, divorced from the medieval balances of goodness and truth, prove a problem for the Romantics and all to follow? 
• How do style and sense support one another felicitously, friend? 
• How may seemingly objective secondary sources give us decidedly different impressions of the same person or subject?  How do we respond to this?  

II. Background

"I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the heart's affections, and the truth of imagination."

"My imagination is a monastery and I am its monk."

Take notes on John Keats

• Years
• Literary Themes
• Life
• Compare Two Encyclopedic Treatments in three to five sentences.

• For More Explore the Keats-Shelley House.  I visited this tiny museum in Rome in the Spring of 2014.  It holds many a sad tale. 

III. Terms

"Poetry should surprise by a fine excess and not by singularity, it should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance."

 

Mansion of Many Apartments 

• Theory devised by John Keats stating that people are capable of different levels of thought. He suggested that some have the ability to move through the 'thoughtless chamber' and the 'chamber of maiden thought' to reach more profound states.

Negative Capability 

•  Term coined by John Keats to describe the (true) poet's ability of  'being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason'.

IV. Reading

"Poetry should be great and unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one's soul, and does not startle it or amaze it with itself, but with its subject."

"La Belle Dame sans Merci: A Ballad" 

"When I have fears that I may cease to be "

"Ode on Melancholy" 

"Bright Star"

"Meg Merrilies"

"Robin Hood" 

John Keats (1795–1821)

V. Journal: Keats

• Simply jot down your impressions after you read each poem (bullets, sentences; whatever you wish).  You have no formal analysis questions.  You will be given an AP prompt from at least one of these poems for essay analysis later.  For now, just get acquainted with the poet. 

  
VI. Further Thoughts 

"I have two luxuries to brood over in my walks, your loveliness and the hour of my death. O that I could have possession of them both in the same minute."

 

Percy Bysshe (say "Bish") Shelley

"The literature of England," wrote Shelley in A Defence of Poetry, "has arisen as it were from a new birth … we live among such philosophers and poets as surpass beyond comparison any who have appeared since the last national struggle for civil and religious liberty" (Keats-Shelley House).

I. Essential Questions

• Why are the Romantics a good lesson in the maxim "ideas have consequences"?
• How do style and sense relate to one another in well-crafted literature? 

II. Background 
Take Basic Notes on Percy Bysshe Shelley From the Columbia University Encyclopedia

• Years
• Intellectual and Literary Themes
• Marriage and Other Elements of Interest

III. Reading

• "To Wordsworth"
• A Song: "Men of England"
• "Ozymandias"
• "England in 1819"

IV. Journal: Shelley

• Reread "Ozymandias" 
• 1.  Identify and explain three key elements that support the thematic meaning of this poem. 

V. Further Thoughts

• "The Necessity of Atheism"
• How Freeing was Free Love For Her?

Shelley's body was found washed up on the shores of western Italy.  His body was burned, but it is said that his heart was delivered to his wife...who is said to have kept a piece of it wrapped in a poem he wrote concerning Keats. An Italian fisherman, on his deathbed, claimed that he had rammed the boat Shelley was on to rob the men on board...but it sank too quickly.