CLASS 1:

William Shakespeare: 1564-1616

- Incredibly successful
- Born in Stratford-upon-Avon
- Came from a prestigious family in the local era
- Moved to London to pursue a career as an actor and a playwright
- Credited as central figure in the canon of English Literature
- Canon = a set of body of work that is broadly regarded over time as the
finest works/examples of literature within the culture
 Changes all the time: writers fall out of favor, other ones come in.
 Shakespeare has been a consistent figure within the canon: has to do with
the amount of works he wrote
Enduring popularity and relevance of Shakespeare:
- Upstart Crow
 Sitcom where David Mitchell plays Shakespeare
 About his life as a middle age playwright returning to Stratford-upon-Avon
 David Mitchell
- Hamnet
 Novel
 By Maggie O’Farrell
 She takes the story of Shakespeare
 Looking at events surrounding the death of his son: Hamnet
 Looking at events of his daughter: Judith
Shakespeare’s expressions:
- Coined by or invented by Shakespeare or they were made popular by
Shakespeare because he used them in his works
- Faint-hearted = Those who are not courageous
- Melted into thin air = Disappeared of the radar
- Not slept one wink = To not sleep at all
- Made of sterner stuff = Don’t be deceived into thinking that this person is
weak, they are stronger than you think they are made of sterner stuff
- This mortal coil= the chaotic, messy business of being alive.
Shakespeare and the English Language:
- English was changing a lot (16th C)
 Influenced by other languages (also because of colonisation)
French: Norman conquest
Latin
 There was no RP accent
 During times of Elizabeth I:
Time of expansion for England, age of exploration, colonisation brought
new words, concepts into the language
 Ideal space for creativity
- Developments that moved E towards Standardisation:
1) William caxton’s Printing press  mass dissemination of English
2)King James Bible  very influential on the English language
The Sound of Shakespeare ‘original pronunciation’
- His son demonstrates what we think English sounded like during
Shakespeare’s time.
- Speech from Romeo and Juliet
1)Classical RP
2)Original pronunciation (the kind what we think would’ve be prone to
Shakespeare’s times)  very different from today
The setting of a play (Elizabethan times)
The Elizabethan Theatre setting
- Plays performed in daylight
- Socially mixed (often rowdy) audience
- 4th wall frequently ignored  people were supporting, commenting (there
was a sort of interaction)
 4th wall = invisible barrier between public and actors (they don’t interact w
each other)
- Socially mixed audience
 Aristocracy, wealthier merchants on the balconies
 In the pits  lower classes (they had to stand)
- Women’s roles were also played by men! (all-male company of actors)
- Scenery and costumes  not important, but the LANGUAGE = important to
hold the attention
Shakespeare outside and in: classic but contrasting speeches
1) Henry V speech snt-cripen’s day
- outward
- Motivating his troops to fight the next day
2) Hamlet soliloquy
- Inward
- Soliloquy  presents the inner thoughts of the character, others around
him are not aware of these thoughts, only the audience is aware of these
thoughts.
- We’re given access to hamlet’s thoughts
History plays:
He was taking real historical events and turning them into highly entertaining,
dramatic theater.
Here is what those three points mean in plain English:
1. "Animates and rewrites English history"
 Animates (Brings it to life): Instead of reading dry facts in a dusty history
book, Shakespeare put the kings, knights, and battles right on stage. He
gave them intense emotions, funny sidekicks, and dramatic speeches.
 Rewrites: He changed the facts whenever it made the story better or kept
him out of trouble. If a real historical event was boring, he changed it. If a
 king was related to the current Queen (Elizabeth I), Shakespeare made
sure that king looked like a hero.
2. "Narrative of greatness of England and Englishness"
 At the time these plays were written, England was a small island nation
trying to prove itself on the world stage.
 These plays were designed to make the audience feel incredibly proud to
be English. They celebrated English victories, English bravery, and what
made their culture unique. It was the 16th-century equivalent of a patriotic
summer movie.
3. "Patriotic but also critical"
 Patriotic: The plays feature massive, famous speeches about glory, honor,
and fighting for your country (like the famous "band of brothers" speech in
Henry V).
 Critical: Shakespeare wasn't just brainwashing the audience. At the exact
same time he is cheering for England, he shows the dark side of royalty. He
shows that kings are often lonely, stressed, and corrupt, and he reminds
the audience that hundreds of ordinary, poor soldiers die just to make a
king look good.

Also:
Henry V speech: St. Crispin’s Day Speech
- English army vastly outnumbered by the French (battle of Agincourt), they
are facing defeat
- Westmoreland = general of Henry V , cousin of Henry V
- Henry V = ambitious, young king who has honour, energy
 Positive portrayal of kingship
- It’s one of Shakespeare’s history plays (he also wrote sonnets, tragedies,
comedies)
 Shakespeare’s rewriting of English history, he dramatizes and focuses on
the kings of England
- Emphasis on the idea of honour (word is repeated many times throughout
the text)
 What is meant with ‘honour’? the idea that you have principles/believes
and live by them and that you do not waiver from them.
- Motivational kind of speech
Line 5-30:
- 5-7: Westmoreland starts with this very negative note that implies: we are
doomed, we are going to loose.
- 5-30:
 9: 'Who would want more men?' He's turning the logic on its head. (he
responds with not an obivous rhetorical question)
 If we are mark'd to die  if it is our fate to die in this battle
 13: idea of ‘honour’
 14: God's will!  intensifier
 15: he is not interested in wealth, he is not a materialist
 17: He doesn't care if others take advantage of him, wear his cloths
 18: he is not interested in these things, but he is interested in something
internal: in honour (line 19)  honour is at the centre!
 25-30: the message
The host = the trumpets: the way in which the leader communicates
through his army (through trumpets, the host)
Message? Tell the army: ‘we don’t want any more’ in fact, if there’s
anybody here who has no stomach for the fight, who’s a faint heart,
they’re welcome to leave. I will give them money, I will pay your wages
 29-30: We don’t want to die alongside those who are not prepared to die
with us.
He rejects the logical idea that they’re going to loose and he talks about
himself: “this is what’s important to me”. + focus on idea of honour
- 31-50:
 31: the feast of Crispian (religious feast)
 32-42: before this: he’s talking about himself w this idea of honour  he’s
moving to the future: he’s saying to his troops: imagine what it’s going to
be like if we win and you survive, imagine how you will feel abt the things
that you have done.
 Image of pride, idea of having achieved something extraordinary for your
country and your king  of course its hasn’t happened yet, but it’s
providing this thing for the imagination of despair
 42-45: Names of his generals
 46: at this point in the future Saint Crispian’s day people will be cheering
and toasting the victory of these men in the army
 50: But we in it shall be remembered  powerful idea of legacy,
remembrance, you have made your mark on history
 51-58: before: future filled with pride, celebration for what you’ve done but
 here: idea of unity, community, a band of brothers, comrades-in-arms
 be he ne'er so vile: it doesn't matter how low you are in society (you may
be a farmer or beggar or whatever), everyone can prove that they are a
gentleman
 gentle 54: idea of gentleness, gentleman  they will be regarded as a
gentleman
 55: all of those so called ‘gentleman’ who are not here today, who are
comfortable in their beds in England will regret that they were not here to
join us and fight.
- Public speech, motivational speech
- Audience is drawn into a way of thinking about now, the future and about
this idea of status (not measured in wealth but in principle (idea of
honour))
Shakespeare voicing the inner: Hamlet’s soliloquy
Hamlet:
- “To be or not to be, that is the question” speech
- Hamlet is a prince, but not a happy prince
 His father has died and his mother has very quickly married Hamlet’s uncle
(= the dead father’s brother)
- Hamlet whose a student studying away and he return to Denmark to the
royal court and he’s not happy with his mom. He really thinks that she
remarried too quickly.
- One night on the rampart on the castle in Helsingør he encounters the
ghost of his dead father and the ghost tells Hamlet: ‘I was murdered by my
brother, Claudius put poison into my ear.
Reaction Hamlet?
 Fury, he wants to avenge the death of his father, he wants to kill Claudius
 But he doesn’t do it, he holds back because he is not a 100% sure.
 He asks himself? Was that really the ghost of my father or was it some
other spirit that tried to deceive me?
- In speech:
 Expression of very profound uncertainty (that’s what to be or not to be is all
about  not knowing what do to, where to go next)
- 16th century:
- Remains a very powerful speech  description of what we often think is a
modern kind of disease ‘the idea of being uncertain/uncertainty’
 In this way: Hamlet’s soliloquy is quite modern/contemporary
Hamlet soliloquy:
- About what happens after death
- Conscience = a sense of right or wrong (nowadays)
 In text: it’s more about just thinking itself
- Catharsis in the play
 Alleviation
Line 3-12:
- Line 4: Whether 'tis nobler in the mind
 Is it better to be one thing or the other
- Line 5:
 the way people may attack us + bad luck (outrageous fortune) --> idea of
that life involves suffering
 outrageous fortune  bad luck
 theme? Life involves suffering! (a theme he continues to use)
 He is asking the question: is it better to suffer, having to tolerate the slings
and arrows of outrageous fortune OR to take arms against a sea of trouble
and by opposing end them (be active, do something about it) (line 6-7)
 Line 5 VS line 6-7
Line 7-12:
- Hamlet is almost welcoming the idea of death as rest, relief.
- Line 12:
 There’s the problem
13&
- Sleep as a metaphor for death
 He is saying: what happens after death, what is it?
Line 14:
- Another famous phrase:
- Image of mortal coil
 A snake sheds its skin, making the idea of: the skin is like our living thing
and when we die we shed that.
  Through Christian perspective it would be clear (hell or heaven)  in
hamlet not
 He’s expressing a humanist idea  doesn’t mean it’s anti-religion, it’s
allowing a space for uncertainty.
Line 15-16:
- ‘Life is shit’
Note: Hamlet is a young man who studies at the university, he’s drawing on new
ideas (early modernity) and there’s an uncertainty: what happens after death?
Line 17-23:
- Who would tolerate all of these wrong?
 Line 17: ‘the whips and scorns of time’  the damage that’s done by them
to us
- The oppressor’s wrong  the bully
- The proud man  we are often victim of the proud people
- The pangs of despised love: not just unrequited love but where you love
someone but they actually don’t like you (despised love)
 Pangs = pains
- the law’s delay  you want justice
- Line 20: somebody who has power
They can insult you and there is nothing you can do about it.
Wouldn’t it be easier to escape all of this?
Line 21-23:
- Bodkin = dagger
- Why take all of this when all it takes is to take your dagger and plunge it
into him (Claudius)
Line 24-29:
- From this point: note all the words Shakespeare uses to refer to the ‘mind’
 Ex. 26-27
Line 30-32:
- Conscience = a sense of right or wrong (nowadays)
 In text: not in moral terms, it’s more about just thinking itself
- Line 31: And THUS/BECAUSE OF all these thinking/uncertainty the native
hue of resolution …
- Native hue = a healthy colour
 Ex. When you come back in from the cold and you have red cheeks  then
you have a native hue
- Resolution = we know what to do and we’re gonna go ahead and do it
- He’s comparing that idea of a native hue of resolution with somebody
who’s pale (line 32)  prevents us from taking action
 Pale = kind of disease ofs, prevents us from taking action/making a decision
 Because of this enterprises of great pith and moment  the plans that will
have a great influence and a great impact and affect many people in the
 kingdom: all of these things, With this regard their currents turn awry ( =
mis, fout)
And lose the name of the action  the very thought itself of the actor:
thinking and becoming uncertain

- The speech in one sense is his self-awareness of his own inability to

actually move forward.
 In the play itself he does ultimately kill Claudius.
 Hamlet also dies later: he is stabbed by Laertes’ poisoned sword.

Slide 20: quote Aristotle.

- One of the purposes of the tragic play is the idea of ‘catharsis’
 Rather than people having to experience misery directly they can
experience that by a play and feel the relief/release of anxiety, fear via a
play (cathartic effect).

 Catharsis is the release, purification, or purging of strong, pent-up emotions (like

sadness, anxiety, or fear), usually experienced through art, drama, or music.
 By experiencing these intense feelings safely through a play or movie, it allows you to
release your own bottled-up stress and leave feeling emotionally cleansed, lighter, and
relieved.

Above: 2 examples of Shakespeare’s speeches:

1)Very internal monologue (soliloquy)
2)very public
Poetry:
- Elizabethan sonnet conventions
- Shakespeare’s sonnets
 Both written in blank verse
Elizabethan poetry: the sonnet
What is a sonnet?
 14-line poem (so short)
 Traditional English sonnet typically employs iambic pentameter
(see syllabus p6)
 Performance of poem at confluence of stress pattern (IP) and
spoken rhythms
 Various structures, but common pattern: 3 quatrains and final
rhyming couplet – echoing pattern of argumentation
 End-rhyme scheme, typically: ababcdcdefefgg
 - Remaining 6 lines: a turn
- A fixed rhyme scheme
We’ll be discussing 3 sonnets:
- In some way or the other these sonnets are moving away from the typical
way of sonnet writing/Elizabethan sonnets
Elizabethan sonnets:
- Popular form in the day
- Has its conventions: what people to find from the genre (zie volgende
zwarte title)
The conventional pose of the Elizabethan sonneteer:  slide 29 typical
example
An Elizabethan sonneteer is simply a poet who wrote sonnets in England
during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I
- Unrequited love (it is not returned)
 The poet is in love but the love is not returned
- Loved subjects is elevated and quite often has divine or semi-divine
features/ they are placed on a pedestal
 Often mythical, not of the real world contexts
- The blazon = a list of attributes (usually physical) stressing perfection
 The eyes, lips, skin, breasts  these all have their comparisons
Ex: ‘white as snow’ , ‘as red as cold?’
Part of this idea of emphasizing/idealizing perfection.
But:
- Female = idealized subject, doesn’t respond (no conversation), doesn’t
speak, is admired + gazed at
3 poems from Shakespeare’s sonnet cycle:
- Each of them in their own way demonstrate Shakespeare’s trying to move
away from these conventions
 Clichés  Shakespeare trying to move his art away from the idea of
stereotype/cliché
Sonnet 18:
- Guiding image: comparison between the person who is being described
and a summer’s day (first line)
- A summer’s day = a part of the bigger thing that he is referring to  i.e.
Nature (hyperbole)
- Temperate = unchanging
- He is saying that you are more lovely than nature and more temperate =
unchanging
- The subject here is superior to the natural world
- Line 12-14: Your beauty won’t die on the condition that last 2 lines
 Line 13: as long as you can breathe you can see and as long as you can see
you can breathe
 Line 14: this is not referring to the blazon but to the poem itself.
The sonnet, it all depends on the creator, writer. The only reason she is
beautiful is because of the poem.
 As long as people continue to read this sonnet/poetry, then your beauty
will continue to live.
- The message = the writer/creator of the text to gives longevity
The sonneteers would compete against each other:
- They would be looking for new ways of expressing their devotion, finding
ways that are more original
 In sonnet 18: Shakespeare takes the idea of a convention that …
A convention is just a traditional rule or a common cliché. The standard
convention for a sonneteer was to compare their lover to beautiful things in
nature (like flowers, the sky, or a perfect summer day) to show how amazing they
were.
Shakespeare takes that exact cliché and turns it upside down:
 The Setup: He starts with the most cliché, conventional question possible:
"Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?" The audience in the 1500s
would have rolled their eyes and thought, "Ugh, another boring summer
poem."
 The Twist: Instead of saying, "Yes, you are just like summer," Shakespeare
spends the next eight lines explaining why summer is actually terrible
compared to his lover. He says summer is too hot, too cloudy, too windy,
and way too short.
 The Win: By criticizing summer, he completely shatters the old
convention. He wins the competition against the other poets by inventing a
brand-new argument: "You aren't like a summer's day at all—you are
a million times better."

Sonnet 130: 127-154 a ‘dark-lady’

- Rather than giving a list of just how fabulous it is  he’s working very hard
to tell us that he’s nowhere near that perfection
- Reverse of the blazon: Negative version of the blazon
- Poem insulting?
- The woman isn’t being praised anymore
- Last 2 lines: the pattern is reversed again
 False compare  part of that is the idea within that typical sonnet tradition
with all the hyperbolic, it’s not really reality we see, it’s exaggerating this
false comparison
- Shakespeare messes with the conventions (consciously)
 Reversing the typical pattern of a love lyric
- Some would argue that it’s a refreshing take on the sonnet
 It gives a more realistic sense of love, not the idea of love that relies on
idealized sorts of images.
 Others might say that perhaps Shakespeare goes too far and when he’s
saying ‘my mistress’s eyes are not this and … her voice is unpleasant’ it
feels like he’s insulting her.
Makes it difficult to turn that into a poem that convincingly is about loving
someone.
In the articles we will find the opinion of a contemporary poet Don
Patterson on sonnet 130:
He really doesn’t like this poem:
- Woman-hating rubbish
Sonnet 138:
- A sense of a relationship
- It is only the poet speaking in the poem directly
- He’s speaking about the way that they interact with each other, it’s
presenting a relationship rather than somebody who’s placed on a
pedestal.
- About 2 people who lie to each other
- About mutual deception just to feel each other feel better about
themselves.
- Phrases such as ‘simple truth suppressed’  usually in negative context,
here: simply about people who are doing that because it makes their lives
better
- Line 10-14: they continue to lie with each other, tell each other lies BUT
also there is that doubling there: they are together so they lie in the same
bed, they lie together.
In contrast to sonnet 18 and 130:
- This is less serious, more playful, a little more graceful
Quatrain 1: The Basic Setup (Lines 1–4)
"When my love swears that she is made of truth / I do believe her
though I know she lies,"
 Meaning: When my mistress swears she is completely faithful and honest,
I pretend to believe her, even though I know for a fact she is lying.
"That she might think me some untutored youth / Unlearned in the
world's false subtleties."
 Meaning: I go along with her lie because I want her to think I’m young,
naive, and innocent—someone who doesn't know how deceitful the world
can be.
Quatrain 2: The Mutual Lie (Lines 5–8)
"Thus vainly thinking that she thinks me young / Although she knows
my days are past the best,"
 Meaning: I foolishly flatter myself into thinking she believes I'm young,
even though she knows perfectly well that I am old and past my prime.
"Simply I credit her false-speaking tongue; / On both sides thus is
simple truth suppressed."
 Meaning: So, I just accept her lies. Both of us are intentionally hiding the
plain, simple truth from each other to protect our egos.
Quatrain 3: Why Do We Do This? (Lines 9–12)
"But wherefore says she not she is unjust? / And wherefore say not I
that I am old?"
 Meaning: Why doesn't she just admit she is unfaithful? And why don't I
just admit that I am old?
"O, love's best habit is in seeming trust, / And age in love loves not to
have years told."
 Meaning: Because love is easiest when you pretend to trust each other
("seeming trust"). And older lovers definitely do not like to be reminded of
their actual age!
The Final Couplet: The Punchline (Lines 13–14)
"Therefore I lie with her, and she with me, / And in our faults by lies we
flattered be."
 Meaning: As you noted in your text, there is a brilliant double meaning (a
pun) on the word "lie" here. It means:
1. We tell lies to each other.
2. We sleep together in the same bed.
 The final takeaway: By ignoring each other's flaws and feeding each
other lies, we both feel flattered, comforted, and happy.
Ben Jonson:
- Contemporary of Shakespeare’s
- Younger than Shakespeare (saw him as a mentor figure)
- In syllabus: tribute to Shakespeare that Jonson wrote on Shakespeare’s
death
P5:
 Echoing that idea of: so long that men can breath and eyes can see
On My First Son: Ben Jonson
- About a father writing a response to the death of his son
 About the loss of his son
 Not about playing with generic convention, this is about trying to express
something: grief
- Not a sonnet, but it’s similar in a way to a sonnet
- It’s a 12 line poem
 Stands as a feeling of something that’s incomplete, not fully realized  to
express the sense of loss (12 lines instead of 14)
- Unevenness of tones
 First 4 lines: logical and abstract
 Second quatrain: almost an outcry, emotional
 Third quatrain: a sense of resignation at the end.
- This poem has metre (metrical pattern), rhyme, certain arrangement of
quatrains, highly organized
 This very structure provides a framework that Jonson can place what must
be very chaotic/destabilizing, emotions, the loss of a child
 Different emotions are jarring against each other but they are being held
together (barely) within a fairly solid structure.
- First 4 lines: logical and abstract
 Poem begins with ‘farewell’
 The right hand  the right hand man/child  emphasizing the importance
 ‘My sin’  religious language
Like he has done something wrong. He’s saying that ‘hope’ is a sin. (he
hoped too much)
 He starts using more commas (language of commas)
 As if he had a debt to pay
Line 3-4:
Idea of who lends the child to the parents?  in religious terms God
God gives you the child.
 I thee pay  he’s not paying the child but the child is the currency, the
child is the thing that needs to be paid back and returned to God.
 On the just day  the Day of justice
 Religious language (:language of religion)
- Line 5-8: Then: emotional (2nd quatrains)
 Line 5-6: connection to Shakespeare’s Hamlet soliloquy
Idea: why should I be unhappy? My son has escaped the misery’s of this
world.
 ‘scaped’  escaped
 World’s and flesh’s rage  another way of expressing the idea of ‘the slings
and arrows of outrageous fortune’.  the suffering that life subjects us too
!!!
Line 9-12:
- More impassioned
- Tone changes:
 ‘rest in soft peace’  gentle
- Line 9: this is where my son is engraved
- ‘his best piece of poetry’  he is referring to himself and his son was also
called Ben Jonson that’s why he could have this line that brings together
the idea of the son and the grave but also the father who’s the poet and
it’s his best piece of poetry
- Why the name matters:
- Because both the father and the son have the exact same name (Ben
Jonson), the poem plays a clever trick.
- When you read the line on the tombstone:
- "Here lies Ben Jonson [the son]... his [the father's] best piece of poetry."
- It means the little boy is the poem. He is the most beautiful piece of art the
father ever left behind in the world.
-
Where are the contrast in the poem?
- The idea of a father’s love that’s conflicting because of religious faith
 But religious faith does not square with the emotions/love he feels for his
son
At the end:
- In order to survive this: I may love another person but I don’t want to like
them too much because it’s to much to bear.
 -
John Donne:
- Younger than Shakespeare
- Height period? On into the 17th century
- He was a wild spirit in his young days
- Womanizer
 The Flea, woman’s constancy  from his younger years where he writes
poems of seduction
The seduction is about the argument of trying to persuade the woman to
go to bed with you.
- drinker
John Donne – Holy Sonnets (1633)
Because Donne was a famous church leader, he felt massive guilt. He
looked at his own soul and thought, "I am completely unfit for God. I am
so broken by sin that I can't even fix myself." This poem is a desperate,
frantic cry for help because he feels like he is running out of time.
- Written later in his life
- He became one of the most prominent churchman in England (London)
 Most famous sermonizer/delivering sermons during this period
Holy Sonnets: Sonnet number 14:
- Poem in which he expresses a sense of crisis
 A crisis of faith, a sense of his own unworthiness to be loved by God
 A sense that he is not fit for God
- Religious poem
- About religious faith
- He is asking god to break and remake him
- Ravish/rape
- Chaste = kuis

- In what way is this poem physical?

 Rave? (eigen Antwoord)
- What do we make of the language?
Simon Armitage:
- Contemporary poet (our times)
- the poet laureate in the UK
One of his sonnets:
- using the sonnet form
- Talking about a certain person’s life
- what’s the tone of the poem? What sort of tone does the speaker seem to
have?
- What’s the effect of having most of the lines beginning with ‘And’
1. What is the tone of the poem?
The tone of the speaker is matter-of-fact, detached, and completely
neutral. The speaker acts like an objective judge or an accountant just listing
facts. Notice how the speaker never says "This was a bad man" or "This was a
good man." Instead, the poem balances good deeds directly against terrible
actions with the exact same calm, flat delivery:
 He is a loving father... (tucked his daughter in) $\rightarrow$ but he is
abusive (slapped/spanked her for lying).
 He is a hard-working, appreciative husband... (saved money, praised
his wife's cooking) $\rightarrow$ but he is a violent monster (punched
her in the face just for laughing).
 He is a caring son... (hired a nurse for his mom, cried when she got sick)
$\rightarrow$ but he is a thief (stole money from her purse).
By keeping the tone completely unbothered and neutral, Armitage forces you,
the reader, to feel the shock. The contrast between a sweet action and a horrific
act of domestic violence is terrifying because it's delivered so casually.
2. What is the effect of starting almost every line with "And"?
Starting lines with the same word is a poetic technique called anaphora. In this
specific poem, starting nearly every line with "And" has three major effects:
 The "Equal Weight" Effect: The word "And" acts like an equal sign. It
treats every single action as if it has the exact same value. In this man's
life, digging the snow off the driveway, praising a meal, and punching his
wife in the face are all just items on a checklist. The poem doesn't give
more dramatic weight to the violence; it just drops it in as another random
fact.
 The Accumulation of Boredom: It creates a monotonous, rhythmic
drone—like a repetitive grocery list. It mimics how people look back at an
entire life as just a long string of events happening one after another.
 The "But" Subversion: Usually, when we switch from a good action to a
bad action, we use the word but or however. By choosing "And" instead,
Armitage smooths over the cracks of this man's abusive behavior. It shows
how easily human beings can balance being "good citizens" while
harboring dark, violent secrets behind closed doors.
3. The Final Two Lines: The Punchline
"Here's how they rated him when they looked back: / sometimes he did
this, sometimes he did that."
The ending is deeply cynical. After the man dies, his family and community don't
brand him as a pure villain or a perfect saint. They sum up his entire complex,
abusive, and kind life with a shrug of the shoulders: "sometimes he did this,
sometimes he did that." It shows how ordinary people often rationalize or
oversimplify human behavior and domestic trauma just to cope with the memory
of someone they lost.

Class 2: 21/02
The Early English Novel:
- Predominant genre
Writers: 18th century
1) Daniel Defoe
- Robin Crusoe (novel: survival narrative)
 Man that has to survive on an island
Daniel defoe inspired by alexander Selkirk (1676-1721) to write robin crusoe:
• Energetic Scot
• 1703 privateering expedition
• Cast ashore on Juan Fernandez
• Rescued 1709
• Written account of experience becomes popular in England
• Defoe inspired by his account to write RC
2) Samuel Richardson
- Pamela
 Novel written in the form of letters = epistolary
 Very personal, intimate
 Close view + feelings of his main character ‘pamela’
 Psychological realism
3) Henry Fielding (in the middle ppt)
- Joseph Andrews
- Comic writer (very different to the other 2)
- Early writings: comic stories, satirical productions  to make us laugh
- Also used his comedy for more serious purposes
 He became interested in addressing the issues in society in 18th century
Britain society
 Comic writing with serious purpose
Novel: definition
- Majority of novels is PROSE (not a lot in VERSE/poetic form)
- Imaginative
- Novel form = main vehicle of literature
- Purpose of literature through the ages: reflect the human life/condition and
experience
- Many subcategories:
 Picaresque, epistolary (novel in letters), Gothic novel (Dracula,
Frankenstein), romantic, realist, historical, fantasy novel, science fiction,
detective…
Today: first solid steps into the emergence of the novel as a recognised form in
the English language
Summary of the Big 3 Styles:
 If you are studying this for a class, early novels generally fell into one of these
buckets:
 Realism / Adventure (Like Robinson Crusoe): Practical survival, facts,
and logic.
 Moral / Epistolary (Like Pamela): Told through letters, focusing on a
character protecting their virtue and doing the right thing.
 Satire / Picaresque (Like Tom Jones): Funny, sarcastic stories about a
charming rogue getting into trouble and traveling around England.

Examples of novels:
- 1984 (dystopian novel)
- The Handmaid’s Tale (dystopian novel)
- Lord of the Rings (fantasy novel) Tolkin
 Fantasy writing in the 20th century
 Story with fantastical monsters, castles BUT, it is a story that reflects the
tensions, conflicts that were present during the 20 th century
 Response to the idea of the rise of dark forces (for example fascism)
 Taks about issues in the actual world (even though it’s a fantasy)
Before novel begins to develop? Imaginative narrative
Romance literature:
- Don’t mistake for the romance novel (romance novel: focus on love,
relation, 20-21th century)
- Refers to older and deep-rooted form of storytelling
- Medieval high culture, courtly, aristocratic
- Storytelling that underlines courtly values
 Honour (refer back to henry V and the idea of honour)
 Virtue
 Chastity = kuisheid
 Duty
- Setting: idealised heroic, mythic past
- Shows fictionality  magic, fantasy, spiritual elements
- E.g. Tales of King Arthur  magic
Cervantes, Don Quixote (1615)
- Novel
- An individual Alonso (main character) who reads too much about romance
literature  he becomes convinced that he is a knight  he becomes Don
Quixote  travels through Spain attempting to live as a knight (even
though he lives in a period where knights don’t exist)
- Cervantes gives a satirical treat to heroism / romance narratives
 He’s making fun of it
- Picaresque = a story that sent us on a journey, the journey is very
unpredictable, (e.g. the road movie genre (now))
 Story with unexpected events happening
- ‘Tilting at windmills’ = somebody is doing something irrational, futile (that
is not going to work)
  Person is motivated by an overactive imagination
 Ex. Don Quixote sees a windmill and rather than seeing the windmill he
sees the windwill as a dragon and he attempts to attack the dragon.
- Pronunciation: Don Quixote VS Quixotic (adjective w different
pronunciation) = overactive imagination that spills over into reality and
tends to have a negative consequence
The novel:
- Moves away from the aristocratic, courtly, mythic setting of romance
literature
- Presents a modern outlook (for the 18th century)  these novels are set in
the city (urban setting)
- Writing about history and journalism
- A genre that is intended to appeal to the values,d esires of the Middle class
(very important!)
 Fairly educated and wealthy (but not as much as the aristocracy)
- Novel draws attention to the darker side of society: e.g: illegal/ immoral
activities
 Tries to illustrate the problems of society
- Denies fictionality (but it is actually fiction)
- Picture on slide (the novel): William Hogarth
 Well known artist
 Specialised in painting realistic scenes: debauchery, immoral behaviour for
example
Daniel Defoe (robinson crusoe):
- He experienced a lot of different aspects of British society (from the
highest to the lowest)
His quote: telling us about those experiences !!!!
- School of Affliction = refers to life/suffering
- Emphasizes:
1) Life/experience brings you wisdom
 You need to gain it through experience, you can’t just learn it from a
church, academy…
2) His experiences have been very wide (Prison <-> celebrated in many
circles)
3) Idea of liberty/freedom
 Freedom is not a matter of physical freedom but also freedom of the mind
(freedom of thought)
His work: Robinson Crusoe (by Daniel Defoe)
Book is based on/Inspired by Alexander Selkirk:
- Energetic Scot
- Took part in a privateering expedition (1703) = it’s like pirating but legal
(the king gives a privateer permission to steal the wealth of other ships
and navies for the sake of the crown/country)
- He joined a ship that sailed across the Atlantic ocean but he does not get
on with his captain  boiling point  he demands that he puts him ashore
 on the next stop: Juan Fernandez  1709: rescued  returns back to
England and writes about his experience on the island  becomes popular
in England  Defoe inspired by his account to write RC (Robinson Crusoe)
- So: Robinson Crusoe is based on real events
Defoe’s writing style:
• Plain, unadorned (transparent)
• Lang. of commercial and middle classes
• Long sentences, repetition of syntactical structures
• Terminology (adds to realism)
• Chronological structure
• Lack of metaphor, similie
• Dialogue kept to a minimum
18th century concerns:
- Britain is moving towards a democracy
 Elected democratic government is beginning to have more of an influence
and greater powers of what happens in the country
 However, only a narrow portion of the population was able to vote (no
universal suffrage yet)
- In terms of a political sense: more stable than in 17 th century
- Expansion of merchants and middle class
 consumers of mass literature
 Novel is written by and for the middle classes: it’s reflecting their values,
aspirations etc.
- Expansion of the British empire
 Brings possibilities in terms of very unfamiliar landscapes and cultures
(Robinson Crusoe connects with that sort of fascination)
- Age of reason (logic)  to solve problems around them
 Enlightenment age
 Age in which there is a confidence in the power of reason, human agency to
solve problems that they see around them (reference: plays out in Robinson
Crusoe)
Defoe’s realism:
- Constantly tries to create a realist picture so that his reader is under the
impression that what he is reading is factual
- No mention of Defoe’s name
- Crusoe presented as author (not Defoe, he acts like Crusoe wrote the book)
- Cover/front page: (ook in syllabus)
 Defoe names the author as ‘Robinson Crusoe’ , he doesn’t name himself
 ‘written by himself’  Defoe is telling us that this is a book by Robinson
Crusoe
 The reader is being invited to believe that this is factual/documentary sort
of narrative
 Terminology, factual information, lists, accounts emphasizes realism
Chapter 3: (p16)
- The ship has been wrecked against the rocks of the island  Robinson
Crusoe is the only survivor
 He realises that in order to survive he needs to try and get as much
material from the ship as possible back onto the island so that he’s got a
better chance of survival
- Description of him swimming back and forth to bring back various pieces
from the ship to help him survive
- Line 59-67: Always a lot of DETAIL  the more detail you have the more
realistic the picture becomes!!!
 When Defoe is creating a realist setting he’s always using a lot of DETAIL
 Ex. Lists of things that he does, actions he takes
 Idea: by piling up the detail the more realistic the picture becomes
Line 46-58: Terminology: e.g. about sailing
- Using the terminology also adds to that sense of realism
68-74:
- When he finds the money  The tone changes
 Use of archaic, elevated language
 He’s making fun of the importance of money  he’s tone become mock-
heroic
- Mock heroic tone  contrast that allows us to see the normal
transparent style where the writing isn’t calling attention to itself
 Contrast between elevated tone and everything else the rest) (usual
register or tone)
 Usual register: language doesn’t draw attention to itself.
- The rest: Transparent style of writing  telling us the story very clearly
 Not a kind of writing where you would have a lot of metaphors (with Hamlet
many metaphors/figurative)
 More direct
 Descriptive (first person narrative: Crusoe)  Crusoe is talking (adds to the
realism)
Defoe’s writing style:
- See ufora ppt
- All of these elements create realism
- Not figurative writing/ no metaphors (reference: hamlet there is a lot of
figurative writing/metaphors)
 Writing = direct
- Descriptive
- First person narrative (Crusoe himself is narrating the story  adds to the
realism)
- Dialogue is minimal in the story
 In Richardson and Fielding: more dialogue (contrast w Defoe)
Chapter 4: 18th century optimism
- Robinson Crusoe novel reflects broadly 18 th century perspective (the age of
reason: confidence in the power of reason and a certain optimism)
- RC never goes through psychological dark periods even though he is
marooned on an island, he remains optimistic
In chapter 4:
- RC decides to make a list of everything bad that has happened to him and
everything good that happened to him  for moral/spiritual purposes (text:
GOOD VS EVIL)
- Point of this GOOD vs EVIL list?
 Idea: It is within the power of the individual to overcome these kinds of
difficulties
- Line 111-115: Defoe writes a piece of reassurance and wisdom directed at
his reader about: no matter hwat life throws at you, there is always
something to be grateful for ('the silver lining') !!!!
 This attitude of optimism: typical for the 18th century
- Romanticism will reject this idea of overreliance of being guided by reason
because there is also the irrational (feeling and passion)  influence one
how we behave
Crusoe and gender:
- A man’s world is portrayed
- Almost no women in text (minor characters)
 No question about this in RC
- Male dominated world
- South African novelist JM Coetze: novel called ‘Foe’
 Wrote his own version of Robinson Crusoe and titled it ‘Foe’ (late 20 th
century)
 In this version: female character called Sarah Barten who finds herself on
the same island as Robinson Crusoe and she comes across RC
 All of a sudden RC is seen from a female perspective
 Coetze plays with this brilliantly
 Now the story is seen from a female perspective
- Old forms of literature are male-dominated
Conclusion:
- The novel is addressing middle class sensibilities
- Intends to create a sort of realism that the reader will accept as a sort of
documentary rather than fiction
- Realism
- Reflection of the sort of values that the middle classes would hold dear
Samuel Richardson (1740):
- Pamela (work) 1742
- Also realism in his writing but a more interior type of realism
 Writing that captures the inner thoughts/inner workings of a character
- Printer and publisher
- Inspiration for Pamela?
 Taken from the Conduct Books:
= books of model letters that parents could write to their children that
could offer advice to their children that were working away. (because
young people were moving from the countryside to the city  brought a lot
of dangers with it)
  Samuel Richardson as a printer was responsible for a lot of these Conduct
Books
 These kinds of books inspired him to write the novel Pamela:
- Pamela is a girl who moved away from her parents to work as a maid in a
large mansion house in the service of a great aristocratic lady Davis
She writes letters to her parents and vice versa
Pamela’s mistress lady Davis dies
Pamela expects that she will be sent back home but she is kept on in the
employment of lady Davis her son (he becomes her master)
The story is about the attempts that the master makes to try and seduce
Pamela
Story  Written in the form of letters
 Especially in the perspective of Pamela (drama, panic, joy, terror…)
In moral terms:
- Pamela is seen as admirable because she fights back
 She resists the advances of her young master
 Idea that Pamela protects her chastity/virtue  she is seen as virtuous
 In the novel she is rewarded: the relationship w the master turns to real
love and they marry, Pamela is elevated in her status (she is rewarded for
her resistance)  ‘rags to riches story’
Pamela, or Virtue rewarded:
- Samuel Richardson aims at INTERIOR REALISM !!!!
Instead of focusing on big action scenes, plot twists, or descriptions of the
physical world, interior realism explores a character’s secret thoughts, hidden
motives, anxieties, and mental struggles.
About the letter: (we only have 1 latter in the syllabus)
- Pamela is writing home to her mother to describe the situation that she
finds herself in.
- Pamela is very able to represent conversations that she has had with other
characters. It tends not to be direct quotation but it is reporting what was
said. (Richardson aka 'Pamela' is very good at this)
 Reported conversations are quite lively
- Pamela constantly thinks about: how does she process the information,
how does she feel, constantly reflecting, how does she try and see this in a
way that’s according to her moral values  this constant process of
reflecting: you really see this in the letters
 This is how R draws the reader into the interior world of the character
Pamela
 Far more detailed than Robinson Crusoe (figure of external actions and
activities <-> pamela: all about the drama of her own inner thoughts)
- Pamela is quite dignified
 The young master keeps giving her affection and warmth OR cruel
actions/words (switching moods)
 Pamela is the victim
 Pamela is dignified in the way she responds to the master (in the letters
you can read she stands up against the master (read letter))
 - Technique in the letter: Writing to the minute = the letters are being
written as the action is unfolding. The action is described as it is evolving.
HOWEVER:  stretches implausibility/credibility
If Samuel Richardson hadn’t written Pamela then it may well be that Henry
Fielding might not have written Joseph Andrews (1742)
- Henry Fielding did not like Pamela the novel
 Fundamentally disagreed with the basic moral premise of the novel Pamela
 Pamela is presented to us as morally good, admirable because of what she
didn’t do (she didn’t sleep with the young master) and Fielding had a
problem with this premise because his idea of being good hinged on what
you actively do that is good, on good works
 He felt it was sending the wrong moral message (problem: how we see
this idea of goodness)  according to Fielding: goodness = good works for
the benefit of others <-> Pamela: who did very little and it was for the
benefit of herself. (according to Fielding)
 He saw Pamela and she did good things for the benefit of herself (not for
others)
- Pamela (SR) is responsible for the writing of the novel Joseph Andrews
(Henry Fielding)

Henry Fielding:
Samuel Taylor Coleridge quote:
- Romanticism
- He read and admired Samuel Richardson and Henry Fielding
Quote:
- Titles of Fielding books
- Richardson and the idea of the interiority of the characters
 Much of the action takes place indoors
- Fielding is about being out in the world
 Much more open
 Dynamics between characters = positive energy
Henry Fielding’s response to Samuel Richardson:
- Originally he was a playwright
 Satirist, satirised the government/those in power (successful and
influential)
 The government did not like being criticised
 Consequence? Stage Licensing Act (1737-1843)
 He could no longer write plays bcs he would not be given a license by the
government to do that (his playwriting days were cut short)
 That theatre tradition/writing of plays is very much a part of his writing
style
- Disliked Pamela: He didn’t like the novel ‘Pamela’ in moral terms
 essential message was the wrong message
response: he wrote ‘Shamela’
 A sham = a fake
Story: Shamela is consciously and deliberately manipulating her master to
seduce him so that she can rise on the social ladder (Opposite of
 Richardson’s work where she is constantly resisting/defending herself, the
master is the evil one)
In Shamela it is Shamela who is calculating and trying to increase her
status
It reverses Pamela ( Shamela)
Reaction? Well-received by public, public loved the fighting between
Richardson and Fielding
Fielding extended the idea even more:
-He wrote another story about a young male (gender reversed) who is
subject to the advances of his female mistress
 He changes the situation
- For comic effect
Fielding’s comedy:
- Early chapters of Joseph Andrews: Initially Fielding is not aiming for
realism in his writing but he clings onto a traditional theatre writing
- Comic names for characters: Lady Booby (lady of the house) , Mrs.
Malaprop (one of Lady Booby her servants)
 Mrs. Malaprop: pretentious, thinks she is articulate (always fails when
making complex phrases/ using difficult words)
 A malaprop = attempting to use a word but getting it wrong (using
different word)
- Situational comedy: a situation that is there to generate laughs
 Wealthy lady pursues/seduces innocent young male servant (Joseph) 
Way more ridiculous than the story where the male master is preying on
the female servant.
- Unlikely coincidences:
 Typical within the theatrical tradition (in Fielding’s novel)
 Ex: Joseph (main character) loves Fanny  important in the book but at
one point it seems that Joseph is Fanny’s brother (they were separated at
birth + throws the whole novel upside down but right before the end it is
mentioned that they actually aren’t brother and sister)
 Another story really similar to Shamela (to make fun of Samuel Richardson)
- Fielding novel then begins to take on more substantial form
 Early in the novel: much of the action takes place around and in London
(the great houses of Lady Booby) but ultimately Joseph who resists the
advances of Lady Booby is sacked (he loses his job) and at that point all he
wants to do is walk back to his love ‘Fanny’.  at that point the story turns
in a picaresque form
Picaresque: joseph’s journey to return back home
As he is walking through the countryside, Fielding takes the opportunity to
demonstrate that England is a dangerous place (traveling in England is
dangerous, there is no police, no law really, lawlessness in the countryside)
Joseph embarking on this journey is where the novel begins to take form as
a much more substantial story than simply satire !!!

• Picaresque : Joseph resists Booby’s advances, gets the sack, walks from
London towards his beloved Fanny
Fielding’s theory of comedy:
- Fielding Is a comic write (he writes for laughs)
In the novel joseph Andrews:
- Desire to write comically is turned to a serious purpose
 Comedy is a tool used to expose the frailties, hypocrisies of powerful people
in society
Quote 1 on slide: Preface (in syllabus)
• ‘The only source of the true ridiculous is affectation […] Now
affectation proceeds from one of these two causes, vanity, or
hypocrisy.’
- True ridiculous = the thing that makes us laugh
- Affectation = pretending to be something that you are not
- Affectation that arises out of vanity/too much pride is LESS serious when
compared to affectation that arises out of hypocrisy because hypocrisy is
about doing the exact opposite to what you profess:
 In particular when It comes to VALUES
 Vanity isn’t as serious of an offense for Fielding as hypocrisy!!!
Quote 2 on slide:
Joseph Andrew (1742)
The good Samaritan scene:
- Chapter XIL (p21)
- Joseph is on the road on the way to Fanny
- Joseph is attacked and left for dead (brutal attack)
 Left naked in a ditch
- A coach passes by and stops
Why does it stop? The socially lowest member on that coach is a servant
and out of compassion wants to stop! The coach does stop.
Joseph is discovered half dead and naked in the ditch
There ensues a conversation between the passengers and the coach driver
as to whether or not Joseph should be helped and transported to
somewhere safe
1)Fielding wants to illustrate how lawless England is
 ‘being robbed on the road is a regular occurrence’
2)Fielding wants to illustrate this idea of compassion
 Genuine true feeling towards another person
 Many (Lawyer, passengers, coach driver) people lack compassion for
Joseph!
 They demonstrate that they are very cold and selfish in their motives.
Who? (Notice the excuses everyone finds for not helping Joseph)
- The Lawyer:
 Helps Joseph but has no compassion, he helps him because they are
already implicated bcs he is dying (otherwise he would break the law)
- Servant/Postilion  wants to help Joseph
- Coachman: concerned about losing time
 he would rather carry on and leave Joseph where he is
 - The Gentleman on the coach
 cowardly, fears for his own well-being (scared of robbers)  concerned for
himself
- A lady: initially seems interested but when she realises Joseph is naked,
she protests (‘I can’t allow a naked man to sit near me’  more worried
about ethics than helping a dying man)
- What do they have in common? They all have different kinds of excuses for
not helping Joseph
- Respectable symbols of society  none of whom have a shred of
compassion for Joseph’s situation
Way of presenting the lady:
- Example of hypocrisy on 2 counts: The idea of hypocrisy
1) When Joseph is about to get on the coach and she sees that he is naked
and she protests
- Joseph sees that there is a lady and thinks (‘I cannot do this to a lady’) 
so he refuses to get on the coach
- Small detail: line 95: seeing the lady, who held the sticks of her fan before
her eyes,
 Only the sticks of the fan (not unfold fan = waaier)  so she is perfectly
able to see joseph and his nakedness before her.
 She protests but is looking at him, she’s interested  well well well
2) She professes to be a lady who doesn’t drink alcohol
- BUT: she has alcohol on her in a little bottle
- At the end of the scene the coach is stopped by robbers again and it is
discovered that the lady has alcohol on her.
- These 2 events make her ridiculous (to the reader)
- The person who pretends to be something but really isn’t = hypocrisy
Justice:
- Key member of the scene is the ‘postillion’ (servant, works for the coach
driver)
 Says: stop the coach
- Who? The young lad who works for the coach driver, he first draws
attention to joseph and asks to stop the coach
- Ultimately Joseph is let onto the coach
 But he needs a coat bcs he is covered in blood
Who will give him a coat? (line 101-115)
- The postillion is the lowest, humblest member
- Only person w a genuine sense of compassion for a fellow human who is
suffering
- He gives the coat to Joseph
- Thing between parenthesis: Postillion transported for stealing a
chicken/hen-roost
 In Fielding’s writing key information is placed into parenthesis
 For that crime he has been transported (sent to the penal colony, Australia
(18th century))
 The seemingly trivial is of prime importance (use of parentheses)
Fielding’s work serious side:
 - He draws attention to a system that isn’t fit for purpose
- He is illustrating that the good person/Samaritan is the postillion
 But: he was punished for a petty crime
- The legal system says: you have to go the penal colony in Australia
- The lowest but best character in the story suffers the most within the
justice system of England (for stealing a chicken)
- The status of the law is mentioned a lot in Henry Fielding’s work and where
it delivers justice (recurrent theme)
- HF was instrumental later in life in helping to set up England’s first official
police force
 He saw the need for it, he was a part of that solution
- He tells his story in such a way that it is clear who we should be admiring
and for who we should be feeling contempt
- He underlines the idea of ‘helping others, good works’ (you need to
actively do good for others  this is what GOODNESS is)
In Joseph Andrews, Joseph has a friend (way older man though):
Parson Adams scene: (in joseph Andrews)
- Parson = reverent = religious minister
- Friend of Joseph, his mentor, a man of the cloth (religious minister)
- One of the greatest comic characters in English literature
Why?
-He is fundamentally flawed as a character, he has a fundamental fault BUT
he is a good man, he believes in doing good for others (goodness),
compassionate man
 Not a selfish man
What is his flaw?
- He has a bit too much pride, his flaw = he has too much pride/vanity
- His vanity: about his learning and influence and power as a teacher, the
message he can communicate to others (about how good he is at that, not
about money,wealth)
- As a character we often laugh at Parson Adams but he is a good person
(balance)
- Very inspiring character
Chapter VIII:
3 main sections:
1) section: domestic scene/issues
- Conversation between Parson Adams and his wife
Mrs Adams is not happy with Parson Adams because Parson Adams is
helping Joseph (Joseph’s mentor, he helps Joseph) and he is facilitating the
marriage between Joseph and Fanny
Mrs Adams doesn’t like this bcs she would like to see her children
employed with Lady Booby (she sees potential there and sees an
employment opportunity)
She thinks that if her husband keeps on helping Joseph then Lady Booby
won’t like that and will not want to employ her children.
 Mrs Adams: practical (fortunes of children)
Parson Adams: not practical, behaves according to his values/believes
= Disagreement between the Adams
 Helping Joseph is the right thing to do even if that damages the prospects
of his Children
 This is what the disagreement between the Adams are about
- Mrs Adams does most of the speaking in this section
 Gives a long list of reasons for why Parson Adams should not be facilitating
this marriage between Joseph and Fanny  All of this embodied in one
sentence, each reason is separated by a SEMICOLON, it’s piling arguments
upon arguments
Why important? It’s a style point
When we think of Robinson Crusoe  He does something similar BUT he
does that with physical scenes and objects, details and actions. He builds
up a picture by building up the detail.
= Paratactic style = this happens and this happens and this and this.
In this scene: Chapter VIII
- Mrs Adams is giving arguments (not physical detail) that are build up and
build up. (Similar technique but for argumentation rather than describing a
scene!)
After the argument: Joseph and Fanny arrive!
- The focus changes (line 160)
2) After the argument: Joseph and Fanny arrive!  delivery of the sermon
- The focus changes (line 160)
- Joseph says to Parson Adams: look I really wanna marry Fanny asap, can
you speed the process up?
 At that point PA delivers a sermon (lesson) to Joseph
 Here we begin to see PA’s weak side : his tendency to turn lots of situations
into a lesson (vanity)
Line 173: response to PA
- Joseph is almost panicking, he thinks Fanny and him are going to be in
danger until they marry
- PA decides to analyse this and looks into both of these reasons.
- Then he delivers the sermon (main lesson):
Main lesson: You should not be too excessive in your passion for another
person
You should control your passion, be temperate.
Line 196-206:
Parson’s message:
- Don’t be too passionate in your feelings!!!!!
- Recognise that if you were to lose your loved one it would be God’s will
and you should be able to accept that with good grace!
- Reminds us of the Ben Jonson poem (previous week)
 The father expressed: ‘I should be happy bcs my son has gone to a better
place.’ (he is clearly not happy in the poem)
 - PA is making the mistake of talking about human emotions in very abstract
terms
 There is no feeling here.
So: lesson has been delivered
3) Section:
- Someone bursts into the house with the news that PA’s (parson adams)
favourite son has just drowned
Reaction? PA’s reaction is the complete contrast to the lesson he was just
trying to teach Joseph
He is running around, expressing grief, going crazy
Even when Joseph is trying to calm him down by referring to the lesson he
was just taught  futile attempt
Feeling of a father who just lost his child and cannot control his feelings
He runs out of the house to find the body and then there is his son
His son didn’t drown, he is only soaked  somebody saw his son fall into
the river and rather than trying to help his son, ran to the house to inform
everybody that he drowned
- PA’s reaction to seeing his son alive:
Equally as joyful as it was desperate when he thought he died
 Demonstrates PA’s own passion again and love for his child (no filter on
that)
 Again demonstrating in his own actions the opposite of the lesson that he
was trying to teach Joseph (that was his vanity speaking then)
 Here: PA acted from the heart
Very important detail:
- His son was saved from drowning by a pedlar (= one of the lowest level of
the ladder of society, a kind of beggar who offers to do small jobs in
exchange for food)
Pedlar appears a number of times:
- Had helped PA in an earlier scene
- Same pedlar saw PA’s son drowning and he saved him
- PA’s now has an obligation to the pedlar: (in debt)
Described in a scene: line 234
 Interesting: idea of obligation
 All those examples are examples of obligations where the person who
should be saying thank you actually feels contempt for the other person 
<-> PA (‘not’)
 There isn’t a genuine feeling of gratitude (the list btw has a similarity to the
list in Hamlet’s soliloquy when it talks about the Law’s delay, oppressive
behaviour)
 He gives us these examples to make a clear contrast: this is an obligation
that is welcomed by PA’s bcs PA’s recognises this for a genuine act of help
and compassion
The way his reaction is described:
- HF is talking directly to the reader (238-240)
 His reaction is spontaneous, a sense of goodness (not thought through) 
we will see this kind of response in Romanticism btw: idea of spontaneous
overflow of feelings
  HF presents his scenes where the moral choice should be very clear for the
reader
 He is addressing the middle class reader with Christian values
 What he says in this line: if you don’t see the significance of this scene I am
not going to go any further because you will never get it. (239-240)
4) Final phase in the scene:
- Return back to PA
 Drama is over, son has survived, has obligation to the pedlar
- PA’s weakness (vanity), frailty returns because he continues to lecture
Joseph
 Making the point: you should never be too intense in your love for your
wife, you should be temperate and reasoned in your love for your partner
 He returns to that kind of lesson
- The person who has the last word = Mrs Adams
 She cuts PA short
Line 266-270:
 ‘you are talking rubbish’
 She is exposing his ridiculousness
 The way he lives his life is not the way in which he teaches the lesson to
Joseph
 We see that he is a genuinely good and loving husband (good moral + has
compassion for others)
 Mrs Adams (practical minded) is the one who points this truth out to Joseph,
PA and to the reader
- PA is a genuinely morally good character
 We admire him bcs he has compassion for others + a good moral
 He welcomes it when others do favours for him
 BUT weakness: intellectually he tends to see things in abstract terms and
delivers lessons on that  He never is able to make the connection
between the way he is (his goodness) and the lessons that he teaches 
that’s why he is a comical character  bcs we laugh and admire him at
the same time (very moving character)
- In Robinson Crusoe: very little dialogue, very descriptive in its approach
to the narrative
- In Samuel Richardson’s Pamela: A little bit more dynamic but it relies
on Pamela as the narrator (the writer of the letters) to be able to present
dramatic conversations convincingly. (however, stretches her own credulity
(= op de proef gesteld))
There is more of a dynamic sort of interaction between characters that’s
reported to us in the SR’s novel
- In Fielding: much more reliance on direct interaction/dialogue between
the characters, the characters are giving space to just speak, make their
argument and then others respond to that.
 Comes from the theatre tradition that Fielding comes from
 In plays there is many dialogue, he brings that into the novel
 Fielding contribution: lively dynamic dialogue
Literacy an social mobility:
20th century: we take the value of education and literacy for granted
18th century: widespread debate about how good an idea literacy is
 - Does everyone really need to read and write
Quotation:
- Illustrates views on why literacy is not a good thing for everyone (as a
social tool)
- Pernicious = negative
- Anti education quote
- HF aligned himself with this way of thinking about literacy
 He wrote to a middle class
 Literacy is not something that he promotes (you can see that within his
characters)
Fielding endorses the practical view:
- Fanny is illiterate but that does not hold her back as a character
- Joseph can read and write but with a limited level of education
 Joseph says on a number of occasions: the modest level of his education is
sufficient, he doesn’t need any more.
- PA  doesn’t gain from his learning, he is poor (even though he is a
parson), all of his years of learning do not guarantee that he fares well in
material terms
 Most learned character in the novel
- HF: Idea of education, value of education and use of education do not have
the primacy that it would for a present-day readership and audience
- His novel reflects an 18th century sort of mindset in terms of education.
(see article)
Conclusion:
Each novel has its own kind of emphasis. (18 th century)
- Realism: Daniel Defoe pioneers a visual and detailed sort of idea of realistic
action and detail
- Psychological complexity, interior realism : Richardson
- Morally directed comedy: fielding => (irony and satire as vehicles for
critiquing society)
On into the 19th century:
- Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy build on the idea of Defoe
 Idea of interiority
- Virginial Woolf builds on the idea of Richardson
 Experimental interiority
- Jane Austen and Kingsley Amis build on the idea of Fielding
 Jane Austen was a big fan of Henry Fielding
 Jane Austen is very good at exposing pretention (particularly in the
higher classes)  she is developed from a sort of Fielding’s approach
Already for essay: start thinking about writer or text u want to talk about in your
essay

Class 3: romanticism I: 28/02/2025

First PowerPoint: romantic poetry
First moment in literary history where we have -ism
Why?: suggesting that there is a broader idea behind it
None of the poets called themselves romantic , being romantic meant
something negative back then
Romanticism has many meanings so it is difficult to place. First thing
how to teach romanticism is by paintings (ex. walker above the sea of
fog)
Romanticism also in music
Romanticism is happening everywhere (not just England, Europe)
Difficult to place/ date:
- Very international
- Happening across many art forms
Romantic music: till early 20th century and we still call it romantic
music
But this is not for literature
Romanticism may have never ended but we can say british romanticism
it started in 1798 with the publication of lyrical ballads by wordsworth
and Coleridge
And ends in 1828 with the death of Byron ( he IS de romantic hero
because he goes against convention)
Or it started in 1789 (revolutipn) /1760 (when scotssman publishes
many poems
British romantic poetry
Started in 1798 with the book of poems by William Wordsworth (1770-
1850) en Samuel Taylor Coleridge and ended with the death of walter
scots in 1832
William blake : founder
William Wordsworth (1770-1850) en Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-
1834): “lake poets”
Most important poet in Scotland: Robert burns, walter scots
Satanic school:
• Lord Byron (1788-1824)
• Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)
• John Keats (1795-1821)

Two Scotsmen also wrote Romantic poetry: Walter Scott and Robert
Burns (the latter mainly in Scots)
Also women, such as Felicia Hemans and Letitia Landon.
More famous as novelists: Austen, Shelley, Brontës

Important novelist: walter scott

William blake – the tyger
This new slide features one of the most famous poems in English
literature: "The Tyger" by William Blake (written in 1794).
Your slide uses this poem as a prime example to help Define British
Romantic Poetry.
Here is an easy breakdown of what the poem is actually saying and why
it fits that topic:
1. What is happening in the poem?
The speaker is looking at a terrifying, fierce tiger and asking a massive
question: What kind of God could create something so scary?
 The Blacksmith Imagery: Blake imagines God not as a gentle
painter, but as a muscular blacksmith working in a dark, fiery
forge. He uses words like hammer, chain, furnace, and anvil to
show how much raw power it took to physically forge the tiger’s
heart and brain.
 The Big Question: In the fifth stanza, the speaker asks: "Did he
who made the Lamb make thee?" He is wondering how the exact
same Creator could make a sweet, innocent, gentle little lamb,
and also make a deadly, terrifying predator like the tiger.
2. Why is this a perfect example of "Romantic Poetry"?
British Romanticism wasn't about love and romance; it was an artistic
movement focused on intense emotions and nature. This poem fits
perfectly for three reasons:
 Awe and "The Sublime": The Romantics loved the concept of the
"Sublime"—the feeling of being completely overwhelmed by
something in nature that is beautiful but also terrifying. A tiger is
gorgeous but dangerous, which is why Blake calls it a "fearful
symmetry."
 Questioning Religion and Authority: Instead of just blindly praising
a gentle God, the poem asks deep, questioning, and slightly
spooky questions about the dark forces of creation.
 Emotion over Logic: The poem doesn't give you a neat, logical
answer. It ends exactly how it begins—in pure wonder and awe of
nature's power.
Summary in One Sentence
Blake uses the image of a fierce tiger to question how a powerful
Creator could design both the terrifying dangers and the gentle
beauties of the natural world.

Coleridge:
The frost performs: tries to describe how he feels: he sees something
and tries o interpret, describing things as you do it
He then has flashback to own youth. Tranger= thing in the fire that is
moving, what he is seeing now , he has before and he tries to figure out
why he becames so quiet.
The divine:
God means in romanticis: something greater than yourself,more
profound, something beyond BUT not theological => sublime
Sublime: looking at fire: sense of quiet , there is something there
But thiu .. crags: projecting supreme enjoyment of nature and complete
being in nature into his son that will be able to have that: he does that
by describing the lake district and everytjing belongs together
At the end he goes back to the beginning, mirroring : the perfection of
nature
This text is the complete poem "Frost at Midnight" by Samuel Taylor
Coleridge, written in 1798. It is one of his famous "Conversation
Poems," which means it is written in a relaxed, personal tone—almost
like he is talking directly to you (or to himself).
Because the images you uploaded are upside down, it can be tricky to
read! Here is an easy, step-by-step breakdown of what happens in the
poem from beginning to end:
Phase 1: The Quiet Cottage (Lines 1–23)
The poem opens late at night. Outside, the frost is freezing everything
in a silent, "secret ministry." Inside a quiet cottage, Coleridge is sitting
completely alone by a dying fireplace. Everyone else in the house is
asleep, including his tiny, cradled baby boy (Hartley).
It is so quiet that the silence actually starts to make him feel anxious.
The only thing moving in the room is a tiny film of soot fluttering on the
fireplace grate. He looks at this fluttering soot and feels a weird
connection to it, because it is the only other restless thing awake.
Phase 2: Flashback to Childhood (Lines 24–43)
Looking at that fluttering soot triggers a stream of consciousness
memory. It takes him back to his own childhood school days in the
crowded city of London.
He remembers sitting at his school desk, staring out the window, feeling
deeply homesick. Superstition said that a piece of soot fluttering meant
a stranger or a loved one was about to arrive. He remembers staring at
the school door all day, dreaming and hoping that his sister or a friend
would walk through to rescue him from his lonely school life.
Phase 3: A Promise to His Baby (Lines 44–64)
Coleridge snaps back to the present and looks down at his sleeping
baby. He makes a beautiful promise to the child: your life will be
different from mine. Coleridge was trapped in a gray, crowded city as a
child, but he promises that his son will grow up in nature. He wants his
boy to wander the mountains, lakes, and beaches, because nature is
God's "eternal language." By learning from nature, the child will learn
directly from God.
Phase 4: Full Circle (Lines 65–74)
The poem ends by returning to the present moment. Coleridge
concludes that because his son will grow up in tune with nature, all
seasons will be beautiful to him. Whether it is a green summer or a
freezing winter, his son will find joy in it. The final image matches the
beginning: the quiet frost hanging up secret icicles that shine under a
quiet moon.
The Big Theme in One Sentence
Coleridge reflects on his own lonely, city-bound childhood to promise his
sleeping baby a beautiful life raised in the healing freedom of nature.

p. 48:
same idea as coridge: William wordsworth
imagine: you standing on the shore by the lake and you make owl
sound. Then there is a lot of sound but then it becomes quiet, he has no
answer anymore. He is overwhelmed by the scene all around you. Same
idea of coridge, everyjting mirrors himself: sublime, the feeling of the
bot, he is complete part of nature, absorbed by his own expereinece,
overpowering feeling
what makes romanticism interesting and tragic:
he adds tragic part, there is a contrast of loss, mekancholy an sorrow
that you feel= this is romanticism
the poet is like the boy, the boy looks at the lake, the poet goes to the
churchyard and looks at the gravestone. But difference: the poet looks
at a manmade think and he is mute en the boy looks at nature and he is
loud. Poet is sadder creature because he has no sens of the sublime
unlike the boy.
This contrast between the hope and the sad reality=> romantic irony=
the clash between the ideal (of the boy) and the reality (wwhat the
poet experiences)
Wordsworth describes the sublime as: ppt 31
Mont blanc: what were thou and earth .. vacancy: he describes what we
see already, but imagine that we could see it completely, capable of
joining nature complete and not just see it through the human lens,
what would happen then? You will never know only children and nature
itself and you can never approach that.
John keats
p. 51 on first looking into chapman’s homer and 54 on seeing the elgin
marbles and ode on a Grecian urn and p56 -57
1. "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer" (October 1816) john keats
Meaning & Context
Keats wrote this famous sonnet after staying up all night reading
George Chapman's Elizabethan translation of the ancient Greek poet
Homer with his mentor. He walked home at dawn and composed this
masterpiece immediately.
The poem describes the feeling of intellectual and artistic awe. Keats
compares reading a great book to making a massive, historic
geographical discovery.
Structure & Style !!!!
 The Form: This is a traditional Petrarchan (Italian) Sonnet
consisting of 14 lines. It is divided into an Octave (the first 8 lines,
rhyming ABBAABBA) and a Sestet (the final 6 lines, rhyming
CDCDCD).
 The Volta (The Turning Point): In a Petrarchan sonnet, line 9
usually introduces a shift in tone or thought. Keats executes this
perfectly with the word "Then..." in line 9.
Verse-by-Verse Analysis
The Octave (Lines 1–8): The Metaphor of Travel
Much have I travell'd in the realms of gold, / And many goodly states
and kingdoms seen; / Round many western islands have I been / Which
bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
 Analysis: Keats uses an extended metaphor (a conceit) comparing
reading to traveling. The "realms of gold" and "western islands"
are books and poems. "Apollo" is the Greek god of poetry, and the
"bards" (poets) hold these kingdoms in loyalty (fealty) to him.
Keats is saying he has read a lot of great literature.
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told / That deep-brow'd Homer ruled
as his demesne; / Yet did I never breathe its pure serene / Till I heard
Chapman speak out loud and bold:
 Analysis: He had often heard of a massive, beautiful literary
territory ruled by the ancient Greek poet Homer (demesne means
domain). However, Keats didn't know ancient Greek, so he felt he
could never truly breathe that "pure" air until he read Chapman’s
bold, loud, and robust English translation.
The Sestet (Lines 9–14): The Shock of Discovery
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies / When a new planet swims
into his ken;
 Analysis: After the volta (line 9), Keats shifts from a traveler to an
astronomer. He compares the shock of reading Homer to a
scientist looking through a telescope and suddenly seeing a
brand-new planet enter his field of vision (ken).
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes / He star'd at the Pacific—and
all his men / Look'd at each other with a wild surmise— / Silent, upon a
peak in Darien.
 Analysis: He shifts to a third metaphor: a Spanish explorer looking
at a massive, undiscovered ocean for the very first time.
(Historically, it was Balboa who first saw the Pacific from Panama's
peak in Darien, not Cortez, but the poetic image of frozen,
stunned silence remains incredibly powerful). The men look at
each other with "wild surmise" (wonder and questioning),
completely struck silent by the sheer scale of what they have
found. This mirrors Keats's own stunned silence after reading
Homer.
Phase 1: The Octave (Lines 1–8) – The Well-Traveled Reader
In the first eight lines, Keats sets up an extended metaphor: Reading
literature is like traveling through geography.
 The Setup: He starts by saying he is a very experienced reader
("Much have I travell'd in the realms of gold"). He has read
countless great European poems and stories ("western islands").
 The Problem: Even though he is well-read, he has a massive blind
spot. He has always heard that the ancient Greek poet Homer
ruled over a massive, beautiful literary kingdom ("demesne"). But
because Keats didn't know how to read ancient Greek, he could
never actually experience it. He was locked out.
 The Solution: Everything changes in line 8: "Till I heard Chapman
speak out loud and bold." George Chapman’s English translation
finally unlocks the door for him.
Phase 2: The Sestet (Lines 9–14) – The Shock of Discovery
Right after line 8, we hit the Volta (the turning point). Keats drops the
comfortable, slow metaphor of a traveler touring islands. Suddenly, the
poem's scale explodes into outer space and massive oceans.
To explain the overwhelming feeling of reading Chapman's translation,
he uses two iconic images of sudden, monumental discovery:
1. The Astronomer ("Then felt I like some watcher of the skies...")
Imagine an astronomer sitting in a dark observatory, routinely scanning
the sky night after night. Suddenly, out of nowhere, a brand-new,
undiscovered planet drifts into his telescope lens ("swims into his ken").
It is a moment of total, unexpected scientific awe.
2. The Explorer ("Or like stout Cortez...")
Next, he takes us to the top of a mountain peak in Panama ("Darien"). A
group of exhausted Spanish explorers hike to the top of a cliff,
expecting to see more trees, but instead, they look down and see a
massive, endless, glittering blue ocean—the Pacific—which they didn't
even know existed.
Look closely at how Keats describes the explorers' reaction:
"...and all his men / Look'd at each other with a wild surmise— / Silent,
upon a peak in Darien."
They don’t cheer. They don't celebrate. They look at each other with
"wild surmise" (eyes wide with a mix of wonder, confusion, and
realization) and they stand completely silent. The sheer scale of what
they are looking at has stolen their ability to speak.
The Ultimate Meaning
This final image is the ultimate key to the poem. Keats uses the frozen,
stunned silence of the explorers to mirror his own physical reaction
after finishing Chapman's book at dawn.
He didn't just read a nice translation; he felt like a man who stumbled
upon a whole new universe. The poem beautifully captures that exact,
breathtaking moment when great art completely alters your perspective
of the world.
2. From "Sleep and Poetry" (Lines 96–119)
Meaning & Context
This excerpt is an intimate, autobiographical prayer where a young
Keats lays out his career goals. He begs the universe for ten years of
life so that he can fully immerse himself in writing and achieve his
poetic destiny. Tragically, Keats would die of tuberculosis just five years
later in 1821, making these lines hauntingly prophetic.
Style & Imagery
 The Form: Written in Heroic Couplets (rhyming lines of iambic
pentameter: AA, BB, CC).
  The Tone: Sensual, lush, and escapist. This represents the early
"Endymion" phase of Keats’s career, where poetry is viewed as a
beautiful, comforting dreamworld.
Section-by-Section Analysis
The Artistic Decree (Lines 96–101)
O for ten years, that I may overwhelm / Myself in poesy; so I may do the
deed / That my own soul has to itself decreed. / Then will I pass the
countries that I see / In long perspective, and continually / Taste their
pure fountains.
 Analysis: Keats asks for a decade to "overwhelm" (drown) himself
in poetry (poesy). He views writing not just as a hobby, but as a
mandatory spiritual duty decreed by his own soul. Like in the
Chapman sonnet, he views the future stages of his poetic career
as "countries" and "pure fountains" he must visit and taste.
The Realm of Flora and Pan (Lines 101–119)
First the realm I'll pass / Of Flora, and old Pan: sleep in the grass, / Feed
upon apples red, and strawberries, / And choose each pleasure that my
fancy sees;
 Analysis: He explains the first stage of his poetic journey. Before
writing heavy, serious tragedies, he wants to write light, joyful
nature poetry. "Flora" is the goddess of flowers, and "Pan" is the
god of the wild. He wants to indulge in pure, childlike, sensory
pleasure (grass, strawberries, apples).
Catch the white-handed nymphs in shady places, / To woo sweet kisses
from averted faces...
 Analysis: The imagery becomes highly sensual and erotic. He
describes flirting with mythical nymphs, catching them in the
woods, kissing them, and playfully playing with their fingers.
...till agreed, / A lovely tale of human life we'll read. / And one will teach
a tame dove... Another, bending o'er her nimble tread... Another will
entice me on, and on / Through almond blossoms and rich cinnamon; /
Till in the bosom of a leafy world
 Analysis: This section is an escape into a perfect, peaceful
paradise. The nymphs take care of him: one fans him with a dove,
another dances gracefully around him, and others lead him deeper
into a fragrant, warm world of almond blossoms and cinnamon.
Summary of Keats's Evolution
If you compare both texts, you can see how Keats views literature. In
"Sleep and Poetry," poetry is a lush, gentle, fragrant garden where you
go to hide, sleep, and taste sweet things. But by the time he writes
"Chapman's Homer," poetry has transformed into something much
bigger and more terrifying: it is a vast, wild, uncharted ocean that
leaves you standing in breathless, shocked silence.
Elgin marbles
1. Line-by-Line Meaning
Lines 1–5: The Weight of Mortality
"My spirit is too weak—mortality / Weighs heavily on me like unwilling
sleep,"
 Meaning: Keats immediately opens with a sense of complete
exhaustion. He feels that being a mortal human being—knowing
he is fragile and will one day die—is a heavy, suffocating burden. It
pulls him down like an unwanted, heavy sleep.
"And each imagined pinnacle and steep / Of godlike hardship tells me I
must die / Like a sick eagle looking at the sky."
 Meaning: When he looks at these massive Greek statues of gods
and heroes, he imagines the monumental effort ("godlike
hardship") and high achievements ("pinnacle and steep") of the
ancient artists. But instead of inspiring him, it reminds him of his
own weakness. He feels like a sick, dying eagle—a majestic
creature trapped on the ground, staring up at the vast sky it can
no longer fly into.
Lines 6–8: Crying as a "Gentle Luxury"
"Yet 'tis a gentle luxury to weep / That I have not the cloudy winds to
keep / Fresh for the opening of the morning's eye."
 Meaning: He finds a strange, comforting pleasure ("gentle luxury")
in crying over his limitations. He is weeping because he realizes
he does not possess cosmic, godlike powers—he cannot control
the winds or wake up the morning sun. He is just a man.
Lines 9–14: The "Dizzy Pain" of Art and Time
"Such dim-conceived glories of the brain / Bring round the heart an
undescribable feud;"
 Meaning: The grand ideas sparked in his mind by these statues
are too vast for him to fully understand ("dim-conceived glories").
This causes an intense emotional war ("feud") inside his heart
between his desire to create eternal art and his realization that he
is mortal.
"So do these wonders a most dizzy pain, / That mingles Grecian
grandeur with the rude / Wasting of old time—"
 Meaning: Looking at these wonders causes a literal physical
sensation of vertigo or "dizzy pain." This pain happens because his
brain is trying to mix two opposite concepts: the incredible,
beautiful perfection of ancient Greek art ("Grecian grandeur") and
the brutal, destructive effects of history and decay ("rude wasting
of old time"). The statues are magnificent, but they are also
broken, limbless, and decaying.
"—with a billowy main— / A sun—a shadow of a magnitude."
 Meaning: In the final lines, Keats's language completely breaks
down into fragmented images. He throws out massive, sublime
natural forces: a crashing ocean ("billowy main"), a blinding sun,
and finally, a "shadow of a magnitude." This means that the ruined
statues are just a tiny, fading shadow of how grand and massive
ancient Greece used to be.
2. Structural Analysis
 The Form: Like "Chapman's Homer," this is a Petrarchan Sonnet
(14 lines).
 The Rhyme Scheme: ABBAABBA (Octave) followed by CDCDCD
(Sestet).
 The Fragmented Ending: Notice the punctuation at the very end:
dashes (—). Instead of a clean, neat concluding sentence, Keats
uses dashes to show his mind is so overwhelmed by the art that
his words are trailing off. He cannot form a complete thought
because the experience is too massive for language.
3. Key Themes & Style
The Romantic Sublime
The Romantics loved the concept of The Sublime—the feeling of being
so intensely confronted by something massive, beautiful, or old that it
terrifies you and makes you feel small. In this poem, the sublime comes
from two things: the perfection of human art, and the terrifying power
of Time which destroys even the greatest art.
The Contrast with "Chapman's Homer"
It is helpful to compare this poem to his other sonnets:
 In Chapman's Homer, discovering great art made Keats feel
powerful, like an explorer conquering a new world.
 In On Seeing the Elgin Marbles, great art makes him feel weak,
defeated, and painfully aware of death. The statues are immortal,
but he is not.
Ultimately, the poem is about the tragic realization that human life is
short, while time is an unstoppable, eroding ocean—leaving even the
most "godlike" human creations as mere shadows of what they once
were.

Defining romanticism:
- End of 18th century, beginning of the 19th century
- Romanticist never had any sense of being together
  Why it is difficult to say when it started, where it started…
- ‘romantic’  doesn’t have to do with romance/love  but comes from the
Schlegel brothers: romance language (daring deeds, passions, dragons)
- We will be using a textual approach: historical background, w
predetermined set of values
Where?
- Global phenomenon
- Entered through literature, translations…
- Rise of nationalism as a result of Romanticism
 Idea that the nation is linked to people, language, culture, climate  very
romantic idea
- Germany
 Where Romanticism gains a bit of its theorization (Schlegel brothers)
 Many terms given which would later be translated across to England like
‘romanticism’
- Every single country that Romanticism moved into had a PRINTING
REVOLUTION
- International movement
When?
- 1780-1830 approximately
- Difficult to date
Starting dates:
- James Macpherson
 Kind of gave birth to the rise of theorization around folklore
- Reception of Chatterton’s Rowley Poems
 Something with lost manuscript of medieval monk
- Lyrical ballads: Wordsworth and Coleridge:
 Preface: programmatic development of how they want to see literature
develop, they diagnose what they find to be wrong w literature in Britain at
that time
- French Revolution
 Immense political, cultural and philosophical shifts
 Denial of all old standard thought
 Preface:
Ending dates:
- Death of Percy Shelley (1822)
 Drowned in a storm in a lake
- Death of Lord Byron (1824)
 Aristocrat
 He fought the Ottomans but didn’t fight bcs he died due to dysentery
- Death of Walter Scott
- Coronation of Queen Victoria
 Ending of the Georgian period  Victorianism: industrialism
- Death of Wordsworth (1850)
- Also: Romanticism never ended
 We’re still doing Romanticism in our own way just digitally
1815: Big change
  Before: optimistic
 After: Pessimistic
 Why? Napoleon was defeated at Waterloo (1815)
 Now Napoleon is called the emblematic of the Byronic hero (lone figure who
through sheer willpower causes international/philosophical change
 His defeat marked a real tonal shift in British Romanticism
The defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo in 1815 turned the older generation into
peaceful escapists and ignited the younger generation into passionate rebels.
 + something else had to do with it: sky was dark for 1 year due to a
volcanic eruption
Historical contexts:
- Romantic literature  exotic, border crossing, talks a lot about British
colonialism (new project then), about war…
- Pamphlet war between Edmund Burke and Mary Wollstonecraft:
 Pamphlet war = letters written to a friend which are published in public but
they’re usually calling someone out
Burke pamphlet:
- Thoughts on revolution
- Personal correspondence to many people (in reality, political)
- Outlines critique of French revolution
- Necessity of hierarchy in the world (natural, it shouldn’t be changed)  like
the Royal Family, no one likes it really but it can’t go!
- Emotional (not rational)
- Almost hysterical, sounds like he’s almost on the verge of tears
- Moralizing the social structure by which power runs from the top down
which through his moralizing is made natural and going against it seems
like a crime against nature, God…
- Personal affront?!
Mary Wollstonecraft pamphlet: in response
- One of the first prominent feminists of the 18 th-19th century
- Wrote her own pamphlet which she addressed to him directly, however,
intended for huge public consumption.
- Sounds polite
What she is really saying:
- You are such a learned man and I am a woman who doesn’t have access to
that
 Before you call me an idiot, don’t, because I have a lack of education
 Lack of education  sarcasm/irony: she turns her position of weakness
(being a woman) into a strength
 Very romantic (irony)
- She 100% wins the debate they’re having
- Being aware of your position as a writer and integrating that in your writing
(through irony)  very Romantic
 Mary did that very well here
 Her criticism of him is revolutionary
 Why these 2 pamphlets?
- Birth of the political/historical landscape
- Huge debate about the changes taking place
 Only big news once a week—month
 People would talk about that for years onwards (ex. French Revolution, even
after Napoleon)
- Romanticism  they way people communicate w each other changed:
personal letters diffused through a mass public (integration of the public
sphere with the personal)
Children’s book:
-
Right before Charles’ coronation
-
Sold out, weird children’s book according to Dominic
-
Hierarchy is made natural, unquestionable (even though it may not be
right)
 Can be linked to Edmund burke ehja

Who?
- Coleridge  in the canon of romanticism (but plagiarised many German
works, SO ? is he really a British writer, what is really British about it?)
- Byron wrote in French, English and Italian
 Most famous works about being abroad (pilgrimage?)
 So what makes him a British writer?
- Shelley
 Plagiarised/translated Schlegel brothers  he wouldn’t see those ideas as
belonging to them
- Problems around canon (bcs they copied things from other countries)
- None of these writers ever considered themselves connected
- The Big Six  people we now place in the canon of Romanticism
 Chosen by Victorians, they looked back in time
////
British Romanticism:
- Difficulty? Romanticism wants to be difficult
- Way of writing which constantly looks at itself, self-conscious, reflextive
- Things that pop up when thinking about Romantic:
 Poet/artist = hero
 Self-centred, elevation of the writer
 Irony
 The self  referring back to themselves as the writer throughout poem,
novel…
Textual elements:
- It’s about nature
 Landscapes, waterfalls, big forests
- About folklore, oaths, ballads
- National idea of culture that is now being recaptured through their poetry
bcs they’re unique as a poet
 - Irony
- The sublime
It’s a reaction against the Enlightenment:
- Enlightenment: elitist, highly stylized, cosmopolitan, neoclassical, not
national, mostly French  Romanticism in Britain big reaction to that:
- Authenticity above style
- National (culture) above cosmopolitan
- Popular (coming from a kind of people spirit) above elevated
- Romanticism wants to be the spirit of the time ((Volks)geist) but it doesn’t
want anyone questioning why it wants to be those things either.
- The sublime = verhevene
- Not about reason (enlightenment) but about interiority rather than
exteriority, emotions
British romanticism:
1) Self and irony
- 2nd quote: ‘Yeah, that’s really cool’  sarcasm/irony
 Words are the same so what’s changed? Intonation or tone or smthg
 What that tone is saying:
- When you look for irony on textual level you look for a disparity btwn a
romantic ideal and a situation:
For example: Disparity between a romantic ideal and a situation (Ex.
Wuthering Heights Heathcliff and Cathy are meant for each other,
soulmates (Romantic ideal: love, passion) BUT  reality: they can’t be
together due to social circumstances for example)
That in a sense is Romantic irony on a textual level.
Similar thing in: Pride and Prejudice
At one point Darcy insults her because he says that he is so high birth and
she is so low birth.  playing w the idea of Romantic irony
- Quote on the right:
 From Don Juan: one of Lord Byron’s texts
 Calls himself self-consciously epic (irony)
 Irony  when he rhymes Virgil and Homer
 He is writing an epic but is playing around w conventions of the epic in
order to poke fun at those conventions.
 He inserts himself into the text.
 He is playing around w the big ideas that have characterized literature, self-
consciously copying them and then kind of ridiculing them within his own
text BUT: people wanted to read big epics during these times.
 Hij kijkt niet per se naar de echte definities van de epiek maar eerder doet
wat de andere eigenschappen ervan zijn
2) Nature and the sublime (verhevene)
- R keeps idealizing natural images
- Constant theme of big lush forest, landscapes, pure running rivers
 Reality: rivers were dirty, forests were getting chopped down
- Idea of picturesque
 Is the place fit for painting or not?
- Nature is never really there, it is always in the presence of the poet itself
  Nature is contextualized in terms of its experience by the person reciting
the poem
- Quote on the right: Ode to a Nightingale - Keats
 About a nightingale
 What comes first? The poet (the ‘I’) then the nightingale
The ode is put first: the act of producing a poem about a nightingale
 Sublime: odd power of nature to spark an emotion doesn’t exist in nature or
in the poet but the space between them.
 Depictions of nature in the text together with a personal pronoun (I or you):
mostly very close together
3) Writing and Orality
- The poet stands apart of the rest (puntje 2)
 Shelley’s quote ‘unacknowledged legislators of the world’
 He ascribes to himself as a poet an incredibly high position within the world
because he stands aside from the rest
- Patronage = sponsoring
- People started writing as commercial authors
 Anxiety around art is related to this (bcs you are no longer writing for
yourself but for money)
- Quote: The Solitary Reaper (Wordsworth)
 Song that has been passed down from mother to child for centuries and is
now being sung?
 It’s not really about the song
 It’s about the poet, how he integrates morality into his poetry, what his
poetry sets aside from the rest
 Even after this oral song goes away the spirit of it it lives on in him
4) History and modernity
- For example: text about nature (also about what the poet thinks about it,
poet’s interpretation of nature  SO: none of these themes exist in
isolation)
 Ex. If it’s about history, it will also be about the self, irony or nature
- Romantic = Romanesque
 It looked backwards towards medievalism as a way of producing art.
- Quote: La Belle Dame Sans Merci (Keats)
 Looking backwards towards medievalism
Ex. Knight
 Supernatural poem:
Ex. Stories of King Arthur when he’s meeting ladies in lakes
Preface to Lyrical Ballads:
- By Coleridge and Wordsworth
- One of the starting points for British Romanticism
- Ballad = oral song
- Lyrical  lyricism, stylization, poetry, written down
S15:
- Difficult to read, not a normal way or writing
- He’s trying to combine an oral form (ballad) and a literally/written form
- Argument he is making is contradictory/ironic:
 Kind of language? Not for the rustic/normal people
  He is writing about the people but with difficult language (not his intention)
Contradiction:
 He says: I love the people and I wanna right for the people BUT: that is not
how he writes whatsoever
- He says: I am of the people, I am going to write in the language of the
people, we’re going to use this simple, pure language to access the higher
emotions, big realms of poetry  BUT: that’s not how he writes!!!!!!
(contradiction)
- Poetry needs to be a common language
- Low and rustic life  pastoral life (life in the countryside amongst people
who don’t necessarily have a lot of money)
- Last 2 lines from ‘indulge’:
 Arbitrary and capricious
 Arbitrary = not necessary
 Capricious (=annoyed)  people who used tons of phrase reps for no
reason at all
That is actually how he writes!
- He is 100% dead serious (not satirical this time)
S16:
Quote 1:
- The poet is apart from the other men, he is elevated
- Contradiction:
 Before: (previous slide) poetry should come from the commonality of
language that even the simplest of men in the most pastoral villages can
produce.
 Is the poet part of the common people here or separate? The poet is apart
from the other men, he is elevated/ set aside.
 Contradiction doesn’t make much sense: poetry should come from the
language of people but the poet is separate, he’s the” unacknowledged
legislator of the world”.

Quote 2:
- Contradictory: Poetry should come from the people, HOWEVER, the poet is
different from the people.
- Poetry  spontaneous (what the poet should be) (line 1) BUT the rest =
WHAT THE POET DOES (something contradictory?)
- Part 1: You should be spontaneous but he doesn’t write spontaneous
(eerste zin tot ‘:’ )
- Part 2: not spontaneous (na ‘:’
- What does Wordsworth say poetry is?
 “The spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings”
 How does that sound? Something that’s natural, just happens, not stylized,
not studied like in the Enlightenment
The rest of the text: Does it read spontaneously? No and there is another
contradiction:
 Between what the poet should be and what the poet actually is
  The poet  should be one of the common men but should also be elevated
from them, spontaneous
 The poet  is not spontaneous in this part
 Overstudied, overworked (it read that way at that time as well)
- Something that took too long to produce = inauthentic (thoughts and
reason  not from sentiment/emotion)
Quote 3:
- Wordsworth is writing about the literary situation of the day
 People are reading novels, papers…
 There is a crisis (like we worry about violent videogames): worry about how
much literature people received at a daily basis
 Rapid speed at which people were updated
- Contradiction:
 Wordsworth says the poetic language comes from the common man,
commonality in language
 BUT: the stuff he hates is what the common man is reading
 His works weren’t popular
- He is moaning about stuff he doesn’t like
- Contradiction: hij zegt dat andere schrijvers sucken maar hij wordt niet
gelezen en de anderen wel (de werken die volgens hem sucken).
- Contradiction
 How he thinks things are or ought to be in
VS
 The reality
Enlightenment  elitism (educated elite that produced the art)
Romanticism  elite that produced the art of the people
Introduction to Songs of Innocence: (William Blake) (we’ll be doing close
reading)
William Blake: romanticist , not commercially successful
- Introduction to his poetry collection ‘Songs of Innocence’
 Spells out what he wants the book to be doing
- Starts off musical  start of singing the song
 Morality
 Message? My poems are important bcs they represent tradition, heritage
(singing songs)
Again: self-conscious
‘symbolic powers move you/mean something’
- Just like Lyrical Ballad:
 Trying to integrate 2 different forms of artistic communication:
1)Musical/spoken
2)Literary
Trying to capture spontaneousness/immediacy of musicality.
That is connected with his depiction nature: he’s using the natural
landscape to help him produce art
- Triangulation: musicality, writing and the landscape/natural world
- He’s playing a musical instrument
 Sonority, music
 - Repetition of the verb  means he is happy
- Then he starts singing the song
- One part musical and one literary
Lines Written Above Tintern Abbey (William Wordsworth, 1798):
Page 193 below: Lyrical ballads (1802):
Stanza 1:
- He is describing in as many words as he possible can everything he’s
looking at.
- Idealized version of countryside Britain
- BUT AGAIN: When it comes to nature it’s not really about nature but about
the poet’s perception of nature. (how this uniquely sensitive soul sees
nature in a different way compared to other people)
Any indication in the poem that this is not really about nature but about
something else?
- Title and first 2 lines:
 It’s not Tintern Abbey, it’s written a few miles above Tintern Abbey, here it’s
the poetic experience put into verse
 Principal subject isn’t really Tintern Abbey or nature or the picturesque 
it’s the poetic experience it has.
Line 3-4:
- Last time he was there was 5 years ago BUT WHAT A 5 YEARS THAT HAVE
BEEN:
 It’s about his own longing for this place
 After this: he does this big aerial view of the landscape
- Very romantic: to go somewhere you really want to be and then to think
about the times that you weren’t there.  triggers that emotional response
(in stanza 2???)
Stanza 2:
- It's about his own feelings (not nature)
- the natural landscape is not really here at all (like in stanza 1), it was just a
trigger to start talking about himself.
Line 40 and down:
- this recollection is not just personal but from the personal
 the exterior leads back into the interior and the interior leads to something
higher
Ex. It makes him consider God, nature of the world and all these Romantic
things
Stanza 3:
Line 85-end:
- acceleration (list of things) in there which makes it ironically kind of
difficult to say out loud.
- Are we still a few miles above Tintern Abby? (river?!)
No, it's more nature in general.
- Nature is used to express something greater! Ofs
- Footnote: contradiction, irony
  Young = another writer
 Supposed to be a spontaneous overflow …
 Contradiction:
1)Spontaneous overflow
2)Footnote
tension/contradiction there
As much as he’s trying to be spontaneous, original and authentic he
writes it as if he’s writing from his spot above Tintern Abbey: lines written
from that moment, here’s what I was thinking in that moment. AND later:
oh, this might have come from somewhere else but I’ve read so much so
what do I know? (contradiction)
- The sublime:
 Big wide open space (like grand canyon for example  not only the
canyons take your breath away but also your experience of it)
 Irony: he’s still interjecting himself in there with footnotes and saying: this
comes from somewhere before, not of this is new, but you know, it doesn’t
matter it’s new to me. (contradiction)
Stanza 4:
- He comes back to his personal life in the very end
- About what his sister needs of him
The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere: Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1798) (p54)
- One of the famous poems of lyrical ballad  has kind of bled into pop
culture
- Takes place on a ship
- Supernatural
- Trying to capture the language of the common man  very strange to
read: supernatural, mythical
- No poetic self, 3rd person
- Marinere = old sailor
- When the bridegroom speaks: between ‘ ‘
1-24:
- Not personal (no poetic self)
- Third person narration
- Omniscient observer who’s narrating events in person.
- What does he narrate?
 There’s a mariner = an old/ancient sailor
Dialogue:
 Mariner is stopping someone on the street and holding him there
 First thing that is said is a question from the person being held: why are you
stopping me? I need to get to a wedding, I’m a guest there.
 The mariner continues to hold him.
 The guest continues to insist that he’s let go
 The mariner gazes at him with his glittering eye  holds him there with a
powerful stare
 The wedding guest sinks onto the stone and has no choice but to listen to
the entire tale.
- Invitation to old storytelling
  Spontaneity in storytelling
- Language: written normally?
 It’s weird (Shakespearian perhaps?)
 Self-consciously copying a much older style of narration and doing it not
very well at some points.
Ex. Mixed up tenses (bad)
- When the bridegroom/guest says something we can see quotation marks
 To signal that this man is speaking
25-55:
- First line = the ancient mariner (but without the ‘ ‘ ) is speaking
- The mariner is pushed to the foreground (level of syntax and grammar as
well)
- Only when the narrator switches over to the wedding guest there are
quotation marks ‘ ‘.
- The ancient narrator’s speech is integrated into the narration itself.
So: the mariner tells a story of how he was once on a ship with a lot of people,
they got lost on the ice and then an albatross appeared.
The mariner for no reason at all shoots the albatross and it falls into the boat and
the other sailors condemn him.  you should never shoot an seabird/albatross
(bad luck)
They tie the mariner to the mast, hang the albatross from his neck as a sign of
his guilt. When nothing really happens they start celebrating: ‘oh well, maybe
what you did was a good thing then’.
And then it goes wrong: there’s another wind that blows them past the equator
into a part of the world that had not yet been explored and they come across sea
monsters.
89-122:
- The point at which the sailors start celebrating and then they’re punished!
 Connection/significance in the fact that it’s not the killing of the bird that
brings them punishment but the fact that everyone changed their minds
and started celebrating it later? (denk hierover)
Opinions change under circumstances  is there a moral to this story,
should you stay firm to your convictions?
Christian POV: you repent your sin and then it’s kind of okey.
Maybe the lesson = the fact that a secondary speaker is telling it to
someone else.

Nature?
 Compared to Tintern Abbey/difference:
Tintern Abbey: pastoral, goes through the poet, into the sublime
The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere:
- The shotting of an albatross  Nature is flowing through that as a moral
bend (speculation)
- Next page: once they hang the albatross around his neck they see 2
skeletons playing dice  supernatural
 - Punishment? Because everyone changed their mind and started
celebrating
 If there is no guilt then they will be punished (Mathiasje zei dit)
- Differ from Tintern Abbey?
 Here: more supernatural
177-195:
- Supernatural  not a normal thing to happen at sea

- The mariner goes on forcibly telling people his story about shooting this
albatross.
 What does that punishment of being forced to tell a story again and again.
What does that say about Romantic writing itself?
- The marinere’s narrative has overpowered the narrator’s power
(Coleridge’s narrative) (just speculation all of this btw)
- Discrepancy between a reality and an idea  irony
- Idea of to tell it again and again  and now it wound up on the written
page
Ozymandias: Percy Bysshe Shelley (bottom of page 61-62)
- Percy Shelley:
 Archetypal Romantic poet: young, radical, died at a young age (which is the
best thing you can do if you’re a Romantic poet), vegetarian, politically
engaged
 Very productive
 He came around with Byron a lot (Byron was more successful though)
Ozymandias:
- Interesting: to what it says about how Romanticism engages with (older)
art.
 Connection with History and Modernity!
- About a man that finds the ruins of a statue
- End = mysterious, you can use your imagination
- Art is timeless: King Ozymandias is dead but his art isn’t
What happens?
- A traveller is telling a story about a man that finds the ruins of a statue of
a long dead king
- Engraved on the plaque of the statue ‘My name is Ozymandias, king of
kings, look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!’
- Irony? (idk)
- Form: Sonnet
 8 lines of one thing
 Tone of other 6 lines changes
What is that tone shift of the 6 lines from the first 8?
- First 8 lines: he meets a traveller from an antique land, the traveller
describes this broken statue of this king (simple description)
 - Last 6 lines: read the plaque and he looks around at what’s left (judgement
being made), the irony of the poem comes in  thing written down +
description of the king and all his WORKS  then he looks around and
there is nothing there (irony here!)
- Tone shift:
- Poem is opened in the middle of a situation (first line super random)
 Spontaneous
- How does it end? mysterious, you can use your imagination

- The poet is speaking: I met a traveller from an antique land. (frame
narrative)
 The rest of it is reported speech (what the traveller said to the poet)
When the poem ends, do we go back to that frame narrative?
- NO, it just fades off  there’s a hyphon (-) and fades into eternity (just like
the king)
 Makes it more mysterious (it kind of opens up out of nowhere and then
fades into nothing/-)
We don’t know what’s going on.
- Less is always more (you can imagine)
- Tonality  stretch in the words (repetition of vowels?!)
First 8 lines:
- Accuracy of the expression being written onto the rock  whoever made it
was very good at what did they.
 It’s still there (line7-8)

- It’s about time taking everything away eventually:

Is there a comment about art being more than that, that surviving?
- The things that have survived in this broken old ruins statue thing in the
dessert is THE SKILL OF THE ARTIST.
 Don’t be too full of yourself, time reduces everything to dust
 Don’t be like Ozymandias who says he’s the King of kings and is nothing
now.
Is there an alternative reading?
- Metatextual approach: us reading it 200 years after Shelley again shows
this lasting of art (not just in the poem but also the poem itself)
Class 4: romanticism II
Part 1: The Year Without a Summer (1816)
What happened: A massive volcano erupted (Krakatoa), shooting ash
into the sky and blocking the sun. It made 1816 the coldest year in
centuries, causing bad weather, ruined crops, and a global health crisis.
The Literary Connection (Lord Byron): The famous Romantic poet Lord
Byron used this scary climate crisis to write a poem.
 He used the science of his time (fossils/extinction theories) to
imagine a crazy future.
 He imagined that our world will one day be buried underground.
  He jokes about future civilizations digging up the remains of the
British King (George IV) like a weird museum monster.
Part 2: American Romanticism (1840s–1860s)
This was the very first truly "American" style of writing. The
presentation shows that it sits on a spectrum between two other
movements:
[ Transcendentalism ] <====== ( AMERICAN ROMANTICISM ) ======>
[ Realism ]
(Nature is Good) (Real Life)
1. Transcendentalism: An earlier movement that believed Nature is
pure and good, but human cities and society corrupt people. (Key
writers: Emerson and Thoreau).
2. Realism: A later movement that rejected romantic ideas and
wanted to show stark, honest, real life. (Key writer: Mark Twain).
Part 3: The Two Ultimate American Poets (Whitman vs. Dickinson)
The exam will likely ask you to contrast these two famous poets
because they were complete opposites in how they lived and wrote:
Poet 1: Walt Whitman (The Outgoing Poet)
 His Life: He loved being out in public, hanging out in Brooklyn, and
being involved in politics.
 His Book (Leaves of Grass): He tried to write a massive poem that
included everyone and everything in America.
 His Style: He used Free Verse. This means his poems had no strict
rules, no set rhythm, and barely any rhyming.
Poet 2: Emily Dickinson (The Private Poet)
 His Life: She was extremely isolated and spent her life trapped
inside her bedroom in Massachusetts. She only published about 10
poems while alive.
 His Book: She wrote 1,800 very short, quiet, mysterious poems
about her inner thoughts.
 His Style: She used Ballad Form (a traditional 4-line pattern that
sounds like a hymn). But she made it unique by using slant
rhymes (words that almost rhyme but not quite, like soul and all)
and lots of dashes (—) to break up the lines.
Quick Summary Checklist for the Exam:
 1816: The cold "Year Without a Summer" inspired dark, scientific
poetry by Byron.
 American Romanticism: Sandwiched between loving pure nature
(Transcendentalism) and facing harsh reality (Realism).
  Whitman: Public person, wrote massive poems, used Free Verse
(no rules).
 Dickinson: Totally isolated person, wrote tiny poems, used Ballad
Form and slant rhymes.
Since Emily Dickinson wrote around 1,800 poems, professors usually
select these specific six because they perfectly show her unique style:
using the Ballad Form (hymn-like rhythms) to explore deep, mysterious
thoughts about poetry, truth, death, and pain.
Here is a simple, easy-to-study breakdown of each poem for your exam:
1. Poem 466: "I dwell in Possibility —"
 The Main Idea: This poem is about the power of poetry vs. prose
(ordinary writing). Dickinson imagines Poetry as a massive,
magical house with no limits.
 The Metaphor: She says Poetry is a house made of "Possibility." It
is a far better house than "Prose" because it has way more
windows and superior doors.
 The Roof and the Walls: The chambers are as vast as cedar trees,
and the roof isn't made of wood—it is the literal sky ("The
Gambrels of the Sky").
 The Conclusion: Her job ("Occupation") as a poet is to stand in this
infinite house, spread her hands wide, and collect "Paradise"
(limitless creative ideas).
2. Poem 1263: "Tell all the truth but tell it slant —"
 The Main Idea: This is one of her most famous lines. It means: Tell
the truth, but don't tell it directly. Tell it indirectly or softer
("slant") so it doesn't overwhelm people.
 The Metaphor: She compares the absolute truth to Lightning. If
you show a child a terrifying lightning bolt directly, it scares them.
Instead, you have to ease them into it with a "kind explanation" so
they understand the storm safely.
 The Conclusion: The raw truth is too bright and dazzling for human
beings to handle all at once ("Too bright for our infirm Delight"). It
must surprise us gradually, or it will blind us.
3. Poem 441: "This is my letter to the World"
 The Main Idea: Dickinson lived a very isolated life in her bedroom.
This poem is her explaining that her poems are her "letter" to a
world that ignored her.
 The Details: Even though the world never wrote back to her, she
spent her time listening to Nature. She took the simple, majestic
news that Nature whispered to her and wrote it down in her
poems.
  The Conclusion: Since she is passing her poems down to future
generations ("Hands I cannot see"), she asks her readers to look
at her work and "Judge tenderly — of Me."
4. Poem 372: "After great pain, a formal feeling comes —"
 The Main Idea: This poem perfectly describes the feeling of
emotional numbness after you go through a massive trauma or
heartbreak. Your body doesn't cry anymore; it just goes cold and
robotic.
 The Robotic Imagery: * The nerves feel stiff and quiet like statues
in a graveyard ("ceremonious, like Tombs").
o The feet walk mechanically in circles without caring where
they go ("A Wooden way").
o The heart feels like a hard stone ("A Quartz contentment").

 The Conclusion: She calls this the "Hour of Lead." She compares
surviving this deep pain to a person freezing to death in the snow:
first you feel the freezing chill, then your mind goes blank
(stupor), and finally you just let go and feel nothing.
5. Poem 449: "I died for Beauty — but was scarce"
 The Main Idea: Two dead people are lying in adjacent graves in a
cemetery, discussing why they died. It shows that Art (Beauty)
and Truth are exactly the same thing.
 The Conversation: The speaker says she died for "Beauty." The
man in the room next door says he died for "Truth." He realizes
they are soulmates and calls them "Brethren" (brothers) because
Beauty and Truth are identical.
 The Haunting Ending: They talk through the stone walls of their
tombs like family members at night, until time passes, moss grows
over their lips, and their names on the tombstones are completely
covered up and forgotten.
6. Poem 591: "I heard a Fly buzz — when I died —"
 The Main Idea: This is a shocking poem about the exact moment of
death. Everyone expects dying to be a massive, spiritual, holy
event. Instead, it gets ruined by a normal, annoying housefly.
 The Setup: The room is dead silent. The family members
surrounding the bed have cried until their eyes are dry ("wrung
them dry"). Everyone is holding their breath waiting for the "King"
(God or Death) to show up and take her soul.
 The Twist: The speaker signs her will and gives away her
belongings. Right at the final, holy moment, a fly flies into the
room. It makes a stupid, clumsy, blue "stumbling Buzz" right in
front of the light.
  The Conclusion: Instead of seeing heaven open up, the windows
fade away, the fly blocks the light, and she simply passes away: "I
could not see to see." It is a very realistic, unromantic view of
death.
💡 Quick Exam Reminder for Dickinson:
If you get an essay question about Dickinson, remember to mention her
style highlights:
1. Slant Rhymes: Words that almost rhyme but sound slightly off
(like Room/Storm or Stone/Lead).
2. Punctuation: She uses lots of dashes (—) to break up the rhythm
and make the reader pause, creating tension.
This is a famous poem by John Keats called "Ode on a Grecian Urn"
(written in 1819). Keats is one of the "Second-Generation" British
Romantic poets from your slides.
To make this super easy to study, let's answer your professor's four
exact questions one by one.
Question 1: Who is “thou?” Who is this ode being addressed to?
The "thou" is the Grecian Urn itself (a large, ancient Greek vase made of
marble with pictures carved into it).
Keats speaks directly to the vase like it is a living person. In the very
first lines, he gives the urn three nicknames:
1. "Bride of quietness" – Because it has sat silently in a museum for
thousands of years.
2. "Foster-child of silence and slow time" – Because it was created
long ago and preserved by time.
3. "Sylvan historian" – A "forest storyteller" because the carvings
show beautiful scenes of nature and trees.
Question 2: What are the scenes that are being described in each
stanza?
Keats is walking around the vase, looking at the frozen pictures carved
into the stone. He describes three specific scenes:
 Stanza 1 (The Wild Chase): He sees a chaotic scene of gods or men
chasing beautiful women through a forest. People are playing
musical instruments like pipes and tambourines ("timbrels").
Everything looks wild and exciting.
 Stanzas 2 and 3 (The Frozen Lovers): He looks closer at a young
man playing a song under a tree, trying to kiss a girl.
o The Musician: Because he is a stone carving, his music is
"unheard," which Keats says is better than real music
because it never stops playing.
 o The Lovers: The boy is trying to kiss the girl. Keats notes
that the boy will never get to kiss her because they are
frozen in stone. But, the girl will also never grow old, and
the boy will love her forever.
 Stanza 4 (The Sad Sacrifice): Keats turns the vase and sees a
religious crowd. A priest is leading a young cow ("heifer") wrapped
in flowers to a holy altar to sacrifice it. Keats wonders what
nearby town these people came from, noting that the town will
now be permanently empty and silent forever because its citizens
are frozen on the vase.
Question 3: Why is the urn being praised at the end of the poem? What
does it embody?
The urn is praised because it embodies Immortality and Eternal Art.
While human beings grow old, get sick, and die, the artwork on the vase
stays exactly the same forever ("When old age shall this generation
waste, / Thou shalt remain"). It is a permanent "friend to man" because
it survives through history.
It concludes with the most famous line in Romantic poetry: "Beauty is
truth, truth beauty." The urn teaches us that true art holds the ultimate,
unchanging truth of the universe.
Question 4: Is the urn being described as a positive object upon closer
reading?
No, not completely. Upon a closer look, the poem is actually a bit creepy
and sad. The urn is a "Cold Pastoral!" Keats realizes that being frozen in
time has a terrible dark side:
 The lover can never actually kiss his girlfriend.
 The trees can never drop their leaves, meaning it is permanently
spring, but summer and autumn will never arrive.
 The little town is permanently desolate and lonely because the
citizens can never return home.
The art is perfect, but it is dead and cold. Real human life involves
getting tired, hurt, and growing old ("a burning forehead, and a
parching tongue"), but Keats decides that experiencing real, warm
human feelings is better than being a perfect, cold piece of marble.
Quick Study Summary for the Exam:
 The Conflict: Real Life (warm, changing, ends in death) vs. Art
(cold, frozen, lives forever).
 Key Concept: The Sublime feeling of looking at an ancient object
that outlives humans.
 Famous Line: "Beauty is truth, truth beauty."
Romantic prose (the novel)
- Personal development: Elizabeth changes
- Novelistic development: what Jane brought to novel writing
Historical context: Jane Austen
- Difference between when she wrote them and when works were published
- In Pride and Prejudice: constant presence of soldiers in village where the
bennet family was (training for war against the French)
- Publishing 2 manners:
 Through sale of copyright: you no longer had any right at all to book that
you were selling (publishers then had all the power)
 On commission: loan author the money to get the book printed and then
they would take their costs back from the sales of the book. Much riskier: if
you weren’t successful you had to pay the publisher back either way (but if
successful, more money in the long-run)
 She never was able to raise the social status of her family
 In her novels: economic uncertainty that plagued her throughout her life
Ex. Constant theme of marriage as economic success
Historical context: development of the novel
- Prose: wasn’t written in verse or in rhyme (less skilled/artistic in 18 th
century)
- Historical documentation:
- Free indirect speech: 3 kinds
1) Direct speech: camera looking 3rd person at this person doing it, no
interiority, impersonal
2) Indirect speech: slightly more personal but still impersonal
3) Free indirect speech: not the narrator saying that but the character
Example:
Catherine, weak-spirited, irritable, and completely under Lydia’s guidance,
had been always
affronted by their advice; and Lydia, self-willed and careless
 Free indirect speech: personal narrative, 3 rd person narrative: prejudice +
contempt for their family
Historical context: social class
- Theme throughout the novel
- Lower landed gentry class = lagere landadel
 Technically not aristocracy
- Darcy (upper landed gentry) = more well-off but Elizabeth and Darcy fall in
love
- Bingley: middle-class but rich enough to buy his way up
- Good breeding = behave well according to your class without any kind of
resistance
 Mrs. Bennet doesn’t have good breeding
  Georgiana Darcy has good breeding: elegant, refined (typical for landed
gentry class)
Examples:
1:
- About the Bingley family, the sisters within the Bingley family
- Free indirect style: narrator talking about the Bingley sisters
 Very useful
- They are worth a lot of money (20k pounds)
- Passive aggressive quote: They were of a respectable family in the north of
England; a circumstance more deeply impressed on their memories than
that their brother's fortune and their own had been acquired by trade.
 Quote makes it clear that they did have to work for their money
 They are not really members of the club to which they claim they belong
 Not thoughts of narrator (has no thoughts), thoughts of someone else
bleeding through into the narrative through FIS and being kind of mean
about it
- Makes it clear how constructed these class inventions were, and also how
fluid they were
2:
- Elizabeth’s words
- Elizabeth has been confronted about marrying Darcy
- Points out how ridiculous class invention was: you could own land of a
1000 a year (not a huge amount) and you could still technically be on the
same level as a multi-millionaire like Darcy but then an even greater
millionaire could be lower than you bcs they had not come from money but
they had earned their money. (ridiculous situation)
Historical context: social convention
- Manners derived during 18th century from French aristocracy that valued
politesse, moderation, lack of direct confrontation, refinement, sensibility
of emotion
 Character that best epitomizes this: Mr. Collins (extract 2): clergyman,
cousin of Mr. Bennet
 He boasts about how polite and refined he is to the family
Satire: he is an awful person in the book, he if false, two-faced, flattering
towards others (forms a version of themselves that is more acceptable to
social customs at the time)
 Darcy is the direct opposite: rude, speaks directly, speaks always with his
thinking (this is why he becomes quite a romantic character)  Mr. Collins
= anti-romantic?!
Historical context: gender and norms
- Jane Bennet (older sister): falls in love w mr. Bingley and vice versa,
Mr;Bingley is taken away to London and is not allowed to know that she is
also there. She can’t pursue him, she can’t say: ‘I am interested in you’ so
she assumes that he has lost feelings for her. At the end when he turns up
 again, having learnt the truth, then she can say yes. (that’s her entire roll)
 was how marriage worked
- Whenever ms. Bennet turns up in the novel: she is always accompanied by
Catherine/Kitty, Lydia or Mary (group: the Bennet females who are all
available for marriage)
- Lydia Bennet is criticised for her behaviour: too much drinking…
- Even though you are technically free as an adult woman  many social
rules around freedom and how you should behave
- Propriety = fatsoen, betrouwbaarheid
- Fortune hunters: economic aspect
 In Pride and Prejudice: they try to mesh those 2 things together: husband =
romantic + financial figure
- Ex. Lydia runs off with mister Wickham who is a scoundrel  creates
anxiety
 Not just for Lydia (might be abandoned by him or be impregnated by him
without any kind of security) but also anxiety for Bennet family
 Her reputation is part of their reputation, if she does something scandalous
that bounces back on them
 Only way to save family’s reputation: force mister Wickham to marry Lydia
= how Darcy becomes the hero of the novel (he pressed Wickham to marry
a girl he ran off with)
 The minute Lydia is married, everything is forgotten by everyone and
society
- Entailment = implicatie
- Recurrent issue of entailment:
Mr. Collins will get everything if Mr. bennet dies:
 Explains why Ms. Bennet is so preoccupied about getting her daughters
married to a wealthy man that can buy the property so that they can
continue living in the house
 Collins proposes to Elizabeth (because he was giving the woman in the
house a chance to keep living like they were living  the gentlemanly thing
to do)
Money was passed down constantly excluding women (gender norms)
 Connection to Austen’s own life? Inheritance issue when father died: money
to male inheritors, James Austen (in pride and prejudice to mr. Collins)
Slide 10:
- Social, moral and the biological are brought together
 In the context of her remaining virtue?
- Lydia’s female virtue combines many characteristics: moral, social,
biological, reputational
Pride and Prejudice: Romantic or anti-Romantic
- To what extent can we qualify Pride and
Prejudice a Romantic novel? Think of the text
in terms of the themes from last week.
- Elizabeth reinforces social conventions (Lydia + proposal Darcy : he is
resisting class conventions and that makes her an accomplice???!!!) (not
necessarily true but people have read it this way)
- Romantic personages:
 - Anti-Romantic personages:
Modern context: Austen’s afterlife
- Bridgerton
Class 5: War Poetry
- Essay:
 You can write about any author we discussed, if about another author: say
in advance
Two Modernist responses to war:
Slide 3:
- Wallace Stevens
- He is telling us smthg about what happens to literature in a time of war
(WWI + WWII)
- Distinction
1) Literature that lets your imagination flow without constraint (many
things that we saw in terms of Romantic writing)
2) Literature/poetry responding to war
- Idea: in a time of war literature becomes something else
 It has no choice but to respond to/engage w the brute facts, the scale of
destruction, violence, suffering
- Use of term ‘heroic’
 Not like heroic actions of henry V  NOT LIKE THIS
 Here ‘heroic’ = expressing the idea of the sheer scale of events (violence,
destruction, suffering)
Real war forces us to drop our creative imagination and face a brutal reality so
massive that it permanently expands how we think.
Slide 4:
• Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, 1912
- Filippo = Italian
- 1912  predates WWI
 But it was already clear from other conflicts that war had become a
question of industry and technology (scale of industry)
 For many modernists technology = seductive
Advances in technology embraced by Modernists
BUT: don’t think that modernism equals fascism
However, one of the branches in modernism is certainly one that is an
inspiritation/ expressed through fascism
For example, architecture in Nazi Germany  much of that is inspired by
modernist aesthetic
- Idea: war is something to be embraced/admired
- Repetition: ‘war is beautiful’
 We don’t think war is beautiful but he does
 His reasons? (see slide)
1) in 1912 these objects were the cutting edge of technology
 Marinetti is admiring the technology of war
 2) Metalization of the human body
 Idea: in war man and machine become somehow fused
 In our own time the version of that = the digitalisation of the human mind
3) .
4) .
 All of these (to us: obscene/disturbing) elements of war, he sees as part of
a symphony/ something to be celebrated
- Marinetti is able to separate his admiration for the spectacle of war (the
lights, technology) from the moral aspect of war
 If we are shocked by that statement it usually means that we have a moral
aspect with which we look at war (bcs we find the idea of ‘loss of life’
disturbing
BOTH MODERNIST STATEMENTS BUT VERY VERY DIFFERENT
- Wallace Stevens: thoroughly ethical poet: important = what is right and
what is good
- Marinetti: important = the aesthetic
p.73 poem is celebrating a defeat
1)Heroic acts:
- Charge of the Light Brigade
 Poet laureate = Alfred Tennyson
 Poet laureate = poet who writes for the queen, represents the country in
terms of writing poetry
Charge of the Light brigade:
- Commemorates/celebrates a particular piece of action that took place
during the Crimean War !!!!
 2-3 year war fought over Crimea in the mid-19 th century
 Russian forces VS Britan, France and Ottoman party
- Poem about a defeat
- About a unit of English cavalry (600 or so of them)
- A mistake was made
 They were stationed at the open end of a valley
 In front of them is the valley
 High ground on the left and right: on that there is artillery
 A messages was passed down to this unit of cavalry telling them to charge,
to ride down the valley and take out the guns at the valley  = mistake,
weren’t meant to do that (everyone could see that, even the soldiers:
pretty much suicide)
Practically surrounded on 3 sides = suicide mission
BUT: it was an order and they followed it
 Charge of the Light Brigade (name of unit) starts
They made it to the end of the valley, many died.
Then they had to ride all the way back, riding back: the same thing
happened
Very few made it back to their own lines. (result was predictable)
Tennyson celebrates this:
  the bravery of the soldiers who against all sets followed the order and did
their duty
- very famous poem
eerste 2 parragrafen:
- he uses a rhythm that is supposed to echo the sound of a galloping horse
- doubleness in the poem:
 you admire a soldier for doing his duty
 BUT: criticism of those issuing the order because you are sending men to
their deaths for the wrong reason.
Parragraaf 3-6:
- Final verse: the men who did this are to be celebrated
- What is implicit in what is written here  criticism of the leaders/generals
who allowed this mistake to be made
- Poet dramatizes what the soldiers are riding into:
 ‘Jaws of Death’
 ‘Mouth of Hell’
 Hell  used differently in Wilfred Owen’s work
- Poetry that deals with heroism in that sense of soldiers doing heroic acts
and celebrating that
Another response: 2)The Romantic impulse and industrial warfare:
- Link between War poetry (especially war poetry that emerges at the
beginning of WWI) and Romanticism
 Many writers were romanticists in their approach to writing poetry , idea of
finding peace, freedom, imagination
P 73 syllabus
Example 1: the Soldier by Rupert Brooke
- Used many times as an expression of patriotism
 Misused in David’s opinion (in debates about Brexit: these kinds of patriotic
texts were used to show what they were fighting for: England for England’s
sake)
- About a young man that is a soldier who is expecting to fight soon and he
may well lose his life
 He is thinking: what does that mean?
 What it means to him is a certain idea about his home, about England
His idea about England is infused w romanticist ideas
Paragraph 1:
- Dust to dust (ash to ash)
- The way England is described:
 England is a kind of mother
 Very idealistic notion of England
Paragraph 2:
- What is he saying? If he should die, his hope is that he will not disappear
completely.
  There will be some aspect of him that will still be felt/still be registered

- Hope: his death will not be futile

 Quite an optimistic poem, although the mood is very sombre
- Rupert Brooke never got to fight
 He was in the navy (sailor)
 He died of a blood infection on board of a ship, he was never actually
involved in action
- Very contemplative poem
 It doesn’t give us action (guns, people dying)
 Spiritual/contemplative idea when thinking about war
Example 2: WB Yeats: An Irish Airman Foresees His Death p 76
- He was Irish, not a solider, too old to fight, did not take part in any fighting
- He knew many people that fought in WWI
- For many years this was swept under the carpet:
 Thousands of Irish men died in Flanders, in Flanders Fields and Northern
France
 They fought for the British army but they were Irish
 Due to the tension between Great Britain and the Republic of Ireland that
part of war history has often been overlooked
 Commonwealth graves  Irish soldiers were not given that treatment
 For many Irish people it was a sort of shame that they fought for the British
side
Poem:
- Speaker in the poem is rejecting all of the typical reasons for fighting
 The reason he gives for being in that situation is very Romantic
- Irish flyer (flying for the British forces) is imagining his death
- Line 1:
 ‘I know’  a sort of resignation, a certainty of death
- Reason numbers 1: He doesn’t hate the Germans (line 3)
- Line 4: he is not fighting out of love for the people of Britain
- Kiltartan = very specific area in the West of Ireland (not far from Galway)
 He is saying: I’m not fighting for the British people, my home is a very
specific area
- Line 7-8: whether he dies or lives, it’s not gonna make a difference to them
- Line 9: law, duty  neither of these things are what pushed him into the
fight
- Line 10:
 Public man = politicians, people who stand up and urge the country to fight
He’s not listening to that.
 It’s not the cheering crowds that are urging him on
- So what is it?
Line 11: It’s a lonely impulse of delight
 Very Romanticist type of phrase
 A desire for freedom, individual liberty that you can find by being up there
in the clouds (the freedom of flight)
- Line 12-16:
  Syntax is very balanced as well
 He says:
everything that happened until now has been a waste
everything that will happen after he’s gone is a waste
What MATTERS is the NOW (the here and now)
- Line 14:
 he is cancelling out the future
 the years to come are a waste because he is going to be dead (that’s his
expectation)
 In Wilfred Owen a similar kind of point is made about the future (during war
people lose their lives and what is lost is the lives that could’ve been lived)
 in poem of WB Yeats: it’s a waste of breath to even think/talk about it.
What do we have in both poems?
- Both romantic sensibility
- Both the soldier and the irish airman foresees in war setting but they turn
away from the details of war: machinery, direct suffering, destruction
- Both contemplate about what it means to be human in a war
Wilfred Owen (1893-1918):
- Nowadays: British army has its recruits read Wilfred Owen’s poetry
because
1) It gives a sense of the brute detail and graphic reality of what fighting
means
2) There is a compassion behind the poems (giving us an idea about the
emotional/psychological cost of the fighting)
- He suffered from shell shock
- In Craiglockhart he met a fellow English officer and poet Siegfried Sassoon:
 He was already established as a famous poet/writer himself
 He became very famous for his anti-war sentiments
 He recognized in Wilfred Owen a unique voice in terms of looking at the war
and he encouraged him to continue to develop his poetry  which he did!
 He returned to the war but was killed on the Ijzer. Nov 4 1918
 His parents were informed of Wilfred Owen’s death on Armistice Day
- He didn’t survive the war but left us with some very powerful poems.
Dulce et decorum est (pro patria mori) : p 74
- Dulce et decorum est (pro patria mori) = it’s sweet and fitting/right to die
for one’s country
 Patriotism
 Expression used by many officers
 Wilfred Owen turns it on its head and gives us this idea of patriotism and
says: your idea of patriotism is based on something very different to my
experience.
Stanza 1:
- He is describing his unit of soldiers
- They are returning from the front line (for rest, to be re-equipped)
- How are the soldiers described?
 Not described as proud, outstanding
  As victims
- What are they compared to?
 Beggars under sacks, coughing like hags (heksen)
What is Owen trying to tell us about their state?
Pitiful, exhausted, not proud,
- ‘but limped on’ = but kept going
- Not all lost a leg or can’t see anything (a bit of hyperbole)
 They’re just stumbling on, not noticing their surroundings anymore,
exhausted
- Drunk with fatigue  not drunk but a sort of tired (they don’t have control
over themselves)
- Line 8: shells
 The shells from big guns
 = a weapon
- A shell is a weapon? It can’t be disappointed
 Owen personifies the inanimate object (which is a weapon here)
Why? To increase the sense of threat !!!!!!!!!
 The weapons are presented as if they are mocking the soldiers
- Stanza 1 = exhaustion
Stanza 2, 3:
- Gas attack
- Emergency: exclamation marks
- Suddenly the tempo changes: the attack is happening
- An ecstasy of fumbling
 To emphasize the idea of ‘I’m trying to get this thing to work but I can’t
quite make it work bcs I’m panicking and if I don’t get it to work I’m going
to die’ (panic feeling)
- Poets point of view: line 3-4
 He is watching one of his men die
- Line 5-6:
 Sounds nightmarish
 The light of the gas itself would be green
 Then that moves on to actual nightmares
Line 7-8:
 Owen keeps seeing this image again and again and again
 Psychological effect of the traumatic experience
Stanza 4:
- You form used
 Poem starts addressing someone
 Who? Reader?
- Line 1-3: he is literally drowning (how you die in a gas attack, your lungs fill
with liquid)
 White eyes  eyes are rolling back into the head
 Eyes writhing  it’s like if the eyes have a life of their own
- Line 4
 His face is like that of a devil who’s had enough of sin
 It’s been too much even for the devil
- Line 5-12:
  ‘My friend’  irony: this is not a friend in any normal sense
He is addressing fellow officers whose job it was to go to (‘the privates’)
public schools to motivate 17-19 year olds to join the fight and the line
they would use would be: ‘it is sweet and fitting to die for your country’
 Zest  we know this word from fruit from like lemon, refreshing
Here it is expressing the idea of somebody giving us the idea with real
enthusiasm: ‘great to fight, to die’. To children!!!
 In movie All quiet on the Western Front: Enthusiasm to fight  disillusion
 He is putting the public face of war/the reasons why they should fight (the
narrative) next to the brute facts
- Very angry poem
The title "Dulce Et Decorum Est" is a Latin phrase from an ancient
Roman poet named Horace. It means: "It is sweet and honorable." But
Owen uses this title as a trick—he shows how terrible war actually is to
prove that this phrase is a massive lie.
Here is a simple, stanza-by-stanza breakdown to help you study for your
exam:
Stanza 1: The Exhausted Soldiers
"Bent double, like old beggars under sacks, / Knock-kneed, coughing
like hags..."
 The Reality of War: Instead of showing soldiers looking brave,
handsome, and proud, Owen describes them looking like beggars
and hags (ugly old witches). They are young men, but war has
physically broken them.
 The Fatigue: The soldiers are so exhausted they are marching in
their sleep. Many have lost their boots and are walking with
bloody, bare feet ("blood-shod"). They are deaf to the bombs
falling behind them because they are completely drained of life.
Stanza 2: The Gas Attack
"GAS! Gas! Quick, boys! — An ecstasy of fumbling..."
 The Panic: Suddenly, the enemy unleashes toxic mustard gas. The
quiet, slow trudge turns into absolute chaos ("an ecstasy of
fumbling") as the soldiers scramble to put on their clumsy gas
masks just in time.
 The Man Left Behind: One soldier doesn't get his mask on fast
enough. The speaker looks through the green glass lenses of his
own gas mask ("misty panes and thick green light") and watches
his friend choking on the gas. He describes it as watching a man
drowning underwater in a green sea.
Stanza 3: The Nightmare
"In all my dreams, before my helpless sight, / He plunges at me,
guttering, choking, drowning."
  The Trauma: This is a very short, two-line stanza where the poem
shifts to the present day. The war is over, but the speaker has
severe PTSD. Every time he closes his eyes to sleep, he relives the
memory of his helpless friend dying in front of him.
Stanza 4: The Angry Message to the Public
"If in some smothering dreams you too could pace / Behind the wagon
that we flung him in..."
 The Horrific Details: Owen gets incredibly descriptive to shock the
reader. He describes throwing the dying soldier into a wagon,
watching his eyes roll back in his head, and listening to the blood
gargling out of his gas-ruined, froth-covered lungs. He compares
the sight to cancer and vile sores.
 The Target: He addresses the people back home who encourage
young boys to go to war ("My friend, you would not tell with such
high zest / To children ardent for some desperate glory...").
The Final Conclusion (The "Old Lie")
The poem ends with the full Latin phrase:
"Dulce et decorum est / Pro patria mori"
This translates to: "It is sweet and honorable to die for one's country."
Owen calls this phrase "The Old Lie." He argues that people only say war
is glorious because they haven't seen the disgusting, painful reality of a
gas attack. He writes this poem to stop people from lying to young
children about the "glory" of dying in battle.

Strange Meeting: Wilfred Owen

- Very different poem compared to dulce et decorum est
- Dulce et decorum est: very realistic
- Strange meeting : takes us away from the battle field
Poem:
- ‘Seemed’  not that it was, that it was facts
- This strange place is some kind of tunnel, BUT: it’s not a real place
 Whether or not it’s imagery, he sees this as HELL
 As he walks down this tunnel, he sees that there encumbered sleepers
(soldiers who are sleeping while they’re dead)
- Dead soldier stares at him
 Soldier can see that Wilfred Owen has had the same experiences than he’s
had
 He’s been through the same thing that Owen’s been through
- Then the soldiers starts speaking to him:
- The undone years (soldiers words)
 = the years that I could have lived, the years that my life could have
developed. Those years are undone, they’re not going to happen anymore.
 - The pity of war, the pity war distilled.
 = The idea of lives that do not get to be lived. Young men’s lives are ended,
they do not go on to marry, have families, have children…
 All of that hope is lost
End of poem: (last 7 lines)
- The conversation Owen is having is with a soldier he killed in that
gruesome way, with his bayonet
- It’s presented as a strange meeting
- Nightmarish kind of setting
 Tells us something about this effect that this killing in that hand-to-hand
combat has had
 Underlining that message of similarity between the soldier, the enemy and
himself + underlining the message of futility: ‘so much has been lost
(futures)’

- NOT an angry poem, it’s resigned, sad in a very profound way

The Big Idea
A soldier escapes the chaos of a battle and crawls down a deep, dark
underground tunnel. There, he meets another soldier. After talking to
him, he realizes two shocking things:
1. They are not in a normal tunnel—they are actually standing in
Hell.
2. The ghost he is talking to is the enemy soldier he stabbed and
killed yesterday.
Stanza-by-Stanza Simple Breakdown
1. Entering the Tunnel (Lines 1–10)
 The Setting: The speaker escapes the battlefield and walks down a
long tunnel carved out of granite rock by ancient wars ("titanic
wars").
 The Sleepers: The tunnel is full of soldiers lying down. They are
packed together so tightly and are so quiet that you cannot tell if
they are asleep or dead.
 The Realization: One sleeper suddenly jumps up, stares at the
speaker with sad eyes, and lifts his hands. The ghost smiles a
dead smile, and the speaker instantly realizes the terrifying truth:
"we stood in Hell."
2. Meeting the "Strange Friend" (Lines 11–29)
 The Safe Hell: Strangely, Hell is quiet. The blood from the
battlefield above cannot reach it, and the sound of the guns
cannot be heard.
  The Conversation: The speaker tries to look on the bright side and
tells the ghost, "There is no reason to cry down here." * The
Ghost's Regret: The ghost replies, "Yes, there is. I am crying for all
the 'undone years' of my life that were cut short." The ghost
explains that before the war, he was a young dreamer, artist, or
poet who hunted for beauty in the world.
 The Pity of War: The ghost says his ultimate goal was to tell the
world "the truth untold, / The pity of war." He wanted his poetry to
show how tragic war is, but now he is dead, so that truth dies with
him.
3. Predicting a Dark Future (Lines 30–39)
 The Future of Humanity: The ghost warns that because all the
poets and thinkers are being killed in the war, future generations
will become brutal and wild like animals ("swift with the swiftness
of the tigress"). Civilization will step backward away from
progress.
 What He Wanted to Do: The ghost says that if he had lived, he
would have used his wisdom to heal the world like washing
wounds with clean water ("wash them from sweet wells"). He
wanted to help people with love, not through the disgusting waste
("cess") of war.
4. The Final Plot Twist (Lines 40–44)
"I am the enemy you killed, my friend. / I knew you in this dark..."
 The Reveal: This is the most famous part of the poem. The ghost
looks at the speaker and says calmly: "I am the enemy soldier you
stabbed and killed yesterday."
 The Shared Trauma: The ghost says he recognized the speaker
because the speaker has the exact same frowning, scared face in
Hell today as he did yesterday when he was plunging his bayonet
weapon ("jabbed and killed").
 The Forgiveness: Even though the speaker killed him, the ghost
calls him "my friend." He mentions that he tried to defend himself
("I parried"), but his hands were too cold and reluctant to fight
back.
 The Ending: The poem ends mid-sentence with the haunting line:
"Let us sleep now . . . ." The two enemies are now united in death,
resting together peacefully in Hell.
Key Themes for Your Exam 💡
 The Brotherhood of Enemies: Owen uses this poem to show that
soldiers on both sides of a war are exactly the same. They are
both young, innocent men who love life and beauty, but politicians
force them to kill each other.
  Double Meanings ("Strange Friend"): Calling an enemy your
"friend" is a powerful contradiction. In life, they were enemies; in
Hell, they are brothers who share the exact same tragic fate.
 Slant Rhymes (Dickinson style!): Notice how Owen uses rhymes
that don't quite match up to create a creepy, uneasy feeling. For
example: escaped/scooped, groaned/groined, bestirred/stared,
mourn/years.

In both previous poems  not a strong theme of ‘love’

- In other poems of Wilfred Owen  strong sense of love and devotion for
the man he serves with, for the man who followed him into battle (he was
an officer)

10 Randall Jarrell
loosed from its dream of life: the American dream
black flak: explosions from the gun trying to shoot down the aircraft
nightmare fighters: nightmare because it’s horrible
and they succeded
the birth, the promise of the American dream,idea of going forward, comes down
to the moment which is his remains. It gives you an idea of how horrific the
damage must have been.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose: its like people are just
waste, just flesh and bones , easy to throw away
The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner
From my mothers .. state: beginni g of my life, my mother gave birth to me, I
became o citizen of the USA
I hunched .. frose: description of him in the bummer and it’s cold
6 miles from.. dream of life: while he is up there he is not part of life and the idea
of American dream( idea that if you work hard enough you will achieve what you
desire)
I woke to the o black flak and the nightmare fighters: explotions shoot sown the
aircraft and it’s horrible because they are trying to bring aircraft down and they
succeed because he is dead
The promise of the American dream, going forward, comes down to the moment
wich is his remains, give idea of how horrific the damage must have been
That detail: removes any sense of dignity, meaningful life, the person is a waste
product
=> war reduces people to flesh and bone that are dispensable
3) Women’s War Poetry
p. 79 War Widow – Margaret Hamilton Noel-Patton:
- Poem doesn’t talk about the immediacy of war/fighting, but about the long-
term consequences of war (certainly in a family context)
- Widow is speaking
- Who is she addressing/talking to? The dead husband
- Pristine = zuiver
- Spare = fit, lean
- How does she feel about her husband?
grief
 Resentment:
she’s left all alone now and he gets to stay young forever
he is preserved, his memory is preserved in terms of the picture and in
terms of the children’s memory of him as (stanza 3 eerste 3 regels)
she also feels resentment (stanza 3, regel 4-5): when mother and children
have a disagreement  children say: ‘dad would have known, dad would
have understood’ (family aspect)
But they ever really knew him
- Stanza 5:
Use of colours (line 1-5)  to represent stages in life
Ex. ‘autumn’s frost’  the autumn of life
Ex. ‘Sober russet’
Ex. Shrill green of youth
 we associate green with Spring time, new life, things being at their best
’Shrill’  we normally use ‘shrill’ to describe noise (a shrill sound (high
frequency))
idea? It’s difficult to look at you, to think of you: ‘you’re so perfect’ ,
you’ve escaped the troubles of growing old (Hamlet theme lol?)
Line 6: speaking on anniversary of his death
Line 7-8:
 By not specifying the word ‘war/fight’
Idea? It’s too appalling to her, she can’t even bring herself to say the word
because it is the thing that took hi awaya (the war)
- Poem:
 Refreshing selfish look of a woman/mother getting old
feeling lonely
feeling that she’s been left behind
feeling resentful (she can’t live up to his perfect memory)
 BUT at the same time: sense of love, sense of grief that’s still there
 Poem gives us that long-term perspective on the effects on a wife of loss in
the war
P 80 Sylvia Townsend Warner: Road 1940
- 1940  early stages of Second World War
 British Empire had numerous colonies in Asia and East Asia (Burma,
Indonesia, Shanghai)
 Japan entered the war and overran many of these colonies at lightning fast
speed  massive streams of refugees
 Many of these refugees were British
 One of the main issues in politics today: idea of immigration, BUT: you don’t
have to go back far in British history to come across immigration
- Not directly about fighting, but about fleeing, trying to escape
- One of the effects of wars: refugees (they run away to escape)
- Context:
 A woman trying to escape from the fighting
- Woman is asking herself a constant question: Why is she carrying a child?
(it’s not her baby)
Stanza 1 & 2:
- Give us the picture: night time, a moment of rest after a day of walking in
the punishing heat
- In this circumstance where everybody seems to be getting rid of things
because they’re heavy (weapons), even misers (gierigaards)
- Mother of this child has left the child (shocking idea)
Stanza 3:
- We can relate this stanza to Hamlet
 In Hamlet’s soliloquy: he is talking about the pains and ills that we put up
with in this life
 Similar here: She is asking the question ‘Why did I save it? Because even if
it survives it’s just going to become another point of suffering in this world
 She can’t find the answer
Stanza 4:
- Line 2:
 ‘I might as well’
 We use that phrase when we’re talking about something every day/trivial
 ‘Oh I might as well do it, like you know’
 BUT here it’s talking about the life of a child???
- Child is ill as well
- The outward reason that she gives herself to why she is carrying this child
in this desperate situation?
 A selfish reason!
 Through this child I might stand a better chance of getting some food or a
bed maybe  shocking, they’re using the child as a means to look after
yourself (selfish idea)
 Might be the way she looks at this
 But there isn’t a sense that that is the motivation of why she did that
initially, the only reason she can think of: ‘well maybe It will help me’ 
BUT: that doesn’t explain why she picked up the child in the first place.
 Why would she pick up a child from its pram in the road while everyone is
casting their possessions aside?
Not really stated in poem but some possibilities:
Maternal instinct
duty to protect the vulnerable?
protecting the weakest
because she is operating as a human being with a heart
- She doesn’t seem to recognize that impulse for goodness/for doing the
right thing
 That’s why she’s asking the question
- End of poem:
  The reason that she gives herself: a selfish reason
Bcs: ‘Grant me even to lie down on a bed; Give me at least bread.’
- Other way to look at it:
 Your sense of values, goodness begins to dissolve (she doesn’t seem to be
able to recognize that she did something for a good reason + by the end of
the poem it’s about survival, it’s as if the child is there to ensure her own
survival)
 How much of that innate sense of goodness/wanting to protect remains? 
not clear to us
- It suggests the way in which a traumatic situation can affect a person’s
behaviour, the way a person thinks about himself/herself
Idea of maternal instinct?
- Poem earlier of Rupert Brooke:
 About England as a kind of mother figure in very idealistic/spiritual terms
Emily Orr ‘A Recruit from the Slums’:
- The slums (sloppenwijken) = place where people of the lowest row of
society live, with worst housing, worst infrastructure
- Addressed to a recruit from the slums
- About young men who lived in the slums who are recruited to fight in the
war
Stanza 1:
- Line 1-2: echoing that recruitment line like in ‘dulce et decorum est’
 Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your
country, put your country first
 She’s directing this to those of the lowest row of society
 Class-based sort of interrogation/questioning
- Forward motion/momentum in the rhythm
 a little bit like poem ‘Charge of the Light Brigade’
- to man the gap = to be soldiers
Stanza 2:
- whatever you’ve been giving, it’s been very little
Stanza 3:
- dregs = the unclean, bottom level of society
- line 3-6:
 she gives the dregs a voice
 she = England
Stanza 4:
- Line 1-2: it’s rejecting the idea that they’re fighting for the country
- Main motivation for fighting = to protect each other as friend rather than
fighting for the country !!!!
What kind of mother is England?
- She’s a mother who’s been neglectful
Who has not cared for her children
 BUT in spite of all that: (line 4-6)
 ‘this is where we belong’
 Grudging acceptance that there is an England that they still see themselves
as being part of BUT it’s a far cry from the shining patriotic version of
England that they should be sacrificing themselves for

- Angry poem
- Political poem
 About the underclass in British society
 Class is a major issue in British society (certainly the case during WWI)
- Idea: this part of society had been neglected, forgotten for many years and
it was being asked now to make the ultimate sacrifice for a country that
had offered them little
One other poem that can be linked to this:
- Image of the country as a sort of mother figure
- Rupert Brooke: the Soldier
 The mother figure is benevolent, spiritually enriching
BUT the mother figure in Emily Orr ‘A Recruit from the Slums’?
- Something much more colder, at a distance
Poem: Randall Jarrell: The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner
- Male poet
- He gives this dead soldier (airman) a voice
- Very short poem, but incredibly dense in terms of the ideas and used
language
- Image of a mother like image for the country
- Ball Turret Gunner
 You needed to sit underneath an aircraft in a little ball
 Function? Protect the bomber from enemy aircraft
 Only small people cold become Ball turret gunners (very little room)
- American poem!!!!!!
Poem:
- Line 1:
 America as a kind of mother figure
 The State?
into the state of life?
into the United States of America (I became a citizen of a state)
- Line 2:
 Could be about his life in America  he wasn’t progressing very far?
 BUT: sentence certainly talks about his job
 ‘till my wet fur froze.’
He makes it sound like a (vulnerable) animal
BUT: The airman wore fur  because it was so cold, they had to wear fur
during the war due to the high altitudes
- Line 3:
 ‘loosed from its dream of life’  sounds a bit like ‘An Irish Airman Foresees
His Death (WB eats)
 You don’t have to think too far before you get the American Dream
 American Dream = all about the idea of hope, becoming rich, the idea of
sell-advancement, you can improve in life if you work hard enough, If you’re
prepared to make the sacrifice you can get on in life. (America makes that
possible)
 You don’t talk about the ‘Dream’ in British culture
 This is where the class thing comes in: you should be happy with your lot, if
you’re of a particular class stay there!
‘Loosed from its dream of life’
 Positive: sense of freedom, loose from constraint
 Negative: he is no longer part of the dream, the hope is no longer there
- Line 4:
 Flak = luchtafweer
 He woke up to the flak (in the middle of the action)
 Nightmare fighters  enemy aircraft trying to shoot down his bomber
- Line 5: Communicates one very graphic and horrible image of he’s been so
physically destroyed during the battle that all they can do is wash him out
with a hose
 how undignified is that!!!
 That’s the end of that particular airman
 Underlines the idea of: what’s the value of human life in war
I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.
- Mother image is related with the country in this poem and to what extent a
person is seen as part of that
What is a Ball Turret Gunner?
To understand the poem, you have to know what his job was. During
World War II, bomber planes had a small, glass-and-metal sphere
underneath the belly of the aircraft.
 A gunner had to sit inside this tiny ball to shoot at enemy planes
attacking from below.
 Because the space was so small, the military only chose very
small, short men to do this job.
 Inside the ball, the gunner was completely trapped, frozen in a
fetal position, and highly vulnerable.
Line-by-Line Simple Breakdown
Line 1: The Womb of the State
"From my mother's sleep I fell into the State,"
 The Double Meaning of "State": Jarrell plays with the word "State."
It means the state of being alive (waking up), but it also literally
means The United States of America.
 The Mother Image: The poem connects his actual mother with his
country (the State). The country took him away from his mother's
 safe womb and put him straight into the "womb" of a military
airplane.
Line 2: The Vulnerable Animal
"And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze."
 The Fetal Position: The word "hunched" shows that he is curled up
inside the ball turret like an unborn baby in a womb.
 The Fur: This sounds like he is a helpless, vulnerable animal. But
your professor notes the historical reality: at high altitudes, it was
so freezing cold that pilots had to wear fur-lined flight suits. His
sweat or breath froze the jacket's fur inside the machine.
Line 3: The American Dream
"Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,"
 The American Dream: Your professor strongly emphasizes that this
is a uniquely American poem. In Britain, class systems tell you to
just accept your place. But in America, the "American Dream"
promises that if you work hard, you can rise up and succeed.
 The Paradox of "Loosed": * Positive: "Loosed" sounds like he is
finally free from the restrictions of ordinary life.
o Negative: It means he is completely disconnected from the
hope and promise of the American Dream. War has stolen
his future.
Line 4: The Nightmare
"I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters."
 The Reality of Battle: "Flak" is anti-aircraft fire shooting up from
the ground. He wakes up from his dream straight into a living
nightmare where enemy fighter planes are trying to blow him to
pieces.
Line 5: The Graphic Ending
"When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose."
 The Absolute Horror: This is one of the most famous, shocking
final lines in poetry. The gunner is so physically blasted apart by
gunfire and explosions that his body has been turned to liquid.
 No Dignity: Instead of a heroic, honorable funeral, the military
treats him like a mess on a windshield. They just grab a hose and
spray his remains out of the glass ball so the next young boy can
climb inside.
The Big Exam Themes 💡
1. The Modern Anti-War Message: Just like Wilfred Owen, Jarrell is
fighting against the idea that war is glorious. He shows that
 modern war turns human beings into completely disposable parts
of a machine.
2. The Cruel Mother (The State): A mother is supposed to protect her
child. But in this poem, the "Mother State" (America) births the
boy just to send him to a brutal, undignified death.

In your own time: have a look at the other poems

Random stuk over examination:
- Study content +
- Those who score high are those who show that they’ve thought about the
texts in their own time (zelfs als je punt niet klopt over een poem, krijg je
toch credit omdat je erover nagedacht hebt)
- Denk ook: how can I connect this to other texts that we’ve seen
- Read other poems to practice
Class 6: modernism
• Early 20c movement in the arts (painting, sculpture, literature,
architecture, music)
• Break with 19c social and artistic conventions – didactic,
sentimental, decadent, realistic
• Interest in the unconscious (Freud). What stirs beneath the
surface?
• Responds to the condition of Modernity – technology, speed,
communication, self
Time  passing of time
Fountain (1917) marcel dunchamp: he put urinal into an exhibition :scandalous
because he said there is another way to look at art
Pablo picasso: girl with a mandolin (1910): this figure is not realistic, Picasso
represents the movement in the painting, he tries to catch invisisble foreces,
energy , souds
Modernism Literature :
Virginia woolf (182-1941)
To the lighthouse (1925)
For centuriew women have been like a mirror, a man sees himself reflected in his
partner and they feel power. Women let the men feel powerful
P 58
Excerpt 1
--
e.e. cummings p. 64 (1864-1962)
 • Presents a seemingly unreadable poem
• Visual layout and typography confuse the reader
• Different way of seeing required
• Unpick the anagrams and follow the disjointed phrases
• Reader’s eye compelled to mimic the action of the poem’s subject
• Once key is found poem diminishes

r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r

• who
• as we look up
• now gathering into
• a The;
• leaps arriving
• gRrEaPsPhOs
• to
• rearrangingly become
• grasshopper
grasshopper appears in different guises, what this makes us do is raising
awareness of the state of the words, language depends on words being
predictable, representing idea etc
the fact that splitting th letters: daws attention to realise on how language works,
it limits our ability to see beyond the habits, perception, so he tries to free us
from the perception, he forces us to be dynamic in the way we see the poem, you
need to try to link words across bounders (punctuation, splits etc) in order to try
make sense
he choses grasshopper because that insect is emblematic , as soon you think you
have seen him, he keeps moving=> as soon as we try to capture idea in
language, it escapes us.

e.e. cummings ‘in spite of everything”= everything that we know should tell us
this is wrong or not worth it, not important
in spite of the fact we are all going to die, what is the meaning of life that will
come to an end
the image of kissing a pillow, but the pillow is on the bed he shared with his lover.
The gesture of kissing the pillow is the way of confirming the value of life and the
power of the emotion between two people.
• Love poem that draws together theme of mortality and image of an empty
bed
• Speaker tries to savour the trace of being with his lover
• The title signals continuity in spite of our mortal state
• Modernist in terms of framing a vivid moment and giving it significance
• Can be compared to WCW `This is just to say´
William carlos Williams (1883-1963) ‘ this is just to say’
Love poem bit title makes it seem not that important
It is presented as a note but in terms of modernism is that poetry can be found in
different places where you don’t expect it to be poetry
There is no punctuation but big word “forgive me” for just have eaten the plums.
He says I have been selfish, I acted on my desire and now I probably disappointed
you. The message is really that this are things we are dealing with the balance
and commitment we have for the other person and desire for them to be happy
in relationships. Williams is saying this is just a little gesture but also saying its
fundamentally important to the way we feel about each other
• A jotted down note left by the husband for his wife as he is leaving for work
• Enjoyment of plums but also sense of guilt
• Replays notion of ‘forbidden fruit’ but in a domestic setting
• This becomes subject for poetry
• Casual, everyday but ‘Forgive...’ gives a clue
• Relationships are made form countless such ‘casual’ moments
William Carlos Williams : Pastoral= rural setting, his image of a
postarall
Notice that its an urban setting and not the country side “The little sparrows
hop ingenuously
about the pavement”
Contrast with
“But we who are wiser
shut ourselves in
on either hand
and no one knows
whether we think good
or evil”
Contrast between birds, nature and “we” (the people)
Are we wisser? He suggest not because our ability to hold back information, not
be honest with each other/ our selfs to remain polite but this is not neceseraly
good for us. We think we are wiser but we are probably not
“Meanwhile,
the old man who goes about
gathering dog-lime
walks in the gutter
without looking up
and his tread
is more majestic” => attention on old man that is gathering dog shit. This is the
lowest activity in society. He is carrying without looking up and for Williams this
image is more majestic than the priest. Idea of looking at the edge of things
(vigrina woolf to the lighthouse). This is just a say which is looking at a kind of
form of writing that is seen as not important, he invests the note with poetic
importance. Williams vieuw is drawn towards old man , the man will be
overlooked , he exist on th edge of society. Ou focus is always on the center
because we think that has the greatest meaning. It’s a way of refreshing our
perspective.
“These things
astonish me beyond words” => vague : is it combination of qparrowns and
humans and old man, is it a narrow selection? What is “these things”. So finding
significance in the seemingly insignificant
1. The Purity of Simple Reality (No Acting)
 The Priest: A priest has to put on a "show." They wear fancy robes,
walk down the center of the church, and act holy so people look at
them. Their majesty is artificial and forced.
 The Old Man: The old man walks in the dirty gutter, completely
focused on his work without looking up to see if anyone is
watching him ("without looking up"). He isn't pretending to be
important, and he isn't looking for praise.
 Why it is majestic: Because he is 100% genuine and honest. To
Williams, true majesty doesn't come from a fancy title or a high
social class; it comes from doing your job quietly, with dignity and
focus, no matter how dirty it is.
2. "Refreshing Our Perspective" (The Center vs. The Edge)
Your professor notes a huge theme here: The Center vs. The Edge of
Society.
 As humans, our eyes are naturally drawn to the center of
attention (the rich, the powerful, the beautiful, the priest)
because we assume that is where the "meaning" of life is.
 Williams deliberately turns his back on the center and points his
camera at the edge—at a poor old man who is completely
overlooked and invisible to everyone else.
  By calling this ignored man "majestic," Williams forces the reader
to wake up and refresh their perspective. He is saying: Look closer
at the things you think are ugly or unimportant, because that is
where real life and poetry actually live.
3. Turning Non-Poetic Things into Art
William Carlos Williams was famous for writing poems about ordinary,
everyday things (like a red wheelbarrow or a refrigerator full of plums).
 Before the Modernist movement, poets only wrote about "grand"
things like beautiful Greek vases, love, and wars.
 Williams breaks that rule completely. He takes a "note" about a
man picking up dog shit and invests it with poetic importance. He
proves that a great poet can find beauty and majesty anywhere,
even in a gutter.
Quick Study Checklist for the Exam:
 The Concept: True majesty is found in honest reality, not in
artificial status (the old man vs. the priest).
 The Technique: Moving focus away from the center of society to
the edge to shake up and refresh the reader's view.
 Key Phrase for the Exam: Investing the overlooked and
unimportant with poetic value.

Marianne Moore (1887-1972)

Poetry
• Famous disavowel of poetry that paradoxically confirms its value
• Sounds like prose but dense precise imagery
• Astonishing feat of invisible form – syllabic poem
• Poetry demands we consider/accept the impossible `imaginary gardens
with real toads in them´
She places herself in between people that don’t like poetry (interesting opening
for poem)
As we read trhought it is not a poem against poetry, it’s a call for a genuine kind
of poetry, to connect us with existence .
She describes the problems off a lot of things that carry the name poetry
She claims that what we need
Last 2 excerts:
Poets should strive to be literalist of the imagination but this is literal terms
impossible because the imagination is beyond the literal. If you can be literal
within the imagine space, you should strive to be that .
Poets should seek to present
Not regular rhyme scheme but there is structural measure: she has hidden , one
you cant hear. She counts syllabus. The line shave more or elss the same
syllables counts
Moore expresses her ideas
Part 1: The Surprising Beginning
"I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all this
fiddle."
 The Hook: Moore starts with a shocker. She says she dislikes
poetry and calls it "this fiddle" (meaning it is just useless fiddling
around or nonsense). She admits that real life has things that are
much more important than fancy words.
 The Twist: However, she says that if you read poetry with "perfect
contempt" (meaning you don't take the fake, snobby parts
seriously), you will discover that deep down, it holds a "place for
the genuine" (honesty and reality).
Part 2: Poetry Must Be Useful and Real
Moore argues that good poetry should capture physical, useful, and raw
things. It shouldn't just be a puzzle for scholars to interpret.
 The Physical Body: She likes poetry that describes real physical
reactions—hands that grab, eyes that dilate (widen), and hair that
stands up on end when you are scared ("hair that can rise if it
must"). These are important because they are useful expressions
of being alive.
 The Raw Checklist: She says poetry should include ordinary, raw,
and even unpoetic things. She lists them to prove her point:
o An upside-down bat looking for food.

o Elephants pushing things.

o A wild horse rolling around.

o A wolf standing under a tree.

o A boring critic twitching their skin like a horse trying to get

rid of a flea.
o A baseball fan.

o A statistician counting numbers.

o Even "business documents and schoolbooks!"

 The Meaning: Just like William Carlos Williams investing the old
man picking up dog poop with majesty, Marianne Moore is saying
everything in the world belongs in a poem. Nothing is too ugly or
too boring for art. !!!!!!!!
Part 3: The Ultimate Definition of a Poet
The most famous part of the poem happens at the end, where she gives
her definition of what a true poet must be. Your professor will definitely
look for these two phrases on your exam:
1. "Literalists of the imagination" A real poet shouldn't be fake or
overly dramatic ("insolence and triviality"). They must treat the
wild things they imagine with absolute, literal honesty. They write
about the imagination as if it is a real, physical place.
2. "Imaginary gardens with real toads in them" This is her ultimate
metaphor for a perfect poem.
o The "Imaginary garden" is the poem itself—the artistic,
created space.
o The "Real toads" are the raw, honest, dirty truths of real life
placed inside it.
Summary Conclusion
Moore concludes that if you want a poem to be completely raw on one
hand, but completely genuine on the other, then you actually do love
real poetry. You just hate the fake, snobby kind!
Quick Study Checklist for the Exam:
 Who wrote it? Marianne Moore (American Modernist).
 What is the main paradox? A poem explaining why she dislikes
poetry, which ends up defining what makes poetry good.
 Key Concept: Poetry shouldn't be snobby; it should include
ordinary, real-world things (bats, baseball fans, business
documents).
 Famous Quote to Memorize: Poetry must present "imaginary
gardens with real toads in them."
1. The Tone: "Famous disavowal... that paradoxically confirms its value"
 Disavowal means saying you don't like something. Moore starts by
tricking the reader. She places herself on the side of everyday
people who find poetry annoying and boring ("I, too, dislike it").
 But as the poem continues, it becomes a paradox (a
contradiction). By explaining exactly why she dislikes bad poetry,
she actually creates a beautiful defense of what genuine poetry
should be. It isn't a poem against poetry; it is a call to use poetry
to connect with real existence.
2. The Message: Two Key Concepts
Your professor highlights the two most important quotes at the end of
the poem:
  "Literalists of the imagination" * The Problem: Your professor
notes that this is actually impossible in real life, because the
imagination is abstract and beyond literal reality.
o The Goal: Moore is saying that even though it’s impossible, a
great poet must try anyway. Within the imaginary space of a
poem, you must describe your ideas with absolute, sharp,
literal honesty—as if those imaginary things are 100% real.
 "Imaginary gardens with real toads in them"
o This means a poem demands that we accept the impossible.
The "garden" is the fake, constructed artwork of the poem,
but the "toad" inside it must be completely real, raw, and
genuine.
3. The Hidden Structure: "An astonishing feat of invisible form"
This is a very important technical point for your exam!
 It sounds like prose: When you read the poem out loud, it doesn't
sound like a traditional poem. It has no regular rhyme scheme,
and it feels like someone is just talking to you in a normal essay or
speech ("dense, precise imagery").
 The Hidden Measure (Syllabic Verse): Even though you can't hear
it, the poem has a strict, hidden mathematical structure. Moore
doesn't count beats or rhymes; she counts syllables (the
individual sounds in each word). !!!!!!
 Each corresponding line in the stanzas has more or less the exact
same syllable count. It is an "invisible form" because it looks and
sounds completely free, but underneath, it is tightly controlled by
math.
Quick Study Checklist for the Exam:
 The Style: Looks and sounds like prose, but is actually a highly
controlled syllabic poem (counts syllables, not rhymes).
 The Goal of Poetry: To reject fake, snobby writing and connect the
reader to raw, genuine existence.
 Key Phrases to use: Disavowal, paradox, literalists of the
imagination, invisible form, syllabic verse.

The lighthouse -vriginia woolf (war poems?)

Virginia woolf (182-1941)
To the lighthouse (1925)
For centuriew women have been like a mirror, a man sees himself reflected in his
partner and they feel power. Women let the men feel powerful
P 58
Virginia Woolf writes in a style called Stream of Consciousness. Instead
of telling us a story from the outside ("The door opened, and he walked
in"), she puts us directly inside the characters' heads. You are feeling
their thoughts, memories, and anxieties exactly as they happen.
Stream of consciousness is a writing style that captures the continuous,
disorganized flow of a character’s inner thoughts, memories, and
feelings exactly as they naturally happen in their mind.
Here is a detailed, easy-to-understand guide to exactly what is
happening in the three parts of the text you shared.
Part 1: The Family Drama (Section 7)
Imagine a mom and her young son sitting together on a bench, deeply
connected and reading a story. Suddenly, the dad walks up and
demands all the attention. That is the exact setup here.
James’s Perspective: Pure Jealousy and Hatred
Young James is standing between his mother’s knees. He absolutely
loves his mother, and he wants her all to himself.
 Why he hates his dad here: He sees his father (Mr. Ramsay) as a
giant, dramatic disrupter. When Woolf writes that James hates the
"twang and twitter of his father's emotion," she means Mr.
Ramsay's anxious, loud energy instantly ruins the quiet, peaceful
vibe between James and his mom. James tries to ignore him by
pointing hard at the page of his book, hoping his dad will just walk
away.
Mr. Ramsay: The Needy Philosopher
Mr. Ramsay is a brilliant university professor, but he has a huge flaw: he
is incredibly insecure. He repeats out loud, "He was a failure." He is
desperate for his wife to tell him he is smart, loved, and important.
 The "Beak of Brass": Woolf uses a famous metaphor here. She
compares Mr. Ramsay’s neediness to a metal beak or a sharp
sword ("arid scimitar"). He plunges this "beak" into the family,
demanding emotional energy to feed his own ego.
Mrs. Ramsay: The Ultimate Caregiver
Mrs. Ramsay feels his anxiety and immediately steps up to fix it. Woolf
describes her as a "fountain" or a "rain of energy."
 Even though she is just sitting quietly knitting a stocking,
mentally she is throwing every ounce of her soul into making her
husband feel secure.
 She creates an entire world of comfort for him—telling him how
much society needs him, how brilliant he is, and ensuring him the
house is full of life.
The Catch: This takes a massive toll on her. The exact second Mr.
Ramsay walks away, satisfied like a full baby, Mrs. Ramsay completely
collapses. Woolf writes that she folds together "like a petal" because
she is totally exhausted from giving away all her energy.
Part 2: The "Wedge-Shaped Core of Darkness" (Section 11)
Now, the kids have gone to bed. Her husband is gone. Mrs. Ramsay is
finally alone in the room, still knitting.
[Public Self] ---> The "Apparition" (Mother, Wife, Hostess, Polite, Busy)
|
[Sheds Outer Layer]
|
[Inner Self] ---> The "Wedge-Shaped Core of Darkness" (Silent, Free,
Limitless)
What is the "Core of Darkness"?
Woolf explains that who we are on the outside—the things people see us
by (our "apparitions")—are just small, childish covers.
When Mrs. Ramsay is alone, she shrinks down into her true inner self,
which she calls a "wedge-shaped core of darkness."
 Why it feels good: In this dark, quiet, internal space, she doesn't
have to be a wife, a mom, or a hostess. She doesn't have to talk or
take care of anyone.
 The Freedom: Because she is invisible now, her mind can travel
anywhere—she imagines traveling to India or walking into a
church in Rome.
 Meeting the Lighthouse: As she sits in this peaceful state, she
looks out the window at the Lighthouse. She watches the "long
steady stroke" of the light. She feels like that light represents her
—steady, quiet, and shining in the dark.
Part 3: "Time Passes" (The Brutal Impact of War)
This is the most famous part of the book. Years pass, World War I breaks
out, and the family’s summer house is left empty and abandoned.
Nature Doesn't Care About Us
In old books, poets used to write that Nature cries when humans are
sad. Woolf says that is a lie.
She describes Spring and Summer arriving at the empty house. The sun
shines, flowers bloom, and the Lighthouse beam gently strokes the
empty beds. But nature is "entirely careless" of human thoughts. It
doesn't care that the family is gone.
The Brackets [ ] of Death
This is Woolf’s most famous writing trick. She takes massive, tragic,
life-changing human events and forces them into tiny, cold sentence
brackets, almost like a boring news report.
 Prue Ramsay’s Death: We learn that the beautiful daughter, Prue,
got married. Then, just a few lines later, inside brackets, we are
told: [Prue Ramsay died that summer in some illness connected
with childbirth...]
 Andrew Ramsay’s Death: The son, Andrew, goes to war. Woolf
doesn't write a big battle scene. She just drops a bomb in
brackets: [A shell exploded. Twenty or thirty young men were
blown up in France, among them Andrew Ramsay...]
Why did she write it this way?
Woolf did this to show how brutal and sudden World War I was. In real
life, when you lose someone you love to a sudden tragedy, the universe
doesn't stop. The sun still shines, the grass still grows, and the world
keeps moving with a chilling indifference.
The comfortable "mirror" humans used to look into—the belief that the
world is safe, orderly, and kind—is permanently "broken."
Conclusion
• Modernism seeks a response through art to the challenges of the
modern world.
• It seeks new forms and modes to express the condition of
modernity and the complexities of self.
• Fundamentally, Modernism asks us to radically change the way
that we look at the world and at ourselves.

Literary modernism: intro I

- By 1940 modernism was basically done
- Context?
 Before modernism:
1) Georgian literature (continuation of Victorian literature)
2) Victorian literature
 Both incredibly clichéd
 About countryside life, hedgerows  what romanticism also kind of did but
this literature is way too cliché
 Focussed on natural imagery, rural settings (Georgian never moved on from
this (after industrial revolution)
- Influence/origins of modernism?
1) American Renaissance
 The encapsulation of what it meant to be a modern country
 Federalised political structure, had adapted to modernity
  Late 19th century: young country, still struggling to pull together a sense of
nation identity (due to immigration), very quick to adapt to changes in
technology: better public transport than in Europe (reflected in their poems)
 Their poems: dissident, breaking w the tradition, saying: ‘my identity is
different to yours’
Early starters of modernist poetry
2) British Romanticism
 Modernism inherited from Romanticism
 Themes in Romanticism: the self, tradition, history  all can be found in
modernism as well
3) French Symbolism
 Very influential to TS Eliot
Literary modernism: intro II
- Linksboven: Wyndham Lewis
 Wrote ‘The Men of 1914’
 He included himself (no one now knows who he is)
 About the people who created modernist poetry all on their own
 Pushes to the side women (Virigina Woolf)
- Linksonder: james joyce
- Rechtsboven: T.S. Eliot
- Rechtsonder: Ezra pound
 “Make it New!” Idea that art needed to be new (if it wanted to be relevant
in the 20th century/modern world)
A new art for a new time
- Idea of Avant-garde = art that is at the forefront of everything, art that
experiments (abstract symbolism)
 Political phenomenon
 Positive: 1ste and 2nd wave feminism
 Negative: the futurism movement that came out of modernism was a
precursor to fascistic art (= Mussolini political project)
- Idea of novelty: trying to write something that had not been done before
- Radical hopeful plans are ended due to the Great War
- As much as this modernism (writing) claimed to be none political  It’s still
working upon a class superiority basis (it’s requiring you to have a certain
level of education in order for it to make sense to you)
 It’s not apolitical but pretending to be apolitical (assumption of some kind
of class superiority)
Literary modernism: intro III
- Baudelaire (1857, 1861)
 Influential for T.S. Eliot
Ex. Lone, masculine, poetic man walking through a city (Baudelairean
persona)
- 1890:
- 1902
- 1913
 Imagist movement = follow on to the symbolist movement
- 1914: Dubliners
 Short stories about the working class in Dublin
  Very first of it kind (novelty!!!)
- 1915: The Love Song, Prufrock
 Different to Dubliners
 Idea of interiority and exteriority
 People’s experience at living in the city (interior and exterior expression)
 Free Indirect Still (modernist texts do this often)
- 1919:
- 1922:
 The big year for modernism
 Waste Land
 Ulysses
- 1925:
What is modernity?
- Enlightenment
 Birth of the scientific method, precursor to literary/textual criticism
- Querelle des Anciens et des modernes
 Discussion in the Academy National: whether art in the 18 th century had
surpassed classical art or not (debate of 60 years)
 That is a moment when they considered themselves better + different
Karl Marx (1843):
- Karl Marx = modern man by definition
- Marxism linked to Modernity
- Dichotomy: 2 sides
1) Stupid old world of philosophy
 the solution of all riddles lying on their lecterns  knowledge in the old
world came prepackaged/ was already ready
2) Something new
 He only sees a way forward by identifying what was wrong beforehand
 Critique of the material conditions that have let up to the modern world and
from there trying to analytically work out how to make life better (Marxism)
Edgar Allan Poe (1844):
- Terse = kortaf
- About literary production
- Same dichotomy:
1) Old way of doing things that have become ponderous
2) New way: not directly positive (curt and terse = not positive adjectives)
 The way of doing things in the old world no longer applies to this world
 The way of doing things now in the new world can only be got at by
critiquing what now doesn’t work from the old world (a critique of the old in
order to reach the new)
Charles Baudelaire – le Peintre de la Vie Moederne (1863)
- Modernity in 2 halves :
1) = fugitive, transitory, contingent
2) = eternal and mutable
- Same kind of dichotomy
 - Reaction to material changes in the world (where the world is suddenly
sped up) and the way of making art/depicting that world aren’t keeping up
- Positive
Literary modernism : intro
- Ezra Pound
- He sees a child who basically hasn’t been taught how to engage w the
world as it now exists
 Reaches for language of the old world (language of exploration, pre-electric
light, of art)
 Using language that’s out of its own time
 Reference to parts of the old world in order to try and make sense of the
new and the fact that there is a difference/failure between those 2 things is
where modernist poetry kind of springs from
20th-century modernity:
- Things get busier, more cars, modern lifestyle
- Context of the First World War
 Encapsulated everything what was wrong with the achievement of this new
age, all the scientific achievements of the old age (end 19 th century) were
building up to this
Despair? But what was the point of all this scientific achievement +
promises of modernisation if this is what is has led us to… ☹
 WWI = child of the 19th century
Consequence of Romantic thought: it was a war between European nations
that thought of themselves in national terms
 Culmination of all the failures of the 19 th century
- Marx
- Darwin
 Turned theories of human origin on their heads by claiming that we shared
common ancestors with apes
- Freud
 Man is no longer even the master of their own mind: what we do is not the
product of reason and thoughtful decision making, it’s a product of
unconscious processes and anxieties and all kinds of weird sexual impulses
and psychosis
Undermined the idea that people had of where they ought to be in the
world
- Consequences of industrialisation?
 Nationalism very strong, however: globalisation
 Everyone measured their clocks at the same beats
 Fears of degeneration = idea that culture was going downhill, even human
biology
 Culture industry: films, reading for pleasure (already the case in
Romanticism but ok)
All of this: explains why their was so much pessimism in modernist texts (Eliot for
example)
Modernism: themes
 Tradition/history:
- The new vs the old (critique + lamenting of it)
- Breakdown of social norms and cultural sureties (the Waste Land for
example)
- Rejection of history and the substitution of a mythical past, borrowed
without chronology.
 For example. In Prufrock (he can’t go more than 2 lines without making a
reference to something (Hamlet for example)
 Asynchronous picking and choosing of different parts of literary history in
order to communicate the meaning that he can’t seem to ever quite
communicate
The self:
- Interiority of narrative
 A lot of the poem takes place in Prufrock’s head
- Lone flaneur = idea of a masculine poetic self who is wandering the streets
and who is finding symbolic meaning in everything that he sees (mainly
miserable)
- Disenchantment and struggle to communicate
Communication and continuation are often depicted as the same thing
Ex. Prufrock is always asking that question: ‘Do I dare to ask that
question?’
The city:
- Most frequent setting for Modernist texts
 + romanticization of the city (the city becomes its own character in
modernist texts)
Time:
- Eliot is constantly asking in Prufrock whether he has time
 Anxiety due to sped of passing of time
Modernism in Art:
Les Demoiselles d’Avignon-Pablo Picasso (1907) :
- Earlier works
- Massive scandal at the time when it was first revealed
Why scandalous?
Depiction of prostitutes bathing in a public square  not scandalous (had
been done for years already) BUT:
- Transformation in HOW they are depicted
- Focus on the medium rather than the message
- It’s a rejection of the idea that paint can/should be used to depict things
realistically
- Statement = style of painting (not about subject)
 Commentary on the way of producing art  Modernist!
Cyclist-NataliaGoncharova (1913):
-Progression from what’s Picasso is doing because it’s depicting a modern
subject as well as a modern way of painting
- Cyclist going through a busy street w neon bright lights
- What’s changed as well:
 Way of depicting movement
  It’s about trying to give the IMPRESSION OF MOVEMENT (pushing the
boundaries of what painting can represent)
 It’s moving on from the idea that it should just represent things as they are
and rather represent things as you think they are felt or experienced.
(reflexive)
- Comment upon what painting can and should be doing now that the world
looks like this
Dinamismo di un ciclista- Umberto Boccioni (1913):
- Taking that idea to its conclusion: not even an attempt to represent like a
figure (cyclist) that we recognize, it’s trying to give an impression of what
it feels like to cycle.
- Cycling was new during those times.
This kind of art:
- Reflexive
- Commentary about what art should be doing in a modern world rather than
a sincere attempt to represent that modern world
Modernism and language:
- Trying to find a new kind of language capable of representing the modern
world
- Essentialism
 Getting rid of anything that is deemed ‘superfluous’
 Each line invites its reading on its own level
 Range of interpretations  Poem’s meaning is enriched intertextually
A Retrospective- Ezra Pound (1916):
3 Rules on how to read properly:
1) Direct treatment of the ‘thing’, whether subjective or objective.
- Direct
- Set out like IKEA kits: do this, do this, don’t do this
 Obsession with efficiency (across modernist texts)
 Not everything should be simple to understand, each word should express
the maximum amount of meaning possible
2) To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation.
3) As regarding rhythm: to compose in the sequence of the musical
phrase, not in sequence of a metronome.
- You can do away (afschaffen) with traditional rhyme and metre
- Lack of rhyme throughout modernist poetry
Slide 18 :
- Anxiety/anxious self-reflection of Eliot/other writers  trying to figure out
what they can make poetry mean (now that everything that it used to do is
now being taken over by new ways of doing things)
 Today: rise of AI (anxiety)
 What use is painting for when you can photograph things
 Problem modernist artists: trying to reconsider what it is that they’re
supposed to be doing now that the job that they were doing has been taken
over by automatization
Théorie Esthéthique- Theodor Adorno
- Reinforces idea: for a work of art to be truly connotative in the modern
world, it needs to rid itself of all the stuff that is not imminent to its own
communication
 Every sentence needs to be communication, hard-hitting
 Nothing can be there bcs it sounds pretty
 You capture the experience of modern life through essentialism
Examples:
- Which one more impactful?
Elegy in a Country Churchyard — G.K. Chesterton
- Georgian writer (cliché)
- Programmatic/formulaic, regular rhyme scheme, 3 stanzas w 4 lines
- More referential (telling story in a much clearer sense)
- More lines to deliver less impact
The Waste Land — T.S. Eliot
- Much more concise
- More impactful (first line already)
- Normally April is the time of Spring, hope…
- No proper rhyme scheme
- Verbs in present continuous: mixing, stirring, breeding
- Melancholy: a death of life
- Essentialism
 Not simplicity, but way of packing each line w a much more impactful
punch w the utter precision in poetic language
Modernist poetry: formal characteristics
- Open form/free verse
 Getting rid of metre/rhyme for the sake of rhyme
- Discontinuous narrative
 Ex. In Prufrock  jumping around between different characters, jumping
from Prufrock’s interior monologue to exterior (third person narrative)
- Intertextuality/classic allusions
 = when a text references another text to back up their point
Ex. Quoting someone
Ex. In Prufrock constantly
- Borrowings from other cultures and languages
 Untranslated segments of other literatures in Modernist poetry all of the
time
Ex. Prufrock: starts with a quote from the Inferno
- Unconventional use of metaphor/power of the image
 Segment from the Waste Land
Ex. April is the cruellest month: April is made to be something that it has
never before been considered to be  contradicts a lot of what we assume
to be the associations of Spring time (hope, rejuvenations)  still in Eliot’s
poem but turned into a negative thing
- Metanarrative
  Narratives about the possibility of producing art (ex. The anxiousness of
modernist criticism about writing poetry and producing art  recurrent in
their own works as well)
- Fragmentation
- Multiple narrative points of view (parallax)
 Existence of multiple characters who all become a primary character
 Prufrock is not just Prufrock, he also becomes Hamlet…
 Continuous shifting around of parallel points of view/narratives
Modernism: A Brief Summary
1) Themes
2) Formal Characteristics
- Nonlinear narrative = narrative that doesn’t progress like time does
Tradition and History:
The City:
- Essentialism: showing that desire to reduce language to something that’s
quite poetically essential
Time:
- Quote
 Irony? Way too simplistic to say: pointing to one date (1910) and saying this
is what shifted
The Self:
- Quote:
 Essentialism of language  fantastic example
 Never read something that has captured the experience of being bored on a
Friday afternoon like in this quote.
 Idea of going to get coffee just to have something to do…
 Captures that experience so directly
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
Thomas Stearns Eliot:
- American writer
- Citizenship late? Bcs a lot of the stuff he writes before that reads in very
British terms
- Transnational writer
- Stultifying = geestdodende
- And … Cats
 Musical
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock:
The title?
- The Love Song: Reminds us of love, something romantic
- J. Alfred Prufrock: romance? No!, old-fashioned name, an old man’s name
- Title sets up a dichotomy
 - Given that this is a love song about someone called j. Alfred Prufrock who
really has no business being in anything love related just going off the
name, is that irony/sarcasm?
 Fun being poked at both sides
1) J. Alfred Prufrock is being made fun of because he has been given this
‘love song’  totally not fitting to who this character sounds like
2) Pretentious, old sounding name  doesn’t fit with ‘Love Song’ (both
ways around)
Slide 31:
Chunk of untranslated text:
- When you start reading the first thing you see is the epigraph (big block of
Italian text)
 Dominic translated it for us
 Comes from Dantes’ Inferno
Divine comedy = trilogy of poetic works describing hell and then heaven
Dantes is led into hell by his literary hero Virgil and interacts w people on
every single level (9 levels)
 He interacts w criminals, people who are damned
- Scene on screen
 He’s talking to som1 who’s been damned and the sinner so shamed of the
crime says:
‘If I thought you had any chance of leaving hell Dante and going out to the
world I wouldn’t tell you, since I know you’re stuck here just like me it
doesn’t bother me
Impossibility of escape
he’s come to terms with just how awful hell is and he thinks Dante
cannot get out!! Solace

What do these 3 elements do? What impression or failing do they give?

(title, chunk of untranslated text, translation) (romantic promise of love
song, old reality of Prufrock and it takes a weird swing down into hell and
the impossibility of escaping hell ( = solace))
Options:
- Bitterness?
- Poem about the business of love (irony of love in title?)
P109 booklet
Line 1-14:
- Etherized
 Ether  back in the early 20th century it was a drug that was used with
patients before a surgery (rag with ether  to knock you out)
 Idea: something that’s been knocked out violently
- Sawdust = zaagsel, zaagmeel
 Idea: Bars/restaurants that don’t worry too much about hygiene and their
clientele don’t worry too much about drinking too much and being ill (cheap
and nasty)
 Idea: something that wants to be a restaurant but isn’t
  Oyster  eating them was a classy thing to do (but it doesn’t matter bcs
they were still in the same kind of place, same economic circle)
 ‘oyster-shells’  by the sound of it they have just been thrown onto the
floor (not a hygienic place)
- Tedious = vervelend, saai
- Insidious = verraderlijk, menacing in a gradual way
 Insidious intent = a harm but with a sneakiness to it
Idea of ‘streets that follow like a tedious argument’
 There is no literal way for a street to move like this
 Point of INTERIORITY and EXTERIORITY of Modernist narrative
Initially a description of a city but there is also a mindset that is not just
description (also: FREE INDIRECT STYLE)
 Metaphor:
By who?
Mindset?
 Bad mood
 An argument is not just tedious/boring but is also hinting at something
much nastier
- Where is Prufrock walking? He is making a visit, on his way to see
someone/people (that is the question that is set up)
- ‘In the room the women come and go Talking of Michelangelo.’ 
constantly repeated
 You were reading a stanza and then immediately makes this jump to this
random sentence
Helpful or not?
 Unhelpful personally
 Which room?
When reading the text:
- Look for questions of self, time, interiority, exteriority, history and tradition,
the city?
Class 7: Narratives of race

Overview:
- Robinson Crusoe 18c ‘realism and paternalism’
 ‘Friday’ = Robinson Crusoe’s servant
 The way he presents Friday aligns w a kind of idea about ‘primitive races’
1) Paternalism = they’re rather childlike, duty of civilized Western man is
to nurture/help primitives develop
 Very strong set of arguments what became colonialism, imperialism
- Heart of Darkness (joseph conrad)
 Quite short for a novel
 Criticism of the way in which Western civilization has developed in terms of
colonialism and imperialism, the way in which other races are subjugated to
the will of the Western powers
 Interesting for us: powers are vested in Belgium (about the Congo)
 Interesting link in terms of Modernism
  Book = early example of modernist thought (before the term Modernism
became a current term in terms of literary work)
 Nightmarish novel
- Beloved (Toni Morrison)
 African American novelist
 Pre-eminent novelist in American letters
 Late 20th century written
 Story about slaves and ex-slaves in the 19 th century, US southern states,
the slave experience, she tells a story of a number of characters
 Tries to give the reader a sense of what the experience was emotionally,
psychologically to live through US slavery (euphemist term: ‘The Peculiar
Institution’)
 Characters whose lives have been decimated by the experience of slavery
 Once they are free after the Civil War: about difficulties they have trying to
piece their lives together
Robinson Crusoe, Treatment of race (Ch 14):
- Realism  piling up of details
Paragraph 1:
- Description of Friday in a very detailed way (realism)
 He is trying to give us a sense of what the REAL Friday looks like
- He is attempting to get a detailed image of Friday as a person BUT at the
same we become aware of the stereotypical markers of the primitive race
(‘the other’)
- Fairly early with his acquaintance with Friday
- Start: detailed + positive
- “Straight, strong limbs”
 Rickets was an issue during the tile
 Rickets = limbs become deformed (if you had straight limbs you were free
of that disease)
- “countenance” = face
- If you read that description  what on earth does that colour look like?
 His attempting to be as precise as possible to the point that it just becomes
obscure
- Overall: positive representation of Friday
- What Defoe is doing here for his white, English, middleclass readership 
presenting an individual that they can somehow connect with and see as
admirable
 Physically attractive, healthy, robust
 All of these positives are meant to be aspects that the reader will find
sympathetic
BUT:
- At the same time you can see the negatives
 To show us that Friday’s admirability are because he does not have certain
attributes
Ex. Not a fierce and surly aspect
 Fierce: angry/uncontrollable
Ex. His hair was long and black…
 So he doesn’t have curly hair
 Ex. and yet not an ugly, yellow, nauseous tawny
Ex. his nose small, not flat, like the negroes
 These are all markers that show us what the sort of stereotype is for the
primitive:
- Curly hair, flat nose
The point?
- YES Friday is a primitive (a cannibal  savagery) BUT he’s not as extreme
a primitive as some
 He looks almost European  we’re meant to relate to Friday
Slide 4:
- Initial description: yeah, quite nice to look at Friday (notes above)
- Friday has been a cannibal and he still has the habit
 They walk down a beach, the site where he had been saved by Crusoe and
there are the remains of half-eaten bodies
 Friday sort of signals to Crusoe: hmm perhaps we could eat
 Crusoe: strong reaction against Friday: this is abhorrent
 THE THING IS: Friday = cannibal but he can be converted/changed (this is
what Crusoe feels)  he thinks: Friday is amenable to my lessons, to my
direction (he is a cannibal but can be changed)
- Relationship between the 2 of them:
 Master and servant
 Crusoe teaches Friday the word ‘master’ (he is master to Friday)
It’s not only what Crusoe does but also the way in which Friday behaves:
very passive way, he lies down at his feet and places Crusoe’s foot on his
head (willingness to be commanded, to signal: you are in charge of me and
I am happy that you are my master)
- Idea of paternalism: het beperken van iemands vrijheid of autonomie met
het doel om die persoon te beschermen, of omdat wordt aangenomen dat
dit in zijn of haar eigen belang is.
Line 87-93:
 Native who’s like a child to the adult who is Crusoe
 Details: he’s devoted to Crusoe, he gives himself fully to Crusoe (no
questions about it)
 His willingness to be mastered by Crusoe  reassures Crusoe that Friday is
not dangerous
 Clear indication of the relationship between:
1) Civilised, developed West
2) Primitive cultures
 That relationship is one of servitude and masterhood.
- Friday is seen by Crusoe as almost pure and innocent
 In novel kind of presented like ‘return to Garden of Eden’
 Sense of purity and innocence
 He uses that to criticise Western society (his own society)
Line 100-110: Crusoe says: here we have a wonderful individual, very
natural, pure, innocent, with all the essential gifts that we have been given
in civilized society  isn’t it a shame that we have not made as much of
those gifts as Friday has. That we have somehow lost our way or not
fulfilling our promise.
 Friday  used as a symbol to signify that not all is well with our own
society. (we don’t got everything right)
Relationship between Friday and Crusoe = very clear, never a doubt about
how committed Friday is to Crusoe, never a doubt about Crusoe’s right to
be superior/a master (no question at all about these things)
 In an 18th century context that portrayal is not unusual, rather progressive
(what Defoe is doing is presenting a native that we can relate to rather than
an alien savage)
 Today we see that it is a racist portrait of course
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (1902):
Link between Robinson Crusoe and Heart of Darkness?
- The picture of the relationship between Western civilisation and primitive
races is one that is STABLE
 West: technology, reason, enlightenment  in those terms it is very clear
why the West sees itself as superior + with the right to subjugate others)
 Primitives:
Heart of Darkness (1902)
- End of 19th century
- Colonialism and imperialism has been working its way through different
parts of the world for many decades
- Conrad gives us the portrait of a system of SUBJUGATION that is FAILING
 The West: not admirable, not energetic and dynamic and ambitious, not
improving the life of those under its care, greedy, rapacious (roofzuchtig),
self-satisfied, exploitative
- HOD criticises the West:
 In terms of development of civilization in terms of colonialism
Passages we will be looking at:
- Narrator = Charles Marlow
 First person narrative for the most part
 He is the witness, he travels all the way to the African continent
 Given a job by the Belgian company (starts of in Brussels)
He needs to travel to the Congo to bring back a man called Kurtz
Why?
 Kurtz who had previously been the start of the company (gifted, brilliant)
but something had gone wrong. He had gone into the deep interior of the
African continent and somehow had become deranged.
 Marlow’s job to travel up the river and collect this manager and bring him
back
 The book is all about the journey and what he sees on the journey as he
gets deeper and deeper into the African interior.
 Random: Apocalypse Now (Vietnam war film)  base don Heart of Darkness
but in Vietnam context
Passage number 2:
- Marlow is on a ship sailing to Africa and the ship gets close to the African
continent and is sailing along the coast and suddenly natives from a local
village get in their boats and paddle out to come and meet the boat
 - Interesting: the way in which Marlow describes the natives who are
paddling out
- Contrast between the way in which he is describing the generalcy and
strangeness of what the Europeans are doing and the way he describes
these natives that he see.
Line 17-21:
- Vocabulary
- Sordid farce:
 Farce: piece of theatre that shouldn’t be taken seriously
 This scene doesn’t seem like reality to him
- People around him are ‘idle’, he is ‘isolated’
- The sea is ‘oily and languid’  even the sea seems lazy and without
energy
- The coast is just: flat and boring (sombreness of the coast)
- seemed to keep me away from the truth of things
 major theme in this book (and ties him with modernism) is the nature of
reality/the nature of truth.
 What Marlow often struggles with: he is in a situation where he is
witnessing what the Europeans are doing in Africa and it doesn’t make
sense to him. He finds it difficult to keep a grasp of what is actually real.
He then sees these natives: line 21-29
- Quite a positive description of the natives: in what way is it positive?
Well first of all, we’ve had the background of the Europeans and of what
they’re doing and it’s very listless and sombre and then suddenly these
natives, why does he admire them so much?
 Idea of energy and vitality and that idea of energy and vitality is linked to
where they are: they belong there, they are part of that environment
 He makes the point: they don’t need a reason/ an excuse to be there. This
is their environment. He says: we (Europeans) are the ones that don’t
belong there.
 They/that energy make sense in that place, to him that is valuable because
that feels like reality, it feels like something that he can depend on.
 When he looks at what the Europeans are doing, he finds it difficult to grasp
that as a reality.
In terms of description:
- Black fellows
- White of their eyeballs glistening
- Marlow is still speaking in a condescending (neerbuigende) way
 Today: would be shocking to say
 Here: used as a general description

- Here we have a picture of African natives who he/Marlow admires because

they are in their own environment
As you read on:
- The ship sails on and he comes across what to him is a very strange act.
  There’s a French frigate just a couple of kilometres of the coast and it’s
firing its guns towards the land
 Marlow watches this and it doesn’t make sense to him
 Pathetic to him: tiny boat Is popping little shots into the continent and he
can’t see any good reason for why it’s doing that, it seems futile, ridiculous.
 typical of what he sees in terms of the European endeavours there.
Slide 8: excerpt 3:
- Vigour = Kracht
- There are also natives who he sees who are in a very different situation
- Once he’s on the land:
 At one point he’s walking around a huge area that is being used for mining
 There are explosions going off in terms of the mining operation
 Those who are working the mines are ALL natives (who have been brought
from different parts of the country as a kind of slave labour)
- The way in which workers/criminals are described  very different to that
kind of energy/vitality in first excerpt
Excerpt nr 3: line 42-51:
- He’s just walking around this area and he comes across a group of men
who are being marched (there is another native w a weapon who is
guarding them)
- Line 48: report = another explosion
- Initial descriptions:
 They’re prisoners, enshackled, shackles around their necks, connected to
each other by chains
Marlow makes the point: they are called criminals, this is what the system
is calling them
 But what have they done wrong? What makes them criminals?  =
insoluble mystery, they are simply victims to this system that has been
imposed upon their lives
Then he walks further in the landscape and he comes across an area and he
becomes aware of people and they’re dying and they’re littered across the
landscape
 They’re native workers who have been worked to the point of exhaustion
 They’re no longer useful bcs they’re sick and dying
 They’re simply left there to die, discarded
Line 85-89:
- This is how Marlow describes the scene that he discovers
- Notice the way that passage starts: ‘black shapes’
 It’s as if these individuals no longer have humanity/their own sense of being
 Described as almost inanimate graphic elements
Line 90-99:
- He calls them shapes and shadows
 They seem to be some half in half out of death/the earth
- He’s attention is caught by an individual (line 96-98)
  He is using ‘synecdoche’ where you focus on one aspect of the whole in
this case of the whole human being  Effect? It’s as if we’re only gradually
becoming aware of a human being, it’s a collection of parts that’s been
pointed to.
Then he actually says the word: ‘the man’
Line 100-105:
- ‘the man’
- ‘but you know with them it's hard to tell.’  typical phrase ‘they all look
the same’
- He’s aware that these people are dying and his attention is drawn to one
individual and he gives him a biscuit
 Marlow feels a little bit uncomfortable, what can he do here?
- Then strangely his attention is caught by a piece of material around the
person’s neck (white piece)
- We might read this and think: where is the compassion, empathy, sorrow
that this person might soon die.
- In Heart of Darkness Marlow presents his images without a doubt that what
is happening in the Congo is a kind of horror/terrible = critique of what is
happening. But at the same there is a lack of humanity on Marlow’s part.
 He almost looks at the victims in an objective way. (he describes them as
shapes, speaking of them as separate parts of the body) but there is a lack
of human feeling/compassion
That links to Modernism in a way: Marrow is a kind of narrator who is
alienated/doesn’t feel connected to the world in which he is living. He feels
somehow cast free from it:
 <-> Henry Fielding, Samuel Richardson  characters and narrators are
very much engaged with the world
 BUT here Marlow doesn’t have that sense of feeling towards those who are
suffering, however he will report it but he doesn’t engage with it 
emptiness to Marlow
Random: Heart of Darkness
- 19th century in terms of Darwinism and theories of evolution:
 Popular to think
1) of the difference between races in terms of different stages of evolution
2) that white Europeans civilised society  signs of a more highly evolved
race
3) Natives of Africa, South East Asia = less developed, less evolved
Quite often that sort of logic was used.
- Joseph Conrad in Heart of Darkness explored that Western Civilisation has
not evolved out of the darkness
 We have ways of thinking and technology  does not mean that we are not
in some essential way primitive
 When he shows what’s happening in the Congo  those levels of civility, of
custom are stripped away bit by bit  to reveal a savagery
 When Kurt is finally found  somebody who has become savage in the way
that he deals with the world
Link Heart of Darkness and Beloved:
 - Heart of Darkness
 Marlow: somebody who is reporting, bearing witness to the injustices, the
exploitations of the colonial mindset and critiquing it! BUT: somebody who
is alienated and not emotionally tied to what he is viewing.
<->
• RC paternalism offers notion of care and improvement of natives through
innate sense of white superiority and religious justification.
• Blvd shows a more brutal and realistic situation in which Paternalism is a
façade for driving economic forces (slavery).
• Humans reduced to the status of domesticated animals, commercial
property.
- Beloved:
 Emphasizes that emotional and psychological connection to the characters
 Trying to give us a sense what the experience was to be a slave + sense
about how you recover from that once you are free
Toni Morrison (woman): Beloved
- Historical novel: dealing w the 19 th century (USA), before and after the Civil
War
- Not something that’s supposed to be locked in its own sort of time bubble/
to viewed at from our standpoint
 Morrison’s point: the issue of race/difference is one that is as vital, divisive,
troubling today as it has been for many many years  it hasn’t gone away
One of her responses to that:
 Toni Morrison tries to understand the present by looking into the past
 Looking at lives lived in the 19th century as a way of thinking about
conflicts/divisiveness in the present
- Today: immigration is a central pain point
 Ex. Donald Trump
 Much of that/the problems today is/are driven by the idea of
difference/inequality
- Presents us a very complicated picture of race and its implications
Toni Morrison (1931-2019):

Frederick Douglas:
- One of the first African American writers
- Was a slave, escaped to the North (Free states), learnt to read and write,
became a famous speech giver, campaigner for the abolitionist movement
- Wrote autobiography: The Life and Times of Frederick Douglas
 About life as a slave, escape
Quote 1:
- Basic observation about the nature of mastery
- About imposing your will of mastery on others
 Ultimately it’s an act of self-entrapment
  You’ll ultimately be as subdued as those you seek to subdue
Quote 2:
- Looks from an African American perspective at the big day of celebration
(4th of July  Day of Independence)
 From an African American POV it’s a grim joke
 ‘its yours’ (White American) , not mine
- For as long as slavery was a fact, to be celebrating this for any African
American was a grim joke!
Toni Morrison demonstrated some of these ideas in her work:
- It centres that slavery in the USA is the context of the novel. Ofs
The ‘Peculiar Institution’: (important for background of the slavery)
- US constitution
 When it was drafted, there was the problem about slavery:
What is their status going to be?
 Confirms their status as property rather than human beings
- 1861:
 Outbreak of Civil War
 Increasing division between largely Free States in the North and the
slaveholding states in the South
- Problems Southern plantation owners
1) Slaves escaping and fleeing north so that they could be free
 Problem? You’re losing your property/workers
 Solution? 1850 Fugitive Slave Act
Fugitive Slave Act = legal for southern slave owners to pursue their
property, you could go to the North and reclaim your property and take
them back to your plantation.
- Many slaves w the aid of white abolitionist escaped from the south but
then owners with professional slave catchers + weight of law behind them,
pursued them and captured them.
 This is an aspect which bears directly on the book here.
Slave and non-slave states 1860:
- Free States
- Slave States
Beloved – summary:
- Margaret Garner  inspiration for Toni Morrison
 Based on actual event (Margaret Garner)
 Tried to escape w her children to the North and was recaptured, rather than
allow her children to fall back into slavery she took their lives  put on trial
for ‘theft’ rather than ‘murder’  UNDERLINES IDEA OF HUMAN BEINGS
WHOSE STATUS IS A COMMERCIAL CATEGORY (not seen as human being)
- What we have in Toni Morrison’s ‘Beloved’ is an account of the main
character ‘Sethe’
 A young mother, a slave, makes the decision to escape w her children,
pregnant at the time
 Moves towards the North
 One day: her owner along w a relative, a slave catcher, a sheriff all arrive at
the farm she is staying to take her back into slavery (we will focus on this
scene: that moment where the white slave catchers arrive to take Sethe
back to the plantation)
- Sethe (mother) = main character
- Beloved= ghost of daughter that sethe killed
- The address: 124 bluestone , the missing 3 is the number of her third child
that she killed
P82
Morrisson presents this scne of the arrival og these men at the farm through
the prspective of these men (sheriff, teacher, teachers nephew, slevecather?
Notice how the sleves are perceived by white men
When the four horsemen came: 4 horsemen of the apocalips, the end of their
bid for freedom
R 3-6: starts out as a plane description and then voc creeps in there of the
slave catcher who says you have watch out when catching sleves =>
language changes = perspective of slave catcher:
1) B carefull because they are unpredictable when you try to catch them
2) You don’t want to have to kill them because they would be worth less then
an animal
P 83 middle paragraph: characers here walk into barn and they see the
horrific event of women wanting to take life of children. The language here is
not in the tone that suggests drama, the event itself is traumatic enough.
So the 2 sons survive but the daughter (beloved, ghost) not
The youngest (Denver) is saved
Characters try to figure out why she did that
Right off Iytw as clear… > property of slaves is again emphasized
In novel we don’t know the real names of white men:
School teacher: most educated and his explanation: his nephew had been too
rough in his treatment to sether, he had beaten her so sleves become
unpredictabl and tht’s why she has gone mad on committing this act.
Nephew: a young man, cannot get his head around of what he sees, he keeps
repeating the sentence: why does she do that for
Sheriff:
What we see as readers: slave experience, this mother would not have done
that had it not be for the system into which her children were born
P 84 final paragraph: as white caracters are leaving , there is a repetition of
the eyes of the sleve characters, victims > all eyes are on you could mean
that they are being judged by the characters alive and dead in the scene
P 87 filling in : sethe is not taken back not slavery, she is seen as daanged
goods, so she is left there. She starts a life with Denver and the ghost (blue
stone rhode?)
Years in advance she kinda explains why she did it: she is talking to paul d and
she describes gathering her children together. She dragged them through the
veil
Veil: separation between life and death
Hummingbirds stucking their needle beaks : it’s an image used to express the
idea of mental and angish that she is feeling at that moment
Its similar to Virgina wolf way by using images to try capture invisible emotion
Denver also asks her why she did it: Denver lives with her and needs her but
she fears her because of what she did with her siblings
When sephe says I .. pushed them beyond the veil: context is described in one
of the exerts: when she escaped with her children was when she was moving
away from the planation, it was only then that she felt she could genuily love
her own children. It grew the further away from the planation she got. The
capacity to love is taken away from slaves.
Paul d himself rememnbers what is was like in the plantation and he says you
could not allowed yourself to love someone else, but you could allow yosrself
to love small moments
Theme 2 p 90: look at it
Theme 3
P 92: we see sethe, Denver and beloved but sether in particular experiences
[Link] go to an isolated frozen lake and they go skating. Symbolically: the 3
individuals that are damaged by the past but together they are able to go
forward. Leaning on each other. At the end of the scene: the focus is on sethe
and it’s clear that the laughing and crying from sadness becomes
indistiguishible of the ther. In reminder of the hurt that she experienced.
Never far from the surface.
The local community excludes them because of the past but therecomes a
point where the community does accept them back . the women go to the
house (blue stne ) and they gather outside of the house and there is a scene
where there are no words but they start to sing (p 93)
… baptised in its wash: this describes a communal gesture of women signaling
that she is part of th community by singing. The voices are searching for the
right message and sethe feels it and she feels cleansed (baptized)
Close of novel: years later: sethe and children are gone: 2 x “it was not a story
to pass on “:
Interpret in 2 ways:
1) It’s too disturbing, shocking
2) If we change the way we articulate it, it has the opposite meaning: this is
not a story to be missed, we should hear it
  Story of slave history: it’s important we keep looking at it
Can be linked to romanticism: the idea of paradox, we have to be able to hold
opposites simultaneously to be able to tackle this kind of material
Interview toni Morrison
JM Coetzee , disgrace (1999)
Coetzee and links to other parts of the course
• Robinson Crusoe
– JMC writes Foe
– View of RC from a female perspective
– The colonial theme and power relations
• Romanticism
– The danger of an aesthetic perspective in an unstable environment
– The Romantic becomes limited to an escape from brute realities

P. 96 Soraya
The idea of love /passion here is an arrangement. Soraya is a prostitute. We see
that he pays for a service and he likes her but from his perspective he feels that
she is a possession. This emerges when he comes across her in public and she
has her son with her and he did not think of her personal live. from that point on
the relationship begins te change. Once that scene happens (they saw each
other), she tranforms herself into just another woman that might cause him
problems. So he is not a pleasant character. He reduces the emotional life to a
set of arrangements, the idea that heis in control.
P 101 Melanie
The next thing that happens, is that he forms a relationship with one of his
students and this is more disturbing in nature because the way he pursues her,
he sees himself as a romantic here . but when we read this w see that this is him
exorting his power over a student and he rapes her. It isdescribe from his
perspective.
When melanie is described, we have a different set of turns, she does not resist.
She only averts herself, she is not welcome. He says it is not rape but it is. David
luty is the predator. The way melanie is described is if she is the prey . David
justifies his actions, that belongs to a romantic narrative.
Melanie is like a rabbit… => described as literally a prey
David is found out, he is brought in front of committee of university and they
want them to shpw regret but he refuses to do that . as a result he loses his job,
he is disgraced.
Note: the hint as he falls proffesionaly, Melonie becomes more empowered and
along with her boyfriend work to exploit the situation but that’s not particularly
worthy thing to do. The point we see here: the power all on David sided, begins to
shift and melanie begins to have control over events
So david thinks he has his life balanced, but he hasn’t . at this pint he comes
from city to easten cape ( far away from the urban centers), this is where his
daughter lives (lucy) . he joins her, he feels [Link] is lesbian and her
job Is to look after dogs. In south African context dogs are important because
they are guard dogs.
In rural areas of south Africa, her position as a white woman, can be risky. She
turns to a black character called petras as a sort of protector. He looks down on
his daughters lifestyle.
p104
Key episode: he and his daughter are at home, 3 men turn up. They say we need
to use telephone, someone needs medical care. They give them the benefit of
the doubt. They are attacked. They are separated, he is locked in b athroom. WE
DON’T KNOW WHAT HAPPENS TO LUCY. It is told from davids perspective
It is a brutal scene. He is beaten up and all. Once the men take what they want
from the house,they leave. Now we see genuine emotion from David: he is
petrified that something bad might have happened to his daughter. He has all of
this fear and when he sees her, she is not physically injured. David just wants to
embrace her. This is first time we see genuine care of David. Lucy refuses his
hugs. It is not said but she has been raped. He does everything to help her, he
wants the authorities involved. Lucy says: when the olice comes, yppu tell them
your story and I mine. Rather than allowing her father to became the carer , she
stand on her own. As novel develops there is not going to be justice. There is little
there can be done legally. This is very frustrating for David. Ultimately David says
we should go back to the city and live together but lucy refuses. She is
determined to stay where her home is and she marries petras. It’s a paractical
relationship because petras can offer her protection.
Petras: presented as very socially low character bt at the end we see hee has a
lot of influence in the community.
David after the attack: lost sense of self respect, disgraced professionally, and
cant be a proper father
Davis starts to work with women who he initially despises. Beverly. Initially he
does not like her, he looks down on her but later when he is brought to his low
point he starts to work with her , helping her with the dogs, he appreciates that
bev is a woman who is emotionally, psychologically strong but has great
compassion for animals. They have an affair but the point is he is recognising her
strength and the imortance of their work with the dogs (when a dog dies)
David becomes aware of the value of the individual life.
David interacts with the dog in his last moment; dog looks to him with trust and
David wants to offers him is hopefully a painless release.
One particular dog: dog with three names: dog that has suffered. But is forms
attachement to David. It becomes his favorite. At the end of the book he decides
if he saves driepoot or not. He doesn’t because this is the system he is working
within
P 108
Notice the language: she puts them away: tendr phrase instead of she kills them
The final scene tells us he can without any sense of awardness that he loves this
dofgs but at the same time, he has to give the dogs up they can not all be saved.
There is also a questioning of this idea of treating each other, other people as
animals. A familiar narrative within racist discourse. He is questioning this idea.
Saying certainly we should not treat people this way ut also we should not treat
animals this way.
This writer engages seriously with the idea of the place of animals in our lives
and the ethical responsibility that we have.
coetsy says we don’t treat animals very well and this links with the idea of how
people treat each other.
Other book of kutsy: elizabeth castello

Excerpt number 1: P131

- At this point Sethe and her 2 sons, young daughter, baby were tracked
down to a farm in the north and at this moment her owner (called
‘schoolteacher’  we never get to know his real name), school teacher’s
nephew, professional slave catcher and a sheriff (all white men) arrive to
take Sethe along w her children back to the plantation
 Plantation name: Sweet home (ironic)
- Main thing to take away:
 Morrison presents the action, the scenes through the eyes of the
white characters.
 by doing that: she gives us a perspective on the motivations, perspective,
view of the characters
- it will give us a crescendo moment in the novel BUT that is not the way it
happens in the novel itself
 in novel: there isn’t a deliberate build-up to it (this moment), it’s suddenly
just there
HOWEVER: impact enormous!
Eerste pauze bij voorlezen:
- the way in which Morrison moves us from the omniscient narrator
(Morrison herself) to the perspective of the professional slave catcher.
 Slight change in the language that tells us we’re beginning to see things
from the white slave catcher’s point of view
 Colloquial register
  The slave catcher is giving us the benefit of his experience catching slaves:
they’re unpredictable so you have to keep your distance
Tweede pauze bij voorlezen:
- The voice of the slave catcher  concerned about 2 things
1) Capturing an escaped slaves is unpredictable
 You never know how they’re going to respond: submissive, do wild things?
2) That importance of the economic value of a slave
 If you kill them, you’ve failed in your job: a dead slave is not worth anything
Derde pauze bij voorlezen:
- These 2 character meet along the way
- Old man = Stamp paid (name)
- Old woman = Baby Suggs
Both are labelled as crazy:
 ‘they must be crazy bcs they’re behaving in a strange way
 Reason really: horrors taking place in the barn
 But from the slave catchers perspective: he just brings it down to ‘they’re
crazy’
Vierde pauze bij voorlezen:
- This paragraph: in many ways the centre of the novel
 The moment at which we see Sethe trying to take the lives of her children
 Her 2 sons are bleeding at her feet
 A young daughter is already dead (her throat has been cut)
 She’s attempting to dash out the brains of her baby
- Horrific scene
Notice:
- How plain (gewoon) the description is
 In interview Morrison said when writing about this topic: ‘the only way I
could do this is to imagine that that’s not any mother, the only way I could
do this was to imagine that it was me as a mother, in that position, making
that decision’
 ‘when you’re dealing with materials like that you don’t get ornamental with
the language, you don’t try to make it fancy, you keep the language to a
minimum, no need for extra because it is there in the event itself  that is
the shocking act’
- One of the questions that arises from this novel:
1) What is it to be a mother?
2) What is slavery?
3) Was Sethe right to do what she did?
 Morrison doesn’t push readers in any particular direction into saying yes or
no
 She says a lot about the circumstances but she leaves it to us to think
about that question
 One thing that is undeniable: that impossible situation of a mother faced w
the prospect of being taken back w her children into slavery  that
situation arises because of the institution/ the system of slavery itself
Vijfde pauze bij voorlezen:
 - School teacher ’s perspective:
 Plantation owner but most educated among the white characters
 He has an explanation why she’s done what she’s done: “She’d gone wild,
due to the mishandling of the nephew…”:
 His reasoning: the nephew has beat her too much (just in the same way w a
dog: if you beat it it will turn on you  to him that’s clear)
 Actual reason: slavery itself
- Line 1:
 Horrific scene and his first response is: there is nothing there to claim as in
‘lost property’
- She was a good slave
- “She had at least 10 breeding years left”
 Not only individuals treated as commodities but also as cattle
 Breeding  language of keeping cattle
 Ties in with the idea of family: for those who were slaves the idea of family
was a dangerous concept  having children  your partner, child could be
taken away from you and sold
- What happens to love within this institution? (see later)
 Event here: idea of love is put under enormous pressure and becomes
impossible
Random deel:
- See what happened when you overbeat creatures God had given you the
responsibility
 Another justification for slavery
 Similar to justification in ‘Robinson Crusoe’
 God has given you the responsibility of this  Biblical justification was often
invoked
 God has given the white race the responsibility to care for these other races
(‘the chosen one’)
Zesde pauze bij voorlezen:
- About the nephew
- He can’t understand it  no sense of his own culpability
- He keeps repeating the term ‘What…?’

- In the end the 4 character (4 white characters) back out of the barn
- Sethe will be taken away by the lawman (sheriff)
- The 2 boys haven’t died (injured), daughter is dead, baby was saved by
Stamp Paid
 They’ve all been spoiled (verwoest) so the School Teacher returns to the
plantation without them
This novel:
- Looks at events leading up to the barn moment: trying to escape +
moment where she’s caught
- Also looks at the years afterwards
Themes of the other excerpts:
- How does this event affect her?
- We gain a sense of what slavery does to a person emotionally
 What effect does slavery have on our ability to love?
Excerpt 4:
- Paul D and Sethe
- When Sethe escapes from Sweet Home w her children she notes that
something happens to her
 She realises that her capacity to love her own children suddenly increases,
she feels she can love her own children
- She is describing what it was like as she’s escaping
- She is talking about: I never knew that I could love my children the way I
could once I escaped  her capacity for love was suddenly there
 Within slavery there is the threat of losing your family  you LEARNT NOT
TO LOVE + not to allow yourself to love
- Paul D comes along later
 Was a slave
 Forms a relationship with Sethe later on
 When he is talking about when you’re a slave, you love small. (“a blade of
grass, you might just snatch a glimpse at a distance of somebody who you
love”  but It can’t go no further than that!)  you protect yourself by
loving small things/ to love big will destroy you within that system.
Excerpt 2: (when Denver is a teenager)
- Sethe’s daughter Denver = daughter who survived
 Grows up fearing her mother, however, she loves her mother
Why? She knows what her mother has done
 Affects her ability to have a full relationship with her mother
- Denver
 She doesn’t know what it is that made her mom do this
 She has this deep fear bcs of her knowledge (she knows what happened)
- As we read the novel it is revealed what it is that pushed Sethe to what she
did: The situation (slavery)
Excerpt 6: Another negative effect of slavery
- Sethe is talking about her memory of her mother and her grandmother
especially
 They were transported from Africa to America as slaves
 They grew up within their native African culture
Point?
- One of the things that’s lost/threatened in slavery: Native culture and
native language
 Sethe can remember a few phrases that her grandmother used to use BUT
the language is pretty much lost for her (connection to language + old
culture  also lost/erased by slavery)
 Consequence of slavery
 - Morrison in the book gives us lots of examples of the consequences of
slavery, slave life, cruelties. (NEGATIVE)
- Morrison also tries to give at least a glimpse of something POSITIVE.
Hints in book: (give a sense of potential)
Ex. Excerpt 8:
- Morrison also tries to give at least a glimpse of something POSITIVE.
Hints in book: (give a sense of potential)
- One of the few points in the novel where there is genuine joy and laughter
This scene:
- Sethe, Denver (daughter) and Beloved (daughter)
 Beloved is the daughter she killed
 What is beloved doing there bcs this is a scene that takes place many years
after the event
Point where novel is not realist: supernatural elements
 Beloved initially returns as a ghost in the house where Sethe and Denver
live
 A ghost that torments Sethe (kind of punishment)
 Paul D (Sethe’s partner) eventually manages to run the ghost out the house
Shortly afterwards:
- Young woman turns up at the house (20-21 years old)
 BUT: has the mind of a young child
 No background information about the girl
 Sethe knows that this is the adult incarnation of Beloved and she takes her
into the house
Scene: Mother, Denver the daughter, Beloved the strange reincarnation of
the killed daughter:
- On a frozen lake
- There is a moment of leisure/enjoyment
- They only have 2 skates to share between them
 A bit of a comedy watching them as they move forward
 They’re trying to glide forward and they’re enjoying themselves (one of the
fe moments)
- The phrase is repeated: “nobody saw them falling”
 Emphasizes 2 things:
1) A private moment (family moment)
 And nobody sees them
2) Just in the same way that nobody sees them falling here  there are
millions of experiences of lives that go unwitnessed/are not recorded
(whether good or bad)
Last paragraph excerpt 6:
- At one point Denver gets up and she tries to go forward on her own and it
fails, she falls down
 All 3 women just burst out laughing (hilarious)
End of passage: (in geel aangeduid)
- Line between laughter and sorrow
 Sethe moves from laughter from joy to sobbing from sorrow
 Reaction girls: they touch her lightly on the shoulder (we’re here together,
we will help)
 - These 3 women on their own individually can’t cope with the burdens
they’ve been given
 Metaphor for their lives: on the ice individually they will fall down 
together they can offer each other that can give them the chance to move
forward with their lives
Excerpt 9: Another glimpse of the positive:
For many years Sethe Is excluded from the local African American village
and community
- They are suspicious of her because of her past
- They are aware of the presence of Beloved  they’re very suspicious about
who beloved is.
 So: they exclude them from community
After a number of years:
- Women in community signal to Sethe, Beloved and Denver that they are
accepted + part of the community
How do they do that?
- Not through linguistic (language/words)
- They sing!
 Not words but they’re singing notes
 They’re looking for the notes/frequences that will touch hearts and
communicate the message: “we accept you”
 Positive = being brought into the community
Often mentioned in novel:
- To make sense of such terrible circumstances we need to try and move
beyond what can be stated in plain language
 We need to look at the idea of music, supernatural as ways of helping us to
navigate these very troubling situations  IDEA OF COMMUNAL TYPE OF
HEALING
Excerpt 10: Paul D
- His simple message? Slavery has left him emotionally in pieces (as it has
with so many people)
 Left him feeling that he’s no longer whole, in pieces
- What he sees in Sethe is somebody who can gather the pieces (he sees
himself as shattered) and hand them back to him  she can provide him a
sense of himself and vice versa
 Idea of what love can finally do when it’s given enough space, room and
freedom to do what it’s meant to do
 He describes it influenced by words of a friend years ago
 SO: there are glimpses of hope in Beloved
Excerpt 11: Final passage (of the novel)
- Conclusion given by Morrison about the story of Sethe (a mother who killed
her child and how she can live after that)
- Phrase: “It was not a story to pass on” + then: image described of years
after Sethe
 Giving a sense of the way in which stories about people fade
 We forget about these stories
 2 contradictory meanings to that phrase:
 1) To pass down from generation to generation  this is too dark, it’s too
disturbing, we cannot tell this story to other generations
2) We should not miss a story (other intonation)
 This is not what we can PASS on
Meaning? Morrison gives a paradox:
1) It’s too dark, we can’t tell the story
2) We can’t not tell the story
- Underlines the idea that the author is clear about not wanting to give a
clear judgement herself, she is leaving it open for us to think about
- She ends the novel with ‘Beloved’
Main thing about the novel ‘Beloved’:
- The way in which Morrison really does try to take us into the emotional
lives of her characters + tell us about the way in which that emotional life
is squeezed and constraint, limited and twisted BY SLAVERY. (by being
regarded as property)
+ after slavery: how can the consequences of that situation be righted? Is
there room for seeing something positive? (there are glimpses in the story
but it remains a dark history)
Seamus Heaney (1939-2013)
From death of a naturalist (1966)
Digging
Seamus Heaney’s poem "Digging" is one of his most famous works. At its heart,
it is a poem about identity, family tradition, and finding your own path in
life. Heaney grew up in rural Northern Ireland, where his father and grandfather
were traditional, hard-working farmers. Heaney, however, grew up to become a
writer and a poet. This poem explores the guilt, respect, and ultimate peace he
feels about choosing a pen over a shovel.
Here is a detailed, easy-to-follow breakdown of exactly what is happening in the
poem.
1. The Setup: The Writer at His Desk
The poem starts in the present day. The speaker (Heaney) is sitting at his
window, holding a pen, getting ready to write.
"Between my finger and my thumb / The squat pen rests; snug as a gun."
 The Pen as a Weapon: Comparing the pen to a gun is highly deliberate.
It suggests that a pen is a powerful tool. It has weight, it takes skill to use,
and it can make a massive impact on the world, just like a weapon or a tool
of manual labor.
 The Sound Outside: As he sits there, he hears a "clean rasping sound"
outside. He looks down out his window and sees his elderly father digging
in the garden.
2. A Flashback to His Father
Hearing the shovel hit the gravel sends the speaker into a memory. He
remembers his father twenty years ago, in his prime, working in the potato fields.
 Expert Physical Labor: Heaney describes his father's movements with
immense respect. He talks about the "coarse boot" pushing down on the
spade, the knee levering the shaft firmly, and how he rooted out the
potatoes.
 Pride: The speaker exclaims, "By God, the old man could handle a
spade." He deeply admires his father’s physical strength, rhythm, and
expertise.
3. Going Deeper: The Grandfather
The memory goes even further back in time to his grandfather, who was an
expert at cutting peat/turf (fuel taken from the soggy bogs of Ireland).
 The Champion: He tells us his grandfather "cut more turf in a day /
Than any other man on Toner’s bog." * A Childhood Memory: He
remembers bringing his grandfather milk in a bottle topped with paper.
The old man barely stopped working—he drank it quickly and immediately
got right back to "nicking and slicing neatly" into the earth.
4. The Turning Point: The Speaker’s Dilemma
After remembering these two generations of incredible, strong men, the speaker
smells the potato soil and the wet peat in his mind. But then he realizes
something painful:
"But I’ve no spade to follow men like them."
 The Guilt: There is a moment of sadness here. He feels like he is breaking
a sacred family chain. He doesn't have the physical drive or the desire to
be a farmer. He cannot follow in their footsteps.
5. The Resolution: A New Way to Dig
The poem ends by repeating the very first lines, but with a massive, triumphant
twist.
"Between my finger and my thumb / The squat pen rests. / I’ll dig with it."
 The Meaning: Heaney realizes he doesn't need a shovel to honor his
family or do hard work.
 Digging with Words: Excavating memories, digging up history, and
uncovering deep truths through poetry is its own form of manual labor. His
father and grandfather dug into the Irish soil; Heaney will use his pen to
dig into his own mind, his heritage, and the human experience.
Summary of the Core Message
Instead of feeling like a failure for leaving the family farm, Heaney uses this poem
to celebrate his ancestors while proudly claiming his own identity. The pen
becomes his shovel.
Seamus Heaney’s "Digging" belongs firmly to Modernism (specifically late
Modernism or contemporary post-colonial poetry), but it uses elements of
Realism to get its point across. It is not Romanticism.
Here is a breakdown of why the poem fits into these categories and why it rejects
the others.
Why it is Modernist (The Core Style)
While written in 1966—putting it historically in the late-modern or postmodern
era—"Digging" relies heavily on Modernist techniques.
 The Internal Crisis: Modernist literature is obsessed with the inner
psychological struggle, identity crises, and a sense of alienation from the
past. The speaker feels a deep, anxious division between his modern life as
an intellectual and his family's traditional past.
 Fragmentation of Time: The poem does not move in a straight line. It
jumps from the present day at a desk, flashes back 20 years to his father,
flashes back even further to his grandfather in the bogs, and then snaps
back to the present.
 Free Verse: It rejects traditional, rigid rhyme schemes and strict poetic
meters. Instead, it uses natural, conversational speech rhythms, which is a
hallmark of Modernist poetry.
How it uses Realism (The Imagery)
Heaney uses Realism as a tool within the poem. Realism is an artistic movement
that focuses on everyday, gritty, unglamorized life.
 Gritty Details: Rather than painting a pretty, perfect picture of farming,
Heaney gives us the harsh, physical truth of manual labor.
 He describes the "coarse boot," the "straining rump" of his father
bending over, the "squelch and slap / Of soggy peat," and the "cold
smell of potato mould." This is honest, dirty, real-world work.
Why it is NOT Romanticism
Romanticism (a movement from the late 1700s to mid-1800s) looked at nature
as a magical, spiritual, and divine force. A Romantic poet writing about a farmer
would focus on how the farmer is "at one with the mystical spirit of the earth."
Heaney completely avoids this. His father and grandfather aren't having a
spiritual awakening in the mud; they are working hard to put food on the table
and cut fuel for the winter. It is a portrait of human skill and labor, not mystical
nature-worship.
Summary
If you are classifying this for a class, "Digging" is a Modernist poem that
relies on sharp, Realist imagery to explore the psychological gap between old
traditions and modern identity.
"Death of a Naturalist," the title poem from Seamus Heaney’s 1966 collection.
In simple terms, this poem is about growing up and losing childhood
innocence. A "naturalist" is someone who loves studying nature. The "death" in
the title isn't a literal death; it represents the moment a young boy's innocent,
joyful love for nature dies, replaced by fear and a realistic understanding of the
world.
The poem is split into two halves that contrast completely. Here is the easy, step-
by-step breakdown.
Stanza 1: Childhood Fascination (The Gross but Fun Nature)
The poem starts with a young boy exploring a "flax-dam" (a wet, swampy ditch).
Heaney uses incredibly descriptive sensory words to show how a kid views a
messy marsh.
 The Stinky, Alive Swamp: Words like "festered," "rotted," and
"swelterered" tell us the swamp is hot, smelly, and decaying. Flies
(bluebottles) weave a "gauze of sound." To an adult, this sounds
disgusting. To a young boy, it is paradise.
 The "Best Part": The boy’s absolute favorite thing is the "warm thick
slobber / Of frogspawn" (frog eggs). He calls it "clotted water." * The
Jam Jars: Every spring, he fills jam jars with the jelly-like eggs, lines them
up on window-sills at home and school, and excitedly watches the dots
grow into swimming tadpoles.
 Innocent School Lessons: He remembers his teacher, Miss Walls, giving
a very cute, sanitized lecture on frogs: the daddy frog is a bullfrog, the
mammy frog lays the eggs, and they change color to tell the weather. At
this stage, nature is safe, simple, and adorable.
Stanza 2: The Awakening (Nature Fights Back)
The second half jumps to a hot day later in the summer. The boy goes back to the
swamp, but everything has radically changed. The cute little tadpoles have grown
up into real, mature frogs—and they are terrifying.
 An Army of Frogs: The field is "rank / With cowdung," and the frogs have
"invaded" the dam. The boy hears a "coarse croaking" and a heavy
"bass chorus" in the air.
 The Military Metaphors: To show how threatened the boy feels, Heaney
starts using war imagery to describe the frogs:
o They are "gross-bellied."

o Their croaking sounds like "obscene threats."

o They sit poised like "mud grenades."

 The Great Slime Kings: The frogs are no longer cute little classroom
pets. They look like a vengeful army. The boy feels sick to his stomach,
turns around, and runs away in total panic.
  The Loss of Innocence: The final line is the most important: "I knew /
That if I dipped my hand the spawn would clutch it." He feels like
nature is going to punish him for stealing its eggs in jars. His innocent bond
with nature is broken forever.
Is this Romanticism, Realism, or Modernism?
Just like "Digging," this poem uses a mix of styles, but it acts as a direct
rejection of Romanticism.
 Anti-Romanticism: Romantic poets (like William Wordsworth) wrote
beautiful poems about how nature makes children pure, happy, and holy.
Heaney turns that upside down. He shows nature as muddy, smelly,
sexual, aggressive, and scary. Nature isn't a gentle spiritual guide; it's an
army of "slime kings."
 Realism: Heaney uses intense, gritty, unglamorized realism. He uses
words like "slobber," "farting," and "slime" to give us the raw, unfiltered
reality of rural wildlife.
 Modernism: The psychological focus is modernist. The poem is entirely
about a sudden internal shift in consciousness—the exact, fragile moment
a child's mind changes from innocent wonder to adult anxiety and fear.
This poem is "The Early Purges," also from Seamus Heaney’s 1966 collection.
In simple terms, this poem is about how growing up on a farm forces a child to
become numb to the harsh realities of life and death. A "purge" means getting rid
of something unwanted. The poem tracks how the speaker goes from being a
terrified six-year-old child crying over drowned kittens to a grown adult who
shrugs off animal deaths as a normal part of farm business.
Here is the step-by-step breakdown of how this happens.
1. The Childhood Trauma (Stanzas 1–3)
The poem opens with a stark, shocking memory: "I was six when I first saw
kittens drown."
 The Farm Hand: A worker named Dan Taggart takes a litter of unwanted
kittens, calls them "the scraggy wee shits," and throws them into a
bucket to drown them.
 The Graphic Truth: Heaney doesn't spare us the details. He describes the
horrific sounds: the "frail metal sound" of the bucket and the "soft
paws scraping like mad" as the kittens try to escape before the water
fills up.
 The Aftermath: Dan shrugs it off, asking, "Sure isn't it better for them
now?" He dumps the dead kittens onto a dung heap, where they look like
"wet gloves," glossy and dead.
2. The Growing Fear (Stanzas 4–5)
 The Child’s Reaction: As a six-year-old, the speaker is "suddenly
frightened." He hangs around the yard for days, sadly watching the
bodies rot in the summer heat until they look like dung.
  The Routine of Death: Even after he temporarily forgets the kittens, the
fear returns because death is everywhere on a farm. He watches Dan trap
rats, snare rabbits, shoot crows, and kill old chickens with a "sickening
tug" to their necks. At this stage, the young boy is still disgusted and
scared by the violence.
3. The Adult Realism: Becoming Numb (Stanzas 6–7)
The poem takes a major psychological shift at the end. The speaker grows up,
and his perspective entirely changes.
 Losing "False Sentiments": The adult speaker now believes that city
people have "false sentiments" (fake, over-emotional feelings) about
animals.
 The Shrug: Now, when unwanted puppies ("shrill pups") are sent to be
drowned, the adult speaker doesn't cry. He just shrugs and says, "Bloody
pups." He has completely absorbed Dan Taggart's cold attitude.
 The Practical Farmer: The final lines explain his new philosophy:
"‘Prevention of cruelty’ talk cuts ice in town / Where they consider death
unnatural, / But on well-run farms pests have to be kept down."
He is saying that animal rights talk only works in the city, where people are
disconnected from nature and think death is weird. On a real, working farm,
killing unwanted or pest animals is just a practical necessity to keep things
running well.
Is this Romanticism, Realism, or Modernism?
This poem is the ultimate example of brutal Realism.
 Hard Realism: There is absolutely no beauty or magic here. Heaney gives
us the cold, gritty, and unvarnished truth of agricultural life. Words like
"scraping like mad," "dung," and "sickening tug" force the reader to
face the unpleasant side of nature.
 Anti-Romanticism: Once again, Heaney smashes the Romantic idea of
the countryside. Romantic poetry often presents the farm as a peaceful,
holy utopia where humans live in perfect harmony with animals. Heaney
shows that the countryside is actually a place of survival, pragmatism, and
routine killing.
 Modernism: The Modernist element is the psychological exploration of
complacency—how a human brain adapts to cruelty and accepts it as
normal just to survive in its environment. The poem leaves the reader
feeling uneasy about how easily the boy's innocence was "purged."

This is "Mid-Term Break," which is widely considered one of Seamus

Heaney’s most heartbreaking and powerful poems.
The title sounds like it’s going to be about a fun school vacation, but the
poem is actually about grief, shock, and the tragic death of Heaney's
four-year-old brother, Christopher, who was hit by a car while Heaney
was away at boarding school.
What makes this poem so devastating is its restraint. Heaney doesn't
use dramatic, loud, crying words; instead, he describes the scene with
cold, quiet, realistic observations that capture the raw numbness of a
family in shock.
Here is the step-by-step breakdown.
1. The Waiting and the Journey (Stanza 1)
The poem begins at Heaney's school (college). He is sitting in the sick
bay with nothing to do but wait.
 Ominous Signs: He is "counting bells knelling classes to a close."
The word "knelling" is very important here. Church bells "knell" at
funerals. Even before we know what happened, Heaney uses this
word to hint that death is in the air. At two o'clock, neighbors—not
his parents—drive him home, showing that his parents are too
devastated to leave the house.
2. The Broken Father (Stanza 2)
When he arrives home, he encounters a shocking sight on the porch:
 The Role Reversal: He sees his father crying. Heaney notes that
his father "had always taken funerals in his stride." His dad is a
tough, traditional country man who usually handles death without
flinching. Seeing this strong man completely broken down
immediately alerts the young boy to how massive this tragedy is.
3. The Awkwardness of Grief (Stanzas 3–4)
Inside the house, the atmosphere is heavy and confusing for the young
speaker.
 The Innocent Baby: The family baby is cooing, laughing, and
rocking the pram. The baby is too young to understand death,
creating a painful contrast between pure childhood joy and total
family tragedy.
 Adult Respect: The boy feels "embarrassed" because old men
stand up to shake his hand and treat him like an adult, saying they
are “sorry for his trouble.” * The Mother's Anger: While the father
is weeping openly, the mother handles her grief differently. She
holds Heaney's hand and coughs out "angry tearless sighs." She is
too shocked to cry; her grief has turned into silent, bitter anger at
the unfairness of the universe.
4. The Arrival of the Body (Stanzas 5–6)
At ten o'clock at night, the ambulance arrives carrying the body.
 The Medical Reality: Heaney writes that the body was "stanched
and bandaged by the nurses." "Stanched" means the bleeding was
stopped. Notice how he refers to his little brother as "the corpse"
 here. He is still emotionally detached, looking at the situation
from a distance because the shock hasn't fully worn off.
5. The Private Goodbye (Stanzas 6–7)
The next morning, the house is quiet. The boy goes upstairs alone to
see his brother.
 Peaceful Imagery: The room is filled with snowdrops (white
flowers associated with purity and early winter) and candles. This
creates a calm, soothing atmosphere.
 The "Poppy Bruise": He looks at his brother, who looks "paler now"
and has a "poppy bruise on his left temple." A poppy is a bright
red flower. Heaney uses this beautiful, natural image to describe a
horrible head injury from the car crash. He notes there were "no
gaudy scars," because the car's bumper simply knocked him clear
without tearing his body apart.
6. The Final Punchline (The Isolated Single Line)
The poem ends with one of the most famous, devastating final lines in
English literature:
"A four foot box, a foot for every year."
Heaney separates this line from the rest of the poem to make it hit the
reader with maximum force. By measuring the size of the coffin ("a four
foot box") against the age of the child ("a foot for every year"), the cold
reality of how young and small his brother was finally smashes through
the emotional numbness.
Is this Romanticism, Realism, or Modernism?
This is a masterpiece of Grief Realism.
 Objective Realism: Instead of writing a sentimental, dramatic
poem about angels taking a child to heaven (which a Romantic
poet might do), Heaney uses an almost journalistic style. He
tracks the exact times ("At two o'clock," "At ten o'clock," "Next
morning") and lists precise visual details (the baby laughing, the
old men shaking hands, the size of the box). This creates a
profoundly real portrait of how a family actually behaves during a
sudden tragedy.
 Modernism: The poem explores a core Modernist theme: the
breakdown of language in the face of trauma. The adults use
awkward, hollow phrases ("sorry for your trouble"), the mother
can only make “tearless sighs,” and the boy is too shocked to
speak at all. The poem shows that when human life faces a
sudden, meaningless tragedy, words often fail us completely.

This is "At a Potato Digging," another deeply historical and earthly

poem by Seamus Heaney.
In simple terms, this poem is about the Irish Potato Famine of 1845 and
how that historic trauma still haunts the Irish land and its people today.
While modern farmers use machines to dig up healthy potatoes, they
are working on ground where millions of their ancestors starved to
death.
Heaney divides this poem into four distinct parts, moving between the
present day and the horrific past. Here is the easy, step-by-step
breakdown.
Part I: The Modern Digging (The Slave-Like Labor)
The poem starts in the present day during a seasonal potato harvest.
 The Mechanical Digger: A modern tractor spins up the soil, and
human laborers "swarm in behind" to pick up the potatoes. Their
"fingers go dead in the cold."
 Animal Imagery: Heaney compares the workers to "crows
attacking crow-black fields." They bend down, fill their baskets,
stand up to stretch for a brief second, and then stumble right back
down to the dirt.
 The Religious Ritual: Heaney notes that this bending down has
happened for centuries. It looks like a religious procession. The
workers are bowing their heads to "the black Mother" (the earth)
and paying tribute to a "famine god." The field has become a
"seasonal altar."
Part II: The Healthy Potato (The Clean Birth)
This short section focuses entirely on the potato itself when the crop is
good.
 The Description: The potatoes are scattered in the mud, looking
like "inflated pebbles" or "knobbed and slit-eyed tubers." When
sliced open by a spade, they are beautifully "white as cream."
 The Promise of Life: Heaney writes that the earth smells good and
the potatoes feel solid and wet inside, promising a good taste.
 The Dark Turn: But right at the end of this happy description,
Heaney drops a creepy image: the potatoes are piled in deep pits,
looking like "live skulls, blind-eyed." This single image teleports us
straight into the dark history of the Famine.
Part III: The Ghost of 1845 (The Great Famine)
This is the darkest part of the poem. Heaney takes us back to "forty-
five" (1845), the year the potato blight struck Ireland.
 Skeletons Walking: The phrase "Live skulls, blind-eyed, balanced
on / wild higgledy skeletons" describes the starving Irish people of
1845. They desperately dug up rotten, diseased potatoes ("wolfed
the blighted root") and died.
  Mass Decay: The potatoes rotted by the millions in the clay pits.
Heaney uses disgusting, medical language to describe the fields:
the storage pits "turned pus into filthy mounds" and smelled like a
"running sore."
 The Torture of Hunger: He writes that the people were "grafted
with a great sorrow" and describes starvation as "beaks of famine
snipped at guts." Their hope rotted away just like the food.
Part IV: The Lunch Break (The Unconscious Ritual)
The poem snaps back to the present day. The hard work stops, and the
modern laborers take a lunch break.
 The Feast: Under a flock of seagulls, the workers sit in a ditch to
eat brown bread and drink hot tea out of tin cans. They are
completely exhausted ("dead-beat, they flop").
 The Sacred Spilling: As they finish eating, they spill the last drops
of their cold tea onto the grass and scatter bread crusts.
 The Deeper Meaning: To the workers, this is just throwing away
garbage. But Heaney calls it a "libation" (a ritual offering to the
gods) poured onto the "faithless ground." Without even realizing
it, the modern workers are still offering food and drink to the
ground to keep the "famine god" happy, praying that the earth
never betrays them again.
Is this Romanticism, Realism, or Modernism?
This is a textbook example of Historical Realism mixed with Modernist
Trauma.
 Brutal Realism: Heaney rejects any beautiful, pastoral imagery of
an Irish countryside. Instead, he uses graphic, visceral language
to describe the famine: "pus," "filthy mounds," "running sore," and
"skipping at guts." This is the raw, historical reality of starvation.
 Anti-Romanticism: A Romantic poet might look at a potato harvest
as a joyful celebration of human harmony with nature. Heaney
shows that nature is "faithless." It is a force that can turn
completely toxic and kill a million people without a second
thought.
 Modernism (Cultural Trauma): The poem is deeply Modernist
because it deals with how a historical catastrophe permanently
alters the psychology of a nation. Even though the modern
workers are safe and have machines, their bodies still move in the
same fearful, bowing rhythms as their starving ancestors. The
trauma of the past is literally baked into the soil they walk on.

These pages are from the short story "Night Swim" by Anne Enright.
Since you liked the super easy breakdowns before, here is the plot of the story
broken down into plain English:
The Setup: The Car Ride
A mother is driving her teenage son, Ben, to a friend's house. To pass the time in
the car, they are playing a game of "Would you rather?" (asking each other to
choose between two terrible or impossible choices, like "Would you rather live in
a turkey or have a turkey live inside you?").
The Flashback: The Night Swim
As she drives through the dark, the mother triggers a vivid stream of
consciousness memory. She remembers a night from her youth, long before
Ben was born. After a night out at a pub, she went for a completely reckless,
drunken swim in a dark lake.
She recalls the terrifying but thrilling feeling of swimming out into the pitch-black
water, losing her sense of direction, and feeling like she was dissolving into the
lake. She almost drowned, but managed to struggle back to the shore where a
man was waiting for her.
The Connection
Back in the present, Ben stops the game and makes her promise that she will
never swim at night, saying, "You must always respect the sea. It's bigger than
you." The mother is struck by the irony: she is the parent who is supposed to be
protecting her child, but here is her teenage son trying to protect her from her
own past, reckless behavior.
The Main Idea in One Sentence
While playing a silly car game with her teenage son, a mother silently remembers
a dangerous night swim from her youth, realizing how the roles have flipped now
that her son is trying to keep her safe.