Course Syllabus--Spring 2000

Eng 551-----Poetry in an Age of Prose:

The Verse Novel

Professor: D. F. Felluga
HEAV 430; telephone: 43770
E-mail: felluga@omni.cc.purdue.edu

Class meets W 6:30-9:20pm; HEAV 122

Please note: this syllabus is now final. You can find an official version in the course Reader, which is now available at CopyMat in Chauncey Village. Books are now available at Von's Books. Note that Robert Browning's Ring and the Book has officially gone out of print only this year, so, although Von's will not be able to order it, there are still copies floating around. Do please look for copies if you visit any other cities during the coming breaks. You might also try alibris.com. Meredith's poem is also out of print; I will be providing copies on the first day of class. If you wish, you can use alternate editions for any of the poems, just make sure the versions you use include the complete text of the poems and have line numbers. The following editions are the ones on order through Von's:

Alfred Lord Tennyson, Idylls of the King (London: Penguin, 1989). ISBN: 0140422536
Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh and Other Poems (London: Pengin, 1996). ISBN: 0140434127
Arthur Clough, Selected Poems (London: Everyman, 1998). ISBN: 0460879391
+
Robert Browning, The Ring and the Book (London: Penguin, 1971). ISBN: 0140422943
George Meredith, Modern Love (London: Penguin, 1996). ISBN: 0140389091

Morris print

Course Description

This course will offer students a comprehensive understanding of the cultural and economic background of Victorian poetry. It will also provide an opportunity to examine five important Victorian poems in close detail, alongside a limited number of theoretical and cultural readings. The course will seek to have students achieve two goals: 1) the acquisition of a thorough understanding of Victorian poetics and polemics; 2) the production of a solid piece of scholarly writing. Each seminar will offer a forum in which to build on each student's ideas through scholarly dialogue and critique.

The course will explore the especially fraught relationship poetry had to Victorian society. Facing the formation of a mass market, new technologies of book production, and the rise of the novel, poetry felt its generic parameters especially strongly and often responded to its new situation by addressing the changes occurring in society and culture. One important result is the verse novel, which rose to prominence in the 50s and 60s to interrogate such issues as genre, gender, form, ideology, domesticity, and nationhood. This course will explore five incredibly diverse long poems that have been dubbed at one time or another "verse novels": Alfred Lord Tennyson's Idylls of the King, Robert Browning's Ring and the Book, Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh, Arthur Clough's Amours de Voyage, and George Meredith's Modern Love. A number of theoretical questions will be raised by these concerns: is there a relationship between genre and ideology? Is there more than a homological relationship between gender and genre? What part does sex play in the formation of culture? Is it possible to apply narratological insights to poetic form? What are the effects on culture of a market economy?





WEEK ONE:

Thus piteously Love closed what he begat:


ADDITIONAL MATERIAL



WEEK TWO:

The union of this ever diverse pair!




WEEK THREE:

These two were rapid falcons in a snare,




WEEK FOUR:

Condemned to do the flitting of the bat.




WEEK FIVE:

Lovers beneath the singing sky of May,




WEEK SIX:

They wandered once; clear as the dew on flowers:




WEEK SEVEN:

But they fed not on the advancing hours:




WEEK EIGHT:

Their hearts held cravings for the buried day.

 



WEEK NINE:

Then each applied to each that fatal knife,




WEEK TEN:

Deep questioning, which probes to endless dole.


CLASS CANCELED FOR MARCH BREAK



WEEK ELEVEN:

Ah, what a dusty answer gets the soul




WEEK TWELVE:

When hot for certainties in this our life!--




WEEK THIRTEEN:

In tragic hints here see what evermore




WEEK FOURTEEN:

Moves dark as yonder midnight ocean's force,


 


WEEK FIFTEEN:

Thundering like ramping hosts of warrior horse,




WEEK SIXTEEN:

To throw that faint thin line upon the shore!


 

 


Last Revised: November 6, 1999

Paintings courtesy of
Carol L. Gerten

Morris prints courtesy of
The William Morris Gallery