Eh 242 Sept 28 2010

Eh 242 British Literature II

Opening Journal Assignment:

(Suggested: 10 Minutes)

Write in response to these questions:

• What do you do to be “creative”? How do you “express yourself” (ugh – I hate that phrase).

• Do you consider your creative activities to be your “hobbies”? How did you come by these activities?

Group Discussion:

(Suggested: 7 Minutes)

Share your findings, and then answer this question.

How important is creativity to you? To the people around you?

Class Discussion:

(Suggested: 5-10 Minutes)

Mini-Lecture: (Suggested: 10-15 Minutes)

Eight Points to Consider

Let’s begin by thinking about the different ideas we have come across in the preface to Lyrical Ballads and in Shelly’s “In Defense of Poetry.”

1)      We might begin by noting that Wordsworth approaches poetry as a intentional act – he writes ‘experiments,’ that follow a particular method, and which produce certain anticipated results (hopefully).

2)      Shelly, however, considers poetry to be a divinely inspired act, produced without rational aims, that has the common effect of joining our minds to absolute truths.

3)      Both ideas are radical, but we might consider them in light of a few important lines from Tintern Abby:

1. And I have felt/A presence that disturbs me with the joy/of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime/Of something far more deeply interfused, Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,/And the round ocean and the living air,/ And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:/A motion and a spirit that impels all thinking things, all objects of all thought, and rolls through all things.

4)      When we read this line, we might ask ourselves if we, too, feel this presence, or if, rather, we know what he is talking about. If we do feel or know, then we may be having exactly the kind of experience that Shelly is talking about in Defense of Poetry – we are being connected with an “absolute truth.”

5)      We might call this a “spiritual” or “religious” experience, but we might also call it a “poetic” or “aesthetic” experience. The terms we use are important.

6)      If we call it “spiritual” or “religious,” we are associating it with dogmatic faith traditions, which both anticipate and color our experience of the poem.

7)      If we call it an “poetic” or “aesthetic” experience, we are basing our reaction on our unique experience with the poem itself. That is to say, The “presence” is not God or Allah, but, rather, simply what it is. The Poem connects us with “the sublime.”

8)      And it is over this notion that the difference between Wordsworth and Shelly could not be more stark. Wordsworth constructs the experience, and understands the experience as a construction. Shelly does not.  For Shelly, it is a Divine experience. That is to say, it may not be “religious” or “spiritual,” but it is rendered by the influence of a supernatural power.

Mini-Lecture in Action:  Journal Exercise: (Suggested: 10 Minutes)

As this point, do you think your understanding of poetry is more in line with what you are reading in Wordsworth, or with what you are reading in Shelly? Explain

Group Discussion: (Suggested: 5 minutes)

Class Discussion

Consideration of Poetry under investigation.