Sept 24 2010

1)      Papers: How is the research going? Has it started yet? It needs to, if it has not.

2)      MLA citation. Is there a need for me to lecture on it? I can on Tuesday, if there is.

Today, we transition from Wordsworth to Coleridge, and get ready to consider the rest of the Romantic movement.

We’ll start with a general round of response to “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”

Questions to be considered:

• What do we notice about its physical layout?

• Here we have a spiritual “invisible world.” How does this idea contrast with the idea of “memory” that we get from “Tintern Abbey.”

• I think it is a good idea to consider this poem against Resolution and Independence, in which we seem to get the inverse of the situation in “Rime”

• We also need to start thinking about the poetic act as an act that is not precisely controlled – what happens when our sense of discourse or displacement cannot be controlled?

• Tintern Abbey

Reading for next class:

Percy Bysshe Shelley : “Mutability”; ”To Wordsworth”;”Ozymandias”;”O World, O Life, O Time”; “A Defense of Poetry”