The Idler Academy English Poetry Course
This is a six-week whistle stop tour through the story of English poetry… Taking you from the medieval to the modern, via the epic, the lyric, the sonnet and the ode… Each week we will read one poem – or sometimes a few poems – very closely, enjoying the beautiful muscularity of English verse, whilst also thinking about poetry in its wider historical and artistic contexts. The sessions will take a chronological approach, but will also make connections with modern poetry, joining the dots between Shakespeare and Shelley, Pope and Plath.
Find your feet (your trochees, your iambs, your dactyls) as you learn your chiasmus from your caesura, and rediscover the Joys of poetry.
WEEK 1. THIS IS ENGLAND: CHAUCER, SPENSER, MILTON ANd the engish EPIC. How did the story of English poetry begin? How did English poetry re-emerge from its Anglo-Saxon roots, shaking off the French and Latin of the Norman Conquest? And how did Chaucer, Spenser and Milton try to be the Virgils of their day? Comparing the beginnings of three English epics: The Canterbury Tales, The Faerie Queene and Paradise Lost, we will think about the way English poets have tried to shape their nation’s story.
WEEK 2. LOVE, ACTUALLY: The Renaissance Sonnet – How did the sonnet made its way to England via Petrarch? And how did the Renaissance breathe new life into English poetry? We will discover how Sidney’s Astrophel and Stella started a sonnet craze that hit the last decade of Elizabeth I’s rule, in which courtier poets cultivated themselves as the perfect lover, soldier and poet, whilst at the same time playing with English as a literary language, inventively reworking French and Italian models. And also, how Shakespeare jumped on this bandwagon, and made the sonnet his own.
WEEK 3. A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH: Donne and the Metaphysical – Taking up where the courtier poets left off, the Metaphysical poets’ virtuosic experiments in verse and form redefined English poetry. Trying to unpack their wit, we will see how they used metaphysical conceit to struggle with the conflicts of the soul. We will look in particular at how Donne – a poet with a complicated reputation, only fully restored by T.S. Eliot in the early twentieth century – challenged both the form and subject matter of English poetry.
WEEK 4. BLITHE SPIRIT: Keats, Shelley and the Romantic Vision – Why did the Romantics seek a new vision? How did they revisit old concerns – the pastoral, the classical – whilst rebelling against the age of scepticism and satire (of Pope, Dryden and Swift) that they escaped from? How can they be said to have created the Individual, and paved the way for modern poetry?
WEEK 5. FOUR WEDDINGS AND A FUNERAL: Love and Death in the Victorian era – Looking at several poems of marriage and death by Browning, Tennyson,Hardy and others, we will explore how love and death captured the Victorian imagination. We will think about Victorian experiments in style, in particular, the dramatic monologue, and discover an age gripped by misogyny, mourning and melancholia.
WEEK 6. BLOW UP: T.S. Eliot and the Fragmented Self – Reading T.S. Eliot’s ‘The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock’ we will consider the modern aesthetic, and the way in which the self is explored in twentieth century poetry. How have poets responded to the fragmentation of identity in the modern era? And, coming to the end of our whistle-stop tour, we will ask: where were all the women poets?
TUTOR: Susanna Hislop. Susanna is an experienced teacher who read Classics at Oxford. She is also an actress and writer. She runs the Idler Academy’s Latin courses.
Dates: Monday 9 January and the following five Mondays
Time: 7pm
Place: The Idler Academy, 81 Westbourne Park Road, London W2 5QH. Tel: 0207 221 5908
Cost: £144. Click here to book.
