Poetic Movements, Poetic Moods, 1660-1800 Level/Semester taught: MA module (Level 7), taught in semester 2 Convenor/Teacher: Rowan Boyson and Elizabeth Scott-Baumann Teaching Arrangements: 2 hour seminar weekly Credit Value: 15 credits Assessment: KEATS forum contributions (position papers and responses to weekly reading – formative assessment): 15%

Joint commentary (3000 words) on a pairing of 17C / 18C prose and poetry: 85%

Module outline: English poetry of the long eighteenth century (roughly, 1660-1800) was philosophical, political, instructive, rich and various. This module offers a survey of eighteenth-century poetics in practice (the changing practices of versification and lexicon) and in theory (the philosophical and educational status of poetry). Focusing on distinctive poetic ‘movements’ and ‘moods’, it will trace the development of dominant styles through close readings of key poems and accompanying prose works from the period. Each session traces a particular poetic movement or counter-movement and questions what was at stake for that movement politically and philosophically. Beginning with the poetry that came directly after the tumultuous political events of the Civil War and Restoration, we consider issues of stylistic engagement and evasion. We move on to the seemingly calmer waters of the polished heroic couplet as writers turned their gaze on an ideal classical past, and consider how far Augustanism succeeds in its purported attempts at balance and order. The module goes on to look at how eighteenth-century philosophies of libertinage, science and materialism might be linked to particular poetic practices, from erotic lyric to long didactic poems about landscape and farming. The final sessions look at later eighteenth-century writing, including the controversy around primitivism and the Ossian forgery, and the gentle, conversational yet philosophically-nuanced poetry of the 1780s and 90s, which is sometimes seen as ‘pre-Romanticism’. Romanticism is in no sense the telos or destination of the module, but we will reflect on the usefulness of macro-critical terms like Augustanism and Romanticism in understanding poetic change and history. The module is aimed at two groups of students: those interested in Restoration and eighteenth-century culture who wish to gain knowledge of what was arguably the most prestigious cultural genre of its time, and those interested in poetry of other periods (for instance Renaissance or Romantic poetry) who wish to explore a historically unfashionable but increasingly revivified era. A basic understanding of prosody and traditional stanza forms is an asset but not a prerequisite; revision of such terms will be offered, and one of the assessments will focus on understanding of form. The module will engage with contemporary criticism, particularly the large question of ‘historicist’ versus ‘formalist’ approaches to literature. Module start date Semester 2, 2015-16

SEMINAR SCHEDULE (INDICATIVE) ALL READINGS WILL BE MADE AVAILABLE IN A PRINT COURSEPACK FOR PURCHASE 1. RETREAT AND SOLITUDE: THE ODE I Primary Katherine Philips, ‘Upon Mr Abraham Cowley’s Retirement’ (early 1660s) Abraham Cowley, ‘The Garden’ and ‘Of Solitude’ essays with poems, from Essays in Verse and Prose (1668) Andrew Marvell, ‘The Garden’ and Upon ‘Appleton House’ (1650s?) Secondary from Joanna Picciotto, Labors of Innocence in Early Modern England from Andrew Shifflett, Stoicism, Politics and Literature from Maren-Sofie Røstvig, The Happy Man 2. THE POLITICAL SUBLIME: BLANK VERSE I Primary from John Milton, Paradise Lost (1667) Thomas Hobbes, ‘The Answer of Mr Hobbes to Sir William D’Avenant’s Preface before Gondibert’ (1650) Secondary from David Norbrook, Writing the English Republic from Lucy Newlyn, Paradise Lost and the Romantic Reader from Catherine Maxwell, The Female Sublime from Milton to Swinburne 3. AUGUSTANISM: THE HEROIC COUPLET Primary John Denham, Cooper’s Hill (1642) Edmund Waller, ‘At Penshurst’, ‘Of English Verse’, ‘On St James’s Park, as lately improved by his Majesty’ John Dryden, ‘Epistle Dedicatory’ to The Rival Ladies (1664) and ‘To the Memory of Mr Oldham’ (1684) Alexander Pope, Essay on Criticism (1711) [Atterbury], preface to The Second Part of Mr Waller’s Poems (1690) Secondary Thomas Kaminski, ‘Edmund Waller’s ‘Easy’ Style’ J. Paul Hunter, ‘Sleeping Beauties: Is a Historicist Aesthetic Possible?’ Simon Jarvis, ‘Why rhyme pleases’ and ‘Archaist-Innovators’ 4: THE CLASSICAL INTERCHANGE: THE SUBLIME II Primary

from Lucy Hutchinson, De Rerum Natura (1650s) from Dryden’s De Rerum Natura (1685) Roscommon, ‘An Essay on Translated Verse’ (1685) Addison, from Spectator 160 and 267 (1711-12) from Pope, Iliad and ‘Preface’ (1715) Secondary from Matthew Reynolds, The Poetry of Translation David Norbrook, ‘Milton, Hutchinson and the Lucretian Sublime’ Paul Hammond, ‘Dryden, Milton and Lucretius’ 5. LIBERTINISM: LYRIC Primary Abraham Cowley, ‘Of Liberty’, essay with poems, from Essays in Verse and Prose (1668) Rochester, from De rerum natura, ‘A Ramble in St James’s Park’, ‘Satyr’, ‘An Allusion to Horace’ (1660-70s) Behn, ‘The Disappointment’, ‘To the Fair Clarinda’, ‘To Mr. Creech …on his Excellent Translation of Lucretius’; ‘A Letter to Mr. Creech at Oxford’; ‘Song: On her Loving Two Equally’; ‘To the fair Clarinda …’; ‘On Desire’; ‘A Pindaric Poem to the Reverend Doctor Burnet’ (1660-70s) Secondary from Christopher Tilmouth, Passion’s Triumph over Reason from Mary Trull, Performing Privacy and Gender in Early Modern Literature from Nicholas Fisher, ed., That Second Bottle: Essays on John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester 6. READING WEEK 7. GEORGIC AND PASTORAL: DESCRIPTIVE VERSE Primary Joseph Addison, ‘An Essay on the Georgics’, and John Dryden, The Georgics, in The Works of Virgil (1697) James Thomson, ‘August’, from The Seasons (1730) Secondary from Ralph Cohen, The Art of Discrimination from John Barrell, English Literature in History, 1730-80: An Equal, Wide Survey from Kevis Goodman, Georgic Modernity and British Romanticism: Poetry and the Mediation of History Christine Gerrard, ‘The Seasons’ in Blackwell Companion to Eighteenth-Century Poetry 8: CONTEMPLATION: NIGHT POEMS Primary Anne Finch, ‘A Nocturnal Reverie’, (1713) Edward Young, ‘Night the First’, in The Complaint: or, Night-thoughts on Life, Death & Immortality (1742)

Secondary from Susan Stewart, Poetry and the Fate of the Senses from Margaret Koehler, Poetry of Attention in the Eighteenth Century 9. PRINT AND PARODY: THE MOCK-HEROIC Primary Alexander Pope, The Dunciad in Four Books (1743) Henry Fielding, ‘Preface’ to Joseph Andrews (1742) Secondary Barbara N. Benedict, ‘Publishing and Reading Poetry’, The Cambridge Companion to Eighteenth-Century Poetry Richard Terry, ‘Epic and Mock-Heroic’ in the Blackwell Companion to Eighteenth-Century Literature Simon Jarvis, ‘Mock as Screen and Optic’, Critical Quarterly 46:3 10. THE PRIMITIVE AND BARDIC: BALLAD Primary Thomas Gray, ‘The Bard. A Pindaric Ode’ (1757) from James Macpherson / ‘Ossian’, Fragments of Ancient Poetry (1760) from Samuel Johnson, ‘Ballad’ in the Dictionary; Journey of a tour to the Western Isles of Scotland; Rambler no. 177 from William Hazlitt, ‘On Poetry in General’, Lectures on the English Poets (1818) Secondary from Fiona Stafford, The Sublime Savage: James Macpherson and the Poems of Ossian from Maureen McLane, Balladeering, Minstrelsy, and the Making of British Romantic Poetry Maximilian Novak, ‘Primitivism’ in The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism 11. CONVERSATION: BLANK VERSE II Primary David Hume, ‘Of Essay Writing’, Essays, Moral, Political and Literary (1742) William Cowper, ‘Book III: The Garden’ from The Task: A Poem in Six Books (1785) S.T. Coleridge, ‘This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison’ (1797), ‘The Nightingale’ (1798) Secondary Marshall Brown, ‘Romanticism and Enlightenment’ in The Cambridge Companion to British Romanticism, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006) Freya Johnston, ‘The Task’, in the Blackwell Companion Derek Attridge, ‘Iambic Pentameter’ in Poetic Rhythm: An Introduction Recommended anthologies: The New Oxford Book of Eighteenth-Century Verse, ed. by Roger Lonsdale (Oxford: OUP, 1984) Seventeenth-Century Poetry: An Annotated Anthology, ed. by Robert Cummings (London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2000) Eighteenth-Century Poetry: An Annotated Anthology, ed. by David Fairer and Christine Gerrard, 3rd edn. (London, Oxford: Blackwell, 2014)