Hebdomadal 3

Oh, Yeats! Quite the change from reading Eliot, wouldn't you say?

Prof. Wolfe indicated today that Yeats's early poems are, generalizing slightly, interested in aesthetic experience and that his later poems are concerned with politics. These themes are fairly huge, however, and leave us with a lot of questions:

• how do these themes manifest themselves in the nuances of a poem's form and rhetoric?
• how does individual poems interact with these huge themes?
• how do poems--even within the same period--differ from one another in the way they tackle these themes?

The general goal for this week's hebdomadals is to ask you to explore how individual poems can fit into much larger poetic structures and intentions. I didn't want to trap you into one specific way of tackling this goal, so here are a few different approaches:

Topic 1: On Scansion & Symbolism

Your goal here is to explore how a close formal and rhetorical reading of a poem helps you identify the subtleties of a poem's theme.

Choose a stanza that Prof. Wolfe hasn't covered too closely in lecture & copy it out at the beginning of your hebdomadal. In an organized argument, describe how this stanza's formal and rhetorical nuances reveal the poem's interaction with Yeats's larger theme from this period.

Formally, you will want to look at the stanza's rhyme and meter, instances of alliteration and assonance and of enjambment and end-stopping. Rhetorically, look for symbols and symbolic language in all its manifestations, particularly metaphor and metonymy.

Yes, this is a somewhat complicated topic for a short response paper; however! it is setting you up to write a paper on Yeats.

Topic 2: Yeats vs. Yeats

Rather than keep the focus narrowly on a few lines from a single poem, choose two poems--one from Tuesday's reading assignment and one from Thursday's--and compare them to one another both in terms of formal ((rhyme, meter, alliteration/assonance, enjambment/end-stoppage) and rhetorical (word choice, symbolism, metaphor) details and in terms of what the poems are about.

One quick rule: don't look anything up! If you are writing this hebdomadal before Thursday or if Prof. Wolfe doesn't cover this in lecture, don't worry about what happened in September 1913 or on Easter, 1916: focus on the poems themselves. Yeats is an intensely autobiographical poet, and we could spend the entire week trying to correlate his poems to his life but we wouldn't understand his poetry any better; and the point--and the pleasure--is the poetry.

Lastly: try to put your reading together as a structured argument; this doesn't mean you need a formal thesis statement or a businesslike tone, but try to keep each paragraph focused on a single idea, and allow your ideas to lead you to an overwhelming question...

Oh, do not ask, "What is it?"

Topic 3: Yeats vs. Eliot

(You can guess where this is going.) Pick one of these pairs of poems!

1. Yeats's "September 1913" (1914) and Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" (1917)
2. Yeats's "The Second Coming" (1921) and Eliot's "The Waste Land" (1922)

Okay, these are huge poems--even Yeats's, which are shorter, are conceptually massive. To keep things simple, choose a small chunk from each poem and characterize the differences in their (say it with me now) formal and rhetorical features.

Now for the fun part: remembering the larger themes Prof. Wolfe has sketched out for these poets and their work, why are these poems so different formally and rhetorically? Or, even more fun, if they're similar then why are they so similar?

Your goal here is to be able to say--if you were writing, say, a 3- to 5-page essay on this topic--how the poet's differences in style mirror the difference in the way they are approaching poetry as a genre. This is huge! This is awesome! If you can get to the point where you can move from comparisons of poets' styles to comparisons of poets' larger aesthetic claims, you are made.

Please, please let me know if you have any questions about this business. We're beginning to bite into the meat of the semester, and I want to hear how you're doing.

Remember, I'm sitting at Steep & Brew on Tuesday afternoons, just twiddling my thumbs and hoping one of you fine folks with drop in to talk about the aestheticist tradition and modern distopias and what music I should be listening to now that I'm just about Rachel Stevens'd out.