As I mentioned in class yesterday, WSAS is holding a massive celebration of the arts on Tuesday, March 7th. I post the schedule here and remind you that participation in one of the events, the Frankenstein marathon reading, is worth 5 points of extra credit.
Monthly Archives: February 2017
Possible poems for presentation
Below is a list of some 30 poems for your consideration. Please take time before class Monday with the Norton Anthology and the pdfs (posted under “.pdfs”; guidelines under “Assignments”) to choose a few poems that you would be interested in discussing in an oral presentation. I’ll circulate a sign up sheet Monday.
Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience
William Blake was both a poet and a visual artist, committed to the interaction of word and image on the page. Each of his illuminated books was completed by hand: first, he would hand-etch designs onto copper plates, then ink-printing the pages, which he subsequently hand-colored and hand-bound. Given the labor-intensive nature of this publication process, he produced few copies, and all are different. The Blake Archive allows us to compare different copies of his texts; I link here to the two pages of “The Little Black Boy,” from Songs of Innocence, which show how the tension between the verbal and visual texts can change our interpretations:
All Blake’s known extant work is included in the Archive, which is sponsored by the Library of Congress.
As for your readings, if you do not yet have your anthology, you can print the poems out from Project Gutenberg: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1934/1934-h/1934-h.htm. We are reading:
From Songs of Innocence:
“The Lamb”
“The Chimney Sweeper”
“The Little Black Boy”
“Holy Thursday”
From Songs of Experience:
“Holy Thursday”
“The Chimney Sweeper”
“The Sick Rose”
“The Tyger”
“London”
A Rake’s Progress
http://www.soane.org/collections-research/key-stories/rakes-progress
A series of 8 paintings by William Hogarth from the 1730’s, A Rake’s Progress tells the story of a young man who comes into a fortune and squanders it.
Ae Fond Kiss
A 1987 performance of Burns’s love song by the Corries, a Scottish folk band.
Scots Dictionary
As I mentioned in class, Scots is a distinct language (or dialect, depending on your definition and politics) with vocabulary, pronunciations, and grammatical constructions that are different from English. This dictionary is pretty comprehensive: