English 551A--Metaphysical Poetry:
Early Modern to the Millennium
(Mon./Wed. 3:30-5:20)

“The heart,” wrote Emily Dickinson, “is the Capital of the Mind.” But Dickinson is elusive, and in her “ecstatic Nation,” where you’re asked to seek “Yourself,” that capitalized single word may be unsettling too. Meanwhile, when love, death, human frailty, faith or disbelief, often suffused with sexuality, take possession of poetry, through a conscious derangement of language at the edge of impossibility, who can tell what’s in the mind. The problems are beguiling, if confounding, but if you stay with the intricacy of them, and are willing to pursue a thought beyond what you thought you could think, you may very well take heart from that. Whether with irony, paradox, or mind-blowing metaphor, the poems we’ll be reading are passionate, but passionate as thought—so deeply felt, indeed, that as we think about such poetry, viscerally, in the body, it appears to be thinking us.

That’s what T. S. Eliot had in mind when, writing of the metaphysical poetry of the seventeenth century, he described its perceptual power—sometimes elliptical or circuitous, but the way it saw feelingly—as “the sensuous apprehension of thought.” As he was defining what poetry should be in the twentieth century, critically and in practice, he gave a retrospective status to a poetry of ambiguity. Even at this historical distance, one of the most compelling things about reading John Donne or George Herbert is that, if you’re engaged with any intimacy, you may—as Freud said we must in modernity—learn to live in doubt. Given the dubious state of the world after the millennium, no less after 9/11, there seems no alternative to that. But, if you think about it, it’s doubt that prompts questioning, which unsettles the “certain certainties” of any ”subject position.” There is, of course, a subjectivity to poetry, but as premised on the belief that precision is next to godliness, it may even serve politics by cultivating the reflex for reading between the lines.

The readings for the seminar will move across history from the period we once called the late Renaissance (now “early modern”), to the Eliotic modern, or that of Wallace Stevens, its witty accretions of high intelligence, through the visionary poetics of Harte Crane or Robert Hayden to the linguistic deposits of Susan Howe, who thinks of herself today, as in her writing on Dickinson, as a metaphysical poet. As for the reading between the lines, the lines themselves will change considerably as we move into regions of the mind where, where with signs of divinity as dubious as the notion of a soul, poets will be struggling with ideas in a material world that seems to defy transcendence. And then our task—as in the quirky concentration of Marianne Moore, seemingly engaged with trivia and inconsequence—will be to discern the metaphysical when it sneaks up on us, or with paradox and ambiguity maybe leaves us behind. So, too, with the exquisite indirection and luminous eye of Elizabeth Bishop as it brings a “rainbow, rainbow, rainbow” to a “pool of bilge,” in an otherwise mere semblance of a potentially redeemable world—where the metaphysics, to be sure, is something other than theological.

Required texts:

Metaphysical Poetry, ed. Christopher Ricks (Penguin Classics, 2006)

Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, eds.
Jahan Ramazani, Richard Ellmann, Robert O'Clair (Norton, 2003)

Early American Poetry, ed. Jane Donahue Eberwein (Univ of Wisconsin
Press, 1978)

Susan Howe, My Emily Dickinson (New Directions, 2007; earlier edition,
published by North Atlantic Books, also ok)