Rape of the Lock

Text:

The Rape of the Lock (with notes by Cummings)

Quotes:

• "A little learning is a dangerous thing" (from the Essay on Criticism)
• "Those rules of old discovered, not devised, /Are Nature still, but Nature methodized" (ibid.)
• "A perfect judge will read each work of wit / With the same spirit that its author writ" (ibid.)
  
• "To err is human, to forgive, divine" (ibid.)
  
• "For fools rush in where angels fear to tread" (ibid.)
• "The proper study of mankind is man" (from the Essay on Man)
• "Placed on this isthmus of a middle state, / A being darkly wise, and rudely great..." (ibid.)
  

Contexts:

• RotL study guide by Cummings
• RotL study guide @ SparkNotes
  
• RotL article on Wikipedia
• Alexander Pope article on Wikipedia
• Pope on CHEAL
  

Terms:
mock-heroic; heroic couplet; epigrammatic style; hyperbole; juxtaposition; satire; Augustan; classicism; the Age of Reason; Enlightenment;

Paradise Lost

Texts:

• Book IV

• Book IX

Quotes:

Of Man’s first disobedience, and the fruit
Of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste
Brought death into the world, and all our woe,
[...] Sing, Heav'nly Muse... [Book i. Lines 1-6]

***

[...] what in me is dark
Illumine, what is low raise and support,
That, to the height of this great argument,
I may assert Eternal Providence,
And justify the ways of God to men. [Book i, I.22-26]

***

Yet from those flames
No light, but rather darkness visible. [Book i. Line 62]

***

Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven. [Book i. Line 261]

***

Which way shall I fly
Infinite wrath and infinite despair?
Which way I fly is hell; myself am hell;
And in the lowest deep a lower deep,
Still threat’ning to devour me, opens wide,
To which the hell I suffer seems a heaven. [Book iv. Line 73]

***

So farewell hope, and with hope farewell fear,
Farewell remorse; all good to me is lost.
Evil, be thou my good. [Book iv. Line 108]

***

Earth felt the wound; and Nature from her seat,
Sighing through all her works, gave signs of woe
That all was lost. [Book ix. Line 782]

Contexts:

• Arnie Sanders' summary of PL: Books I and II; Books IV, IX and XII

• SparkNotes on PL
• PL study guide by Cummings
• PL study guide at Bibliomania
  

• A good introduction to PL

• Norton Anthology overview of PL

• PL on Wikipedia
  

• John Milton on Luminarium

• Andrew Marvell's poem as a preface to PL
  

• Major events in the 17th century
• Historical background: age of Milton and Marvell (at Bibliomania)
  

Terms:

epic; epic hero; in medias res; ab ovo; epic (extended) simile; soliloquy; flash-forward (prolepsis); flashback (analepsis); focalization (point of view); blank verse;

hubris; prelapsarian; felix culpa;

Civil War; Commonwealth; Puritans; Roundheads; Cavaliers; Restoration, Great Fire of London.

Metaphysical Poetry

Texts:

• Grierson's take on Metaphysicals

• John Donne

• George Herbert

• Henry Vaughan

• Andrew Marvell

• Ben Jonson

Listen to John Donne's “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning”

Quotations:

• Dull, sublunary lovers' love... (from “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning”)

• Our two souls therefore, which are one, [...] / Like gold to aery thinnes beat. (from “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning”)

• As souls unbodied, bodies unclothed must be, / To taste whole joys. (from “To His Mistress Going to Bed”)

• Busy old fool, unruly sun... (from “The Sun Rising”)

• Death, be not proud, though some have called thee / Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so; (from “Sonnet 6”)

• Batter my heart, three-personed God; (from “Sonnet 10”)

• Gather ye rosebuds while ye may... (from Robert Herrick's “To the Virgins to Make Much of Time”)

• I saw eternity the other night / Like a great ring of pure and endless light... (from Henry Vaughan's “The World”)

• Had we but world enough, and time, / This coyness, Lady, were no crime. (from “To His Coy Mistress”)

• But at my back I always hear / Time's winged chariot hurrying near; (from “To His Coy Mistress”)

• Tennyson and Browning are poets, and they think; but they do not feel their thought as immediately as the odour of a rose. A thought to Donne was an experience; it modified his sensibility. When a poet’s mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experience; the ordinary man’s experience is chaotic, irregular, fragmentary. The latter falls in love, or reads Spinoza, and these two experiences have nothing to do with each other, or with the noise of the typewriter or the smell of cooking; in the mind of the poet these experiences are always forming new wholes. […] the essential quality of transmuting ideas into sensations, of transforming an observation into a state of mind.
  T.S. Eliot “The Metaphysical Poets” (1921)

• The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together; nature and art are ransacked for illustrations, comparisons, and allusions; their learning instructs, and their subtlety surprises; but the reader commonly thinks his improvement dearly bought, and, though he sometimes admires, is seldom pleased.
  Samuel Johnson “The Life of Cowley” (1779)

Contexts:

• Metaphysical poets at Luminarium

• Early 17^th century poetry at Luminarium

• Grierson's intro to Metaphysicals

• Early 17^th century at Norton Topics Online

• Historical background -- age of Donne (at Bibliomania)
• Historical background -- from Donne to Dryden (at Bibliomania)
  

• John Donne study guide at Bibliomania
  
• On Donne's metaphors in "Valediction...Mourning"

• "Valediction" study guide by Cummings
• "Death be not proud" study guide by Cummings
  
• "To His Coy Mistress" study guide by Cummings
• Marvell study guide @ Bibliomania
  
• "To Celia" study guide by Cummings
  

• 17^th century major events

• Arnie Sanders' take on John Donne and George Herbert

• Google directory on 17^th century British literature

Terms:

Metaphysical ; Cavalier; Sons of Ben; conceit; emblematic conceit; microcosm-macrocosm analogy; paradox; coincidentia oppositorum; oxymoron; juxtaposition; discordia concors; concordia discors; hyperbole; shaped / pattern verse; aubade; pun; wit; masque; mannerism; baroque; counterreformation.

King Lear

Texts:

• Full text of the tragedy, with variations, annotations and commentary.

Quotations:

• Nothing will come of nothing. (Lear I.1.90)

• Thou, Nature, art my goddess. (Edmund I.2.1)

• Ingratitude, thou marble-hearted fiend... (Lear I.4.257)

• How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is / To have a thankless child! (Lear I.4.287-8)

• I am a man / More sinned against than sinning. (Lear III.2.59-60)

• Is man no more than this? (Lear III.4.101)

• As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; / They kill us for their sport. (Gloucester IV, 1.36-7)

• Humanity must perforce prey on itself, / Like monsters of the deep. (Albany IV.2.50-1)

• When we are born, we cry that we are come / To this great stage of fools. (Lear IV.6.182-3)

• The wheel is come full circle. (Edmund V.3.177)

Contexts:

• It's probably best to start looking around here, a Shakespeare vortal

• KL on SparkNotes

• Arnie Sanders' take on KL

• Cummings' KL study guide
  

• How to enjoy King Lear

• A nice introduction to King Lear

• A Joyce Carol Oates essay on KL

• An essay on the role of foreshadowings in the play

• The lunar calendar and temporal references in KL

• A Christian perspective

• Read about the British Theatre at the time of Shakespeare

• A .pdf text by Wheeler on tragedy, with quotes and explanations of basic terms

• A .pdf text by Wheeler comparing tragedy and comedy

• Shakespearean pronouns by Cummings
  

Terms:

tragedy, English Renaissance theatre, Elizabethan tragedy, Jacobean tragedy, tragic curve, peripeteia, tragic hero, fatal flaw, hubris, anagnorisis, catharsis, soliloquy.