Professor John Olmsted
Rice 108
Office Hours: Tuesday and Thursday, 4:30 to 5:30 p.m.
and by appt.
Phone: 775-8582
E-mail: John.Olmsted@oberlin.edu
Writing in 1931,
William Butler Yeats described the poets of his generation:
We were the last
romantics -- chose for theme
Traditional
sanctity and loveliness;
Whatever's
written in what poets name
The book of the
people; whatever most can bless
The mind of man
or elevate a rhyme.
Yeats here summarizes the implicit agenda of much Romantic and Modernist poetry: it is rooted in a newly conceived sense of tradition; its aim is beauty and pleasure; it draws its language and thematic concerns from ordinary working men and women, and its intention is no less than to transform human consciousness. We will devote the semester to a study of the poetry and several of the plays of Yeats in the context of literary modernism and of Irish history and culture of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.
In Yeats' work
we will focus on the poetry collections Responsibilities, The Wild Swans
at Coole, The Tower, The Winding Stair and other Poems, and Last Poems,
and plays such as Cathleen ni Houlihan, On Baile's Strand
and Purgatory.
Like all the first year
seminars, this course has as well three distinct goals:
-you will learn or refine
skills necessary for close reading of a text, critical thinking, discussion,
and research
-the course is designed to
provide a good introduction to college-level work in the liberal arts
-students who complete the
seminar successfully will earn Writing Proficiency credit
The responsibility of each
member of the class is to do the assigned reading, to take an active part in
class discussion and in individual group meetings, and to prepare and hand in
all written work on time.
Students are expected to
attend all classes and to arrive on time.
After the first few weeks we
will divide the class into discussion groups. The chair of each group will arrange for one or more
meetings of the group each week outside normal class times. In these group meetings you will read
the assigned texts aloud, discuss them, and prepare your presentations for
regular class meetings.
Groups should prepare each
week to read and discuss all the assigned poems and topics. On Thursdays beginning September 22 each member of the class will hand in a two- to
three-page paper in which you report when and where you met with your group,
who attended, and what was discussed. Then, in the second, longer section of
the paper, treat some aspect of the texts assigned which interested you.
The final paper, due on
December 15, will be twelve to
fourteen pages in length and will deal with some important aspect of YeatsŐ
work. Ideally, the topic will
arise from your weekly journal papers.
For help with the mechanics
of your papers consult the Oberlin English Department site: www.oberlin.edu/english/resources/guide.html or the Harvard writing site: www.fas.harvard.edu/~expos/sources
Evaluation in the course will be based on class participation, on the weekly papers, and on the final paper.
Texts:
W. B. Yeats, The Collected
Poems of W. B. Yeats. A New Edition, ed. Richard J.
Finneran. Macmillan.
YeatsŐs Poetry, Drama, and
Prose. Ed. James Pethica. Norton critical edition.
Class Schedule:
Note: A more detailed syllabus with group
assignments will be available once the discussion groups are formed.
Week of
September 5
Early Yeats poems: "The Song of the Happy Shepherd," "The
Sad Shepherd," "The Meditation of the Old Fisherman," "To
the Rose upon the Rood of Time," "Fergus and the Druid," "The
Sorrow of Love" (see also 1895 version Pethica, p. 16),
"When You are Old" (see also 1895 version, Pethica p. 17).
September 12
"The White Birds," "The Lamentation of the Old Pensioner"
(Pethica, p. 20), "The Two Trees," "The Song of Wandering Aengus,"
"He Gives his Beloved certain Rhymes," "He hears the Cry of
the Sedge," "He thinks of Those who have spoken Evil of his Beloved,"
"He wishes his Beloved were Dead," "He wishes for the Cloths
of Heaven."
September 19
First group assignments
First
journal paper due September 22