This course will devote half its time to poetry and the other half to prose.
Poetry: Our process will be first to analyze and then to imitate the following:
heroic couplets (Alexander Pope)
sonnets (William Shakespeare, Edwin Arlington Robinson)
stanza forms (John Donne, Emily Dickinson)
Imagism (early Ezra Pound, the Spectra Hoax)
Our methods will include the writing of intentionally bad verse in order better to understand good verse. There will be constant writing assignments – all short, but therefore well focused and well developed. Each week’s writing will be responded to in writing by members of your writing group (3 or 4 people). The assignments will generally alternate between slavish imitation of your model and your incorporation of that model into something of your own. Your final assignment for this half of the course will be a poem that begins in heroic couplets, includes a sonnet, modulates into two or three stanzas, and concludes Imagistically.
Prose: In this half of the course, we will blend together fiction, literary non-fiction, and political prose. At all times, our efforts will be to gain control of the flow of a sentence, the flow from sentence to sentence, and the flow of a paragraph. Once again slavish imitation will alternate with subordination of the imitated model to your own purposes. Here is a likely list of the models we will be studying:
John Lyly (16th century; excerpts from Euphues, which established a style that commanded English prose style for 25 years)
Thomas Deloney (16th century; excerpts from the first works of English prose fiction to be written by a member of the working class)
Samuel Johnson (18th century; essays and his Preface to his edition of Shakespeare)
Abraham Lincoln (19th century president; Gettysburg and Second Inaugural Addresses)
Charles Dickens (19th century; brief excerpts from two novels)
J.K Rowling (21st century; brief excerpts from one of the Harry Potter novels)
George W. Bush (21st century; post 9/11 Rose Garden addresses written for him)
Barak Obama (21st century; inaugural address)
We will concentrate heavily on two concerns: (1) The way the syntactic structure of sentences signals readers how to go about making sense of what the author intends to be the sentence’s contents; and (2) the rhythmic flow of prose – every bit as important in prose as it is in poetry.
Again you will be writing weekly, exchanging your writings, and commenting on the writing of others in your group. Again your final project for this half of the term will combine the techniques we study from some of those authors.
Throughout the term, you will be asked to read only a few pages each week, but to read and re-read them with an intensity that will unlock for you the secrets of their structure and style. You will be asked to write short pieces only, with the exception of the two projects that end each half of the term; but that brevity is intended to encourage intensity of concentration.
We will work together. This is not a competitive course, but a collaborative one.
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