Dear Students,
Wick won’t be able to join us in class on Monday, October 20, but I will be there. Remember, Wednesday, October 22, is Maryville’s “Wellness Day,” when all classes are canceled. Below is the plan for tomorrow morning’s class.
See you soon,
Peter
P.S. I found a free iOS / iPadOS app (“English Poetry Collection”) featuring many poems in English. Here’s its App Store page.
Edgar Lee Masters — Spoon River Anthology, continued (at Wick’s Request)
Notes from Wick’s Spoon River class session during April 2021
Edgar Lee Masters (1868–1950)
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Spoon River Anthology. 1916.
- Born in Kansas, but grew up in Lewistown and Petersburg, Illinois
- Trained in law in Chicago, practiced law there
- Had literary ambitions
- Wrote Spoon River Antholog (200 free verse poems, first published in Saint Louis, in serial form — the publisher had shown Masters The Greek Anthology, and its epigrams inspired Masters)
- After Whitman, the most important American poet writing free verse (three descriptions, each useful: Poetry Foundation, Academy of American Poets, Wikipedia)
- Work was a runaway sensation, helped to propel free verse to the forefront
- Moving from formal poetry into more experimental things
- Everybody in a small town knows everyone’s business
- Masters presumes that people in small towns know everything about everyone, recreates Lewistown into Spoon River
- Decedents in a cemetery stand up and give a comment on their lives in turn
- He works into the poems interactions between people
- He made up names (first names from one cemetery and second from another)
- People from Lewistown recognized who Masters was referring to — from Wikipedia:
Meanwhile, those who lived in the Spoon River region objected to their portrayal in the anthology, particularly as so many of the poems’ characters were based on real people. The book was banned from Lewistown schools and libraries until 1974.3 Even Masters’s mother, who sat on the Lewistown library board, voted for the ban.9 (Masters claimed “My mother disliked the anthology; my father adored it”.)4 Despite this, the anthology remained widely read in Lewistown; local historian Kelvin Sampson notes that “Every family in Lewistown probably had a sheet of paper or a notebook hidden away with their copy of the Anthology, saying who was who in town”.9
- Demystification of small town America; the memory gilds everything, people forget the tragedies and betrayals
- Small town life is dying
- American painter (a Missourian) named Jesse Barnes has made a mint selling idealized images (“light painter”)
- Masters talks about the smarminess and cruelty in small town life
Wick’s chosen poems for today’s class:
- 26 – Knowlt Hoheimer (revisited) — refers to Owen, “Pro Patria”
- 1914 sonnets of Rupert Brooke are jingoistic
- Let’s read and reflect on Randall Jarrell’s The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner
- 222 – Faith Matheny — about a mystical experience, a theophany, the “God-shine” seen in the faces of a friend
- Mystics — Marguerite Perrette, St. Theresa of Avila, St. Hildegard of Bingen, St. Catherine of Siena; the great mystics were almost always associated with a monastery
- John Dewey — Consummatory experiences
- William Wordsworth — Spots of time (in which meaning is revealed)
- James Joyce — Epiphanies (famous one in his novel Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: woman carrying a basket of laundry)
- Fabian experiences — epiphanies at sunset
- Natural moments can be epiphanic
- Seeing the crescent moon cradling Venus in its arms makes you understand why all the Muslim nations have taken that symbol for their flags
- 187 – Father Malloy — Masters is speaking to Malloy, buried in the Catholic Cemetery (not the City Cemetery, where Masters is visiting gravestones)
- He was so remarkable that some of the German Lutherans considered converting to Catholicism
- Another of Wick’s favorite poems from the Spoon River Anthology is 207 – Lucinda Matlock
- Capitalization of Life in the last line puts the poem into a religious context (Life = God)
- Wick has loved these poems since his boyhood
If students want to continue reading Spoon River Anthology poems, here’s the Index of Titles
Two leftover art songs (if time permits)
Song: “Fear no more the heat o’ the sun”
BY WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
(from Cymbeline)
Fear no more the heat o’ the sun,
Nor the furious winter’s rages;
Thou thy worldly task hast done,
Home art gone, and ta’en thy wages:
Golden lads and girls all must,
As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.
Fear no more the frown o’ the great;
Thou art past the tyrant’s stroke;
Care no more to clothe and eat;
To thee the reed is as the oak:
The scepter, learning, physic, must
All follow this, and come to dust.
Fear no more the lightning flash,
Nor the all-dreaded thunder stone;
Fear not slander, censure rash;
Thou hast finished joy and moan:
All lovers young, all lovers must
Consign to thee, and come to dust.
No exorciser harm thee!
Nor no witchcraft charm thee!
Ghost unlaid forbear thee!
Nothing ill come near thee!
Quiet consummation have;
And renownèd be thy grave!
How would you set Shakespeare’s text to music?
- Would you create a strophic setting?
- What aspects of THRMFT+ (musical style) would you employ?
- Please take two minutes to jot down some thoughts.
- If you’d like, please share your ideas with the class.
Musical setting by [Gerald Finzi] (1901-1956)
Gerard Manley Hopkins: Spring
Nothing is so beautiful as Spring –
When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush;
Thrush’s eggs look little low heavens, and thrush
Through the echoing timber does so rinse and wring
The ear, it strikes like lightnings to hear him sing;
The glassy peartree leaves and blooms, they brush
The descending blue; that blue is all in a rush
With richness; the racing lambs too have fair their fling.
What is all this juice and all this joy?
A strain of the earth’s sweet being in the beginning
In Eden garden. – Have, get, before it cloy,
Before it cloud, Christ, lord, and sour with sinning,
Innocent mind and Mayday in girl and boy,
Most, O maid’s child, thy choice and worthy the winning.
Ned Rorem (1923-2022): 20th century art song setting Hopkins’s Sonnet “Spring” — Phyllis Curtin, soprano; Ned Rorem, piano
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W12_nnb8v98