“The Spirit Level”: English Poetry from Hopkins to Heaney:
This course will sample some of the various types of “meta-physical” poetry written in the United Kingdom during the past century, with an emphasis on short lyric poems and their social, cultural, and religious contexts. We will be looking especially at poetry that pushes language to the edge of what is unsayable, to that which is beyond words. The title for this course is from a book by Seamus Heaney, The Spirit Level (New York:
Farrar, 1996), that contains a poem called “The Swing.” In that poem the speaker narrates the experience of riding with his friends on a tree swing that is a “lure let down to tempt the soul to rise.” Yet the speaker and his friends never really rise far above this world: “Even so, we favoured the earthbound.” The poem concludes, “In spite of all, we sailed, / Beyond ourselves and over and above / the rafters aching in our shoulder-
blades, / the give and take of branches in our arms.” Heaney’s description of the desire for and partial achievement of upward movement, yet the inevitability and glory of remaining earthbound is what this course will examine. We will be reading poets and poems that attempt to stretch language from our daily physical existence into a spiritual or even mystical/religious experience. The course will not be a survey course, though it will present poets and poems in a roughly chronologically order from late in the
nineteenth century to the present. We may look at texts by Gerard Manley Hopkins, Oscar Wilde, Patrick Kavanagh, David Jones, Philip Larkin, Eavan Boland, Seamus Heaney, and Paul Muldoon.
Each student will be responsible for three in-class presentations. In one of the presentations, you will lead the discussion of a particular aspect of the poems being addressed; in the second, you will briefly summarize and critique a recent critical writing about the poems under discussion; in the third, you will apply a critical methodology of your choice to some aspect(s) of the poems we will discuss that week. You will have the choice of writing two papers (the first due during midterm week; the second due at the end of the semester) or one long paper due at the end of the semester. You will also be expected to fully engage in class discussions. Your final grade for the semester will be based on the assigned writings, presentations, participation in class discussion, and attendance. As always, I welcome student input in our choice of texts and am willing to help students outside of class to understand better the texts we read and offer help with the paper(s) they write.
