William FitzGerald                                Fall 2006
English 220 - Introduction to Literary Study


Homework for Friday, September 22:

To read:

This class, following upon one devoted to the sonnet, will focus on the ode as a significant, recurring genre in the English poetic tradition. A product of the classical period, and particularly associated with the Greek poet Pindar and the Latin poet Horace, the ode reflects a neoclassical revival in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century and was especially popular with the English Romantic poets, such as Wordsworth, Shelly, and Keats.

In your reading for class, consider the variations in structure, tone, and subject matter of the odes selected here. That is, after reading each one over at least once, consider these poems comparatively on many of the formal criteria we have thus far identified, e.g, meter, rhyme, stanza. Consider as well the occurence of sound patterns and other structures of repetition or variation that come to light with a second or a third reading. Finally, consider the rhetorical dimensions of these poems: who is speaking, to whom, and for what apparent purposes? What, if anything, distinguishes the poem's speaker from the poet himself? What roles does the poem assign to the reader? What persuasive or argumentative or expressive or cathartic purposes might these poems serve?

Gray, "Ode: on the Death of a Favorite Cat," p. 409
Wordsworth, "Ode: Intimations of Immortality," p. 478
Shelley, "Ode to the West Wind," p. 543
Keats, "Ode on Melancholy," p. 585 and "To Autumn," p. 587

Some background on the ode can be found at
http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/english/melani/cs6/ode.html


To write (for Monday, September 25):

For one of the odes by Keats or Shelley listed above, write up, as an exercise, a (semi)coherent set of observational notes that address matters of form and, to a lesser extent, interpretation. That is, tell us (an audience of this class) what schemes and themes are to be observed in this poem. To begin, briefly summarize the poem in several sentences and then proceed to make several observations along the lines of the questions I have written above. Finally, feel free to pose your own genuine questions about this poem's meaning or purpose. If you have a short, tentative answer to any of those questions, feel free to sketch it. Note:

This is an exercise, one of several, in close reading preparatory to a more sustained, formal effort in the first essay. Here, your task (in not more than two typed pages) is to test  the variety and volume of things you can observe and comment upon in a poem.