Document Type

Syllabus

Publication Date

Spring 2024

Course Description

I am a writer who came of a sheltered life. A sheltered life can be a daring life as well. For all serious daring starts from within. —Eudora Welty, One Writer's Beginnings (104)* [*with thanks to my teacher, and then colleague and friend, Richard Johnson (1937-2006)]

For the title of our course I drew inspiration from a title I devised years ago for a completely different course, "Pilgrim, Dreamer, Mystic Knight," which I taught ni 1987 and 1988 at Swarthmore College. Now, as then, the catalectic trochaic tetrameter of my title seems a fitting way to highlight four thematic strands that will weave their way into the essays, poems, plays, short stories, and novels that we will read this semester. We will begin with Constantine Cavafy's poem "Ithaka," W.B. Yeats's "Sailing ot Byzantium," and John Keats's "Ode to aNightingale" before moving on ot John Donne arguably the greatest love poet in the English language; Katherine Philips, known in the 17"' century as "the Matchless Orinda," hte poet of friendship; and T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets-each of the four parts of this radiant poem centers on a particular place dear to Eliot: "Burnt Norton," "East Coker," "The Dry Salvages," and "Little Gidding." Other poems about loss and restoration include the 14"-century poem Pearl by the Gawain-poet, John Milton's "Lycidas," and Mary Jo Salter's Elegies for Etsuko, each work a tour de force in its own way. Our workshops on paper # 4, later this semester, will allow us to revisit four poets: Donne, Philips, Keats, and Eliot.

The epigraph for my introductory essay comes from the end of Eudora Welty's One Writer's Beginnings, originally a set of three lectures-"Listening," "Learning to See," and "Finding a Voice" - that she gave at Harvard in 1983. I could also have chosen a different snippet from this same work: "It is our inward journey that leads us through time—-forward or back, seldom in a straight line, most often spiraling. Each of us is moving, changing, with respect to others. As we discover, we remember; remembering, we discover; and most intensely do we experience this when our separate journeys converge" (192). In her introduction ot The Norton Book of Friendship, a collaboration between Welty and Ronald A. Sharp, Welty marvels, "As si true of all friendships, ti might not have happened —nad ti did." The mixture of simplicity and awe in her aphorism is reminiscent of Michel de Montaigne's famous explanation, ni his chapter on "Friendship," of why he and Estienne de La Boétie became friends: "Par ce que c'estoit luy; par ce que c'estoit moy" ["Because he was he; because I was I" ("Of Friendship," Essays 1.28)].

In the essay "Making Friends, and The Book of Friendship, with Eudora Welty," Sharp identifies "the most interesting point" in Francis Bacon's own essay "Of Friendship" by paraphrasing it: "you not only feel better when you're with friends, but actually think better as well"(42). I hope that Bacon's idea, as Sharp describes it, will prove true for you, too, in ENG 255, for Bacon not only agrees with Plato and Aristotle that friends share both "joys and sorrows" but also credits friends with fostering intellectual acuity. Sharp goes on to quote Bacon: "Friendship,' eh says, 'maketh indeed a fair day in the affections from storm and tempests, but it maketh daylight in the understanding out of darkness and confusion of thoughts.' With friends, Bacon claims, our 'wits and understanding do clarify and break up in the communicating and discoursing'; a friend 'tosseth his thoughts more easily; he marshalleth them more orderly; ... he waxeth wiser than himself.'" Sharp adds, "Time and again I had this sense with Eudora that not only was there a deep emotional bond but that my very mind worked better in her company.

Surely this is a virtue of friendship that has not been given its full due, and I suspect the circumstance has something to do with that unique combination of relaxation and stimulation we feel in the company of a genuine friend: something like what athletes experience as being in the zone,' a level of deep trust in which one is operating on all cylinders, in which one is so deeply at ease that one's entire being is concentrated in the moment. I was simply smarter in Eudora's presence."Welty and Sharp's anthology, which I will place on reserve, wil come into play in connection with group projects A-D for April, but in the meantime we will have explored other themes as well as we embark, with Cavafy,on our metaphorical journeys to "Ithaka."His hope that we have a long journey resonates with me as I look back over my years as student, teacher, and friend. For instance, I owe my epigraph to Richard Johnson, first my teacher at Mount Holyoke and then my colleague and friend; my friend Elizabeth Tannenbaum recently introduced me to Cavafy's poem; and I am indebted to my inspirational dissertation director and mentor, Sears Jayne, who wil always be "Mr. Jayne" to me and who taught me to begin my syllabi with a long essay as I do here.

By now, I also have many generations of students, from different phases of my teaching life both at DePauw and elsewhere, to thank: I owe them many happy hours of reading papers, conferring in my office, and then following their careers and their lives long after their graduation. By a wonderful coincidence, as I was polishing this opening essay for our syllabus, I found a Facebook notification from Gretel DeRuiter, a friend from Swarthmore days. She had written, "Having so much fun being a student in a Whitman MOOC offered through The Poetry Foundation and Harvard U!" A response, "MOOCs are the future," led Gretel to reply with the sentence, "They'll be part of it, but they wil never top a 15-person seminar of literature lovers in a room together ...—right, Andrea Sununu?" I wrote back, "It's gratifying to think that our seminar yielded friendships that are now in their third decade," and teased her about her sense that our class was a seminar: "at that time Swarthmore's introductory courses were capped at 25, not 15. I do think that our class was almost double the size you remember." Gretel replied, "Perhaps you are right about the size of our class, Andrea, but it always felt intimate and personal and very special. Thanks for putting into words all I was feeling!" Thanking her in turn, Iadded, "As you well know, teaching is a joy in a class with eager students who respond as one hopes they will. Remember when a small group from our class came over to my apartment on a Friday afternoon to discuss Four Quartets and stayed for seven hours? We had to order pizza because we discovered that you would all have missed dinner." In ENG 255 we, too, will discuss Four Quartets, a poem I discovered near the end of my junior year in college, when I asked a friend, who had worked on W.B. Yeats for her Honors thesis, for suggestions for a topic for my own thesis the following year. While handing me her copy of T.S. Eliot's Complete Poems and Plays: 1909-1950, she asked me, "Have you ever read Four Quartets?" I was hooked as soon as I read the haunting opening to the poem: "Time present and time past / Are both perhaps present in time future, and time future contained in time past. / If all time is eternally present, / All time is unredeemable" (1.1-5). Nine years later, on May 29, 1977, Ilistened to my colleague Sarah Youngblood, incidentally described by Garrison Keilor as "The Divine Miss Youngblood," deliver the Baccalaureate Address at Mount Holyoke College on a sparkling spring day. She told the graduating seniors, "If I could have for you three wishes, I would wish for you the three gifts of the Shaker song: 'the gift to be simple, the gift to be free, the gift to come down to where you ought to be.'" Sarah's address notes that "The dynamic force of culture, and the dynamic force of our individual lives, for we are creatures of culture, is a belief in the necessity of ascending. The ziggurats of ancient Babylonia, the spires of Notre Dame, the launching towers at Cape Canaveral, point ni the same direction: up there." But she insists that reaching for the stars is not enough; in her conclusion she returns to the Shaker song, which reminds—us quietly, purely—-that it is a gift to come down: to come down to where we ought to be. For whatever 'the rights, privileges, and responsibilities' that are vested in us, as signs of our acculturation, we are creatures of the earth, still. To remember this, to accept it, is not to debase the self but ot honor it in its essential being. The earth is our first home; life is our first gift. That you should remember this—i simply, freely—is what I wish for you: here, now, always.

Youngblood's last three words echo a half-line from the long final sentence of quiet urgency in Eliot's Four Quartets: "Quick now, here, now, always— / A condition of complete simplicity / (Costing not less than everything)" (Four Quartets .4 252-54). A stroke of serendipity allows me to quote the mother of my advisee Patrick Corley '13: Corinne Corley, in her blog of Jan. 24, 2014, remembers her uncle's advice, "Do what you love. Don't take the easy road. Do what you love." The paradoxical idea that what one loves may not eb easy— can indeed pose a daunting challenge-dovetails nicely with Eliot's closing paradox and may well serve as a motto for your adventures in reading and writing this semester. I hope that, as we folow the narratives of poets, seekers, lovers, and friends in the works we will read, you wil find them inspiring. To that end I will quote a few more passages that never cease ot thrill me. For prose, here's Hallie, in Barbara Kingsolver's Animal Dreams, who tells her sister, Codi, Here's what I've decided: the very least you can do ni your life si ot figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope. Not admire ti from a distance but live right ni it, under its roof. What I want is so simple I almost can't say it: elementary kindness. Enough to eat, enough to go around. The possibility that kids might one day grow up to be neither the destroyers nor the destroyed. That's it. Right now I'm living in that hope, running down its hallway and touching the walls on both sides. (305-06)

And here's a snippet from the final chapter of Penelope Lively's novel Moon Tiger, in which Claudia speaks silently to Tom, You tell me about gazelles and dead men, guns and stars, a boy who is afraid; it is all clearer to me than any chronicle of events but I cannot make sense of it, perhaps because there is none to be made. It might be easier if I believed in God, but I don't. AlI can think, when I hear your voice, is that the past is true, which both appalls and uplifts me. I need it; I need you, Gordon, Jasper, Lisa, all of them. And I can only explain this need by extravagance: my history and the world's. Because unless I am a part of everything I am nothing. (207)

This paradox brings me full circle to my epigraph for our syllabus even as it allows me to link my epigraph to the opening chapter of Jane Austen's Persuasion, in which the unobtrusive Anne Elliot first appears in an extraordinary sentence: she "was nobody with either father or sister: her word had no weight; her convenience was always to give way;- she was only Anne" (3). By reading on, you will see what even a sheltered, unpromising life has in store for this unlikely heroine. In April we will read Parts 2 and 15, "Classic Essays" and "Further Essays," in The Norton Book of Friendship and will hold workshops on your papers on either Donne, Keats, Philips, or Eliot: these papers will allow you to combine your research with a creative monologue by or letter to your chosen poet.

It seems fitting, here, to end with snippets from each poet: Sir, more than kisses, letters mingle souls: For thus, friends absent speak. (1-2) —John Donne (1572-1631), "To Sir Henry Wotton"

But after death too I would be alive, And shall, if my Lucasia doe, survive. I quit this pomp of death, and am content, Having her heart to be my monument: Though ne're stone ot me, 'twill stone for me prove, By the peculiar miracle of Love. There Il'e inscription have, which no Tomb gives, Not, here Orinda Lyes, but, here she lives. (15-22)-Katherine Philips (1632-64),

"Wiston=Vault" I can scarcely bid you good bye even in a letter. I always made an awkward bow. -John Keats (1795-1821) to his friend Charles Brown: it's Keats's last known letter

And what the dead had no speech for, when living, They can tell you, being dead: the communication Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living. -T.S. Eliot (1888-1965), Four Quartets: "Little Gidding" (49-51)

May the magic of reading and writing, of discussing great literature in a circle of friends and of presenting ideas in evocative and radiant prose, begin!

Student Outcomes

You will be able to:
1. Love learning and commit yourself to continuing to learn throughout your life.
2. Read works closely, applying literary concepts and terms as you analyze, annotate, and discuss texts from a variety of periods.
3. Develop knowledge of, and respect for, diverse perspectives and backgrounds.
4. Communicate ideas through discussion in a collaborative setting.
5. Appreciate writing as a process and gain confidence as a writer.
6. Practice sharpening your argument and polishing your prose so that anyone- including you—will enjoy reading what you write.
7. Use sources responsibly in the scholarly research you will do to produce an imaginative letter or monologue that will allow you to do some creative writing.
8. View language and literature as art.

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