English 385 Going to Hell in Modern Poetry

Michael Thurston

Th 3-4:50 p.m.

This course explores a number of twentieth-century poets' deployments of the nekuia (encounter with the shades of the dead) and katabasis (journey into the underworld) topoi familiar from classical epic poems. Our motivating question is why so many modern and contemporary poets return to these ancient narratives. What do these structural allusions to the tradition enable poets to think through or resolve? What work do the poems attempt through the nekuia and katabasis ? And how do modern poets' versions themselves alter the tradition and its own cultural work? Our method will be the close textual analysis of the poems, with some examination of the poets' other writings, of critics' readings of the poems, and of the contexts in which the poems were written. The main requirements for the course will be careful and assiduous reading (of long and often difficult poems), a class presentation, and a substantial (20-25 pages) critical paper that integrates critical and contextual research.

We will begin at the beginning, by reading the relevant episodes in important precursor poems: Odyssey (Book XI), Aeneid (Book VI), Inferno and Purgatorio (selections), as well as some important scholarship on the cultural work of the descent and encounter topoi (David Pike, Ronald Macdonald). We will then work through a series of modern and contemporary poems that are explicitly patterned after the canonical descent narratives:

Pound, Canto I (as well as the third of "Three Cantos" that is an early version of Canto I), Canto XIV

Eliot, The Waste Land ; "Little Gidding"

Heaney, " Station Island " (plus background poems by Heaney and Yeats)

Walcott, Omeros (substantial selections plus background poems like "The Hotel Normandie Pool' and " Greece ")

Harrison , v.

Merrill, The Changing Light at Sandover (at least the first part, The Book of Ephraim )

Boland, "The Journey," "The Making of an Irish Goddess," excerpts from "Outside History"

Crane, "The Tunnel" (from The Bridge )

Oliver, In the Cave of Suicession

And others

We will then spend one or two class sessions on poems that implicitly refer to the nekuia and/or katabasis (poems by Robert Duncan, Charles Olson, H.D., Edna St. Vincent Millay, and others).

By mid-term, students will choose their paper topic and begin reading and research. They will present their work during the final two weeks of class (when they will also hand in a draft of their paper).