English 246D

Other Readings and Media

Bacon, F.: The Essays; Di Cesare, ed. George Herbert and the 17th-Century Religious Poets; Donne, J.: Complete English Poems; Hill, C. A Century of Revolution, 1603-1714; Maclean, H, ed.: Ben Jonson and the Cavalier Poets; Marvell, A. Complete Poems; Milton, J. Paradise Lost

Description

"Aside from Bacon's essays and, perhaps, Pilgrim's Progress, the course will concentrate on verse (because verse is what the seventeenth century did best and because I'm not worth listening to about seventeenth-century prose). We will read as much as is convenient of the verse of Donne, Jonson, Herrick, George Herbert, Carew, Waller, Milton, Suckling, Lovelace, and Marvell. I will concentrate in class on the poems that, in the judgment of later centuries, are the best. That includes Paradise Lost.



My chief concern as a student of literature is aesthetic, and I will inevitably ask what it is that this or that literary warhorse does for its clients that has made so many readers value it so highly and for so long. "