Skip to main content

Paper #1: Romantic Plagiarists due 9.13.21


Of all the mighty world

Of eye, and ear—both what they half create,

And what perceive (Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey)

Wordsworth and Coleridge did everything together—including writing poems. Wordsworth often took credit for Coleridge’s best ideas (the albatross), and Coleridge did the same (the Lyrical Ballads). Keats was a superfan of the Romantic poets and lived in their shadow, possibly even beating them at their own game. All of them were inspired by each other, borrowed from each other, and if we want to be catty, stole from each other as well. That’s what makes Romantic Poetry such a rich and important movement—it speaks with so many of the same ideas in very similar language.

For your first paper, I want you to choose TWO passages from TWO different poems (each poem a different poet) where one seems to steal from the other. You can look up the dates if you want to see who came first, but even publication dates can be tricky, since poets often sit on works for years. So just determine who you think is the ‘original,’ and who you think copies/cribbed from his ideas. Note that a copy doesn’t mean it’s worse…sometimes the cover version is better than the original, after all!

The passages should be SHORT: just a stanza or two. You should first analyze the original stanza and explain what you think it means and how it uses language to achieve this goal. Then, you should examine the ‘copy,’ and discuss what it borrowed (either literally or figuratively), and how it translates the original into its own language. Do you think the second version is better? More poetic? More interesting? More sublime? And what do we gain from reading these passages side by side? Make sure we can see why you think one work borrow from the other: don’t assume we can see what you do. Show us!

REQUIREMENTS

  • Use no more than 2 poems, making sure that each poem is by a different poet
  • Short passages—no more than a stanza or two
  • QUOTE: you must quote actual lines and discuss them, but DON’T just quote the entire passage and leave it at that. Help us see the small details.
  • Use MLA citation throughout with a Works Cited page
  • DUE Monday, September 13th by 5pm

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

For Monday: Short Lecture on Colonialism and Mansfield

As a way to introduce you to some of the themes we'll be exploring with our last two books, I've recorded a short lecture (about 18 min.) that I would have discussed with you in class if we were still meeting. I know 18 minutes is a lot to watch in a single stretch, so feel free to start and stop, or simply leave it playing in the background. However, I think it will help you see and understand some of the larger ideas going on behind the scenes in Mansfield's stories.  AFTER you watch the video, answer the following question as a COMMENT below: "Since many women in the early 19th century tried to hide their identity as a woman by adopting a male name, or writing more 'male' stories, how do you think colonial writers did the same? That is, how did they hide their colonial identity in writing to sound more 'English'? What might they have had to hide, or ignore, or not reveal as a writer? (This will count toward your participation grade, since I can...
40 comments
Read more

Short Lecture on Being "Weak" in Mansfield's Stories

Before we race to the end of Mansfield's stories, I wanted to discuss some of the major themes we've encountered in several of them, particularly "Daughters of the Late Colonel," "The Life of Ma Parker," "Mr. and Mrs. Dove," and "Marriage a la Mode." Watch the video to hear some of my thoughts on these stories, most of which are drawn from your responses to the reading questions. It's a little longer than the last one, but still only about 25 minutes (sorry)!  After you finish, answer the following question as a COMMENT on the blog.  Q: Talking about emotions, love, death, or otherwise being "weak" was very taboo in British society at this time. What subjects or relationships do you feel are taboo in our own society? And I don't just mean awkward subjects (abortion, politics, etc.), but what emotions or experiences would you have trouble discussing with your parents, your siblings, your friends, and even your sig...
32 comments
Read more

For Friday: Wordsworth, "Ode: Intimations of Immortality"

“Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections in Early Childhood” (pp.51-57): read the entire poem, but the questions will only focus on Stanzas 1-7 NOTE: This is a longer poem, though it’s broken up into short stanza chapters.  Read it slowly, and focus on each stanza as an individual poem.  Then consider how each one develops a general ‘story’ or narrative about Wordsworth’s life.  Consider this, too, as a kind of mid-life crisis poem: Wordsworth feels himself pulling away from the innocent joys he used to experience in life, and the poem is an attempt to find himself—and to convince other readers to find themselves in the thickets of adulthood.  Answer TWO of the following... Q1: According to Stanzas 1-4, what causes the poet to feel distanced from the natural world?   What has come between him and his imagination/emotions?   In Stanza 2 he writes that “But yet I know, where’er I go,/That there hath past away a glory from the earth...
25 comments
Read more