The Amazing Dr. Funkenstein and the Mind-altering burrito

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Shakespeare: Poetry
When writing this study guide on Shakespeare’s poetry I pretty much consulted the pages on him in the Norton Anthology, and flipped through the TOC’s of other anthologies to see what poems they included. But also I looked back on my experience with good ol’ Billy-Bob and remembered how much came up in my classes. This is the result.
Shakespeare wrote some poems, early in his career, about figures from classic Greek mythology-- they’ve never come up before so they’re not important. What you need to focus on is the sonnets. Now the Norton calls his sequence “unlike the other sonnet sequences of his day” (802) which is very unhelpful because when we think of “his day” we only really know him. However, they go on to say “nor are the moods [of the sonnets] confined to what the Renaisance thought were those of the despairing Petrarchan lover: they include delight, pride, melancoly, shame, disgust, and fear” (802). This is what you’re looking for in terms of running motifs.

How to Recognize a Shakespeare Sonnet
Here’s my little guide to recognizing a Shakespeare poem on the test.
- Insult the poem
Yell out “Marlowe was better” and if the poem slaps you it’s probably Shakespeare.
- Look for that old school English
It’s not Ye Olde English, but it’s not quite everyday language. (You can probably figure this one out already.)
- Look out for the threesome
The Shakespeare sonnet sequence is famous for it’s love triangle between the young man, the dark lady, and the speaker. This has caused many scholars to speculate that Shakespeare was a bisexual. Of course, it can’t be proved either way, but if it helps you do a gender study or a homosexuality comparision with another poem the more power to ya.
- Simple in language, powerful in metaphors
As the Norton puts it “although the vocabulary of the sonnets is usually simple the metaphorical style is very rich” (803). I’m sure a lot of you would disagree with the simple language claim, but with a little literal reading the situation can easily be brought out. It’s the power of his metaphors that have made Shakespeare stand up against time. “‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day,’” the Norton offers, “is a question that might lead to a very ordinary comparison, but instead it introduces a profound meditation on time, change, and beauty” (803).
- They didn’t get their images from TV
So when you look at the imagrey of the poem there won’t be any Chevys or Coca-cola. The images are only coming from stuff availible to a person living in Renaissance England. The Norton suggests “gardening, navigation, law, farming, business, pictoral art, astrology, and domestic affairs” (803).
- A few running themes
And lastly, in the overall scheme of the sonnet sequence, there are a few themes that keep coming up. They are as follows. “The beauty of the young man [...] urges him to propagate and preserve that beauty” (802), and “the transience and destructive power of time, countered only by the force of love and friendship and the permanence of poetry” (802). You catch that happening in an old school poem and you might just have a Shakespeare.

Required Reading
Shakespeare’s sonnets have been assigned numbers and that is how I will identify them (some people do the first line too but... I’m just too lazy for that). These are the must read numbers:
18, 29, 30, 55, 60, 73, 97, 107, 116, 129, 130, 114
but if you’re really pinched for time just read:
18, 30, 73, 116, 129, 130



Works Cited
Abrams, M. H., et al. ed. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. 6th ed. Vol 1. New York: Norton, 1993.

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1914-1945-- an overview
Who said it was impossible to condense almost thirty years of literary history into one page? It makes me laugh. Ha! Ha, ha, ha! Ha! But seriously this was hard because 1914-45 is the most important period in the history of literature.
There’s so much going on in the culture during this period. The horrors of World War I, the Great Depression, the rise of Freud, the Harlem Renaissance, expatriotism (aka “The Lost Generation”), industrialization, widespread electricity, the mass-produced automobile, the first flight, improvisational jazz, the reemergence of blues-- if you catch any of this historical stuff in one of your poem, you might just be looking at something from this period.
All that being said, I can’t go over every single person in this period. I can’t give you individual notes on their particular styles. I can, however, give you a list of the most important people, a few selected titles from them, and talk about the major styles of the period.

Americans
Ezra Pound- The Cantos, “In the Station of the Metro,” “The River Merchant’s Wife,” “Lament of the Frontier Guard”
Robert Frost- “Mending Wall,” “The Road Not Taken,” “Out, Out-,” “Design,” “Home Burial,” “After Apple Picking”
Carl Sandburg- “Chicago”
Wallace Stevens- “Sunday Morning,” “The Emperor of Ice Cream,” “Not the Ideas About the Thing But the Thing Itself”
T. S. Eliot (that’s right, he’s an American, now don’t forget it)- “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” “The Wasteland,” “Preludes”
Edna St. Vincent Millay- “What my Lips Have Kissed, and Where, and Why”
ee cummings- “My Father Moved Through Dooms of Love,” “Between the Breasts,” “The Cambridge Ladies Who Live in Furnished Souls,” “may i feel said he”
Hart Crane- “At Melville’s Tomb,” “Chaplinesque”
Langston Hughes- “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” “Theme for English B,” “The Weary Blues,” “Mulatto,” “Young Gal’s Blues”
William Carlos Williams- “The Red Wheelbarrow,” “Portrait of a Lady,” “The Widow’s Lament in Springtime,” “This is Just to Say,”
Gertrude Stein- Melanctha, Tender Buttons
F. Scott Fitzgerald- “Babylon Revisited,” The Great Gatsby
Ernest Hemmingway- “A Clean, Well Lighted Place,” “Hills Like White Elephants,” “The Killers,” A Farewell to Arms, The Sun Also Rises
John Steinbeck- “The Pearl,” The Grapes of Wrath, Of Mice and Men
William Faulkner- “Mosquitoes,” “Old Man,” The Sound and the Fury

Brits (including the incredible Irish)
William Butler Yeats- “A Coat,” “The Lake Isle of Innisfree,” “Sailing to Byzantium,” “Leda and the Swan”
James Joyce- “The Dead,” Ulysses, Finnegan’s Wake, Portrait of the Young Man as an Artist
George Orwell- 1984, “Shooting an Elephant,” Animal Farm
Virginia Woolf- “A Room of Ones Own”
W. H. Auden- “Musee de Beaux Arts,” “In Memory of W. B. Yeats,” “Funeral Blues”
Dylan Thomas- “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night,” “Fern Hill”

Now you probably noticed by now that the American list is a lot longer than the English list (which is populated by Irish and Welshmen anyhow). This is not just because the English are inferior to the Americans. (I will now stop making fun of the English.) This is because the world is becoming a global society. Literary traditions are no longer separated by geographical boundaries. We got faster travel-- boats, and planes soon enough. T. S. Eliot moves to England. W. H. Auden moves to the US. The Lost Generation smokes hash in Gertrude Stein’s Paris apartment. And from this point on we’re all working together to form a vocabulary vast enough to create Modern Literature.
I’ve talked a lot about the other stuff (a lot of it being pointless filler) now let’s get down to what you’re looking for in terms of style. Modernism is the big player in this period. So look for getting down states of mind on paper, fragmentation, lenses, discontinuity as seen, not only in subject, but also reflected in poetic technique. Big, complicated metaphorical stuff, people. Like how T. S. Eliot uses long conceits and irregular rhyme patterns in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” Imagism is big too. So if you see a short poem that’s chock full of images, then put it in this category too. Think about Ezra Pound’s “In the Station of the Metro” and William Carlos Williams “The Red Wheelbarrow.” Stream of Consciousness falls under the Modernist category as well. So Gertrude Stein, William Faulkner, and (my favorite) James Joyce, come on down! Include that weirdo concrete poet ee cummings here too.
But wait, you say. What about the authors that aren’t so Modernist but are still in the modern period? How do I recognize them? (Good luck, I say.) Look for historical and context clues. “The Emperor of Ice Cream” can’t happen until the nationwide emergence of ice cream. FDR put the public works to work putting blues songs down for recording, so if you see someone do the blues, like Langston Hughes or W. H. Auden, put it here too. Virginia Woolf certainly takes a modern stance on women’s rights and such. And still there are some formal poets at work like Robert Frost and Millay. Look at how modern Millay’s stance is. Look at how subjective Frost’s formal, little New England world is.



Works Cited
Abrams, M. H., et al. ed. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. 6th ed. Vol 1. New York: Norton, 1993.
Baym, Nina et al. ed. The Norton Anthology of American Literature. 2nd ed, shorter. New York: Norton 1986.

Speaking of the Lost Generation, listen to this.

Woody Allen

- You like Asian people, why don't you come along? I suggested to my brother. It'll give us a chance to hang out.
Just like in real life, I had a group of Japanese businessmen to entertain. I brought them to a fancy Chinese buffet on Maple street (because, where else would you take a large group of Japanese businessmen). My brother came along. We were all sitting at this big table, set off in a private corner.
I went up to the buffet and lifted the entire tray of General Tso's chicken out of the buffet table. The chicken wasn't that great-- it was a little crunchy, and the sauce was too transparent and sweet. But when you've got a monkey on your back you don't care-- it was still decent.
We were all having a good time, drinking sake and eating General Tso's chicken. But my brother kept making fun of me. And the Japanese businessmen kept laughing at me. It was infuriating.
So finally I give up. I stand up from the table and say
- You know what? They're your Japanese businessmen now.
And I leave the restaurant.