Gray and Collins

             Thomas Gray was deeply affected by the death of Richard West in 1972, which “desolated Gray and memories of West haunt much of his verse.”  He constantly was revising his poems and published very little.  He believed, “The language of age is never the language of poetry.”  Most of his poems ware a contemporary reaction against Alexander Pope’s elegance.  Gray was referred to by Samuel Johnson as “The Common Reader.”  He had a love for nature and the sublime.    

William Collins’s goal was to “create more poetry, more lyrical and fanciful than that of Alexander Pope’s generation.”  Collins was ahead of his time and was admired by the Romantics and people who love fantasy.  Samuel Johnson described Collins, as someone who loved fairy tales and magic.  

The Mouse Dinners

In Russell Edson’s “The Mouse Dinners,” he proves the point, “You are what you eat.” Although it is never revealed in the story, what species the main characters are, I kept seeing them as more cats or birds than humans, because they eat mice, and I can’t really see humans eating mice, but now I believe the word “mice” and “mouse” could be substituted for anything.

In every kitchen in the world, someone could be eating something they didn’t really like, but wanted to appear grateful for their spouse’s efforts. I could relate to this couple and what they were going through. When I cook something, I expect people say thank you and to give an honest opinion about it, so I know if they would like me to cook it again or never again.

When the husband says, “I never liked mouse. I thought you liked mouse, so I liked mouse so you’d like me,” mad me laugh, because who hasn’t done something to make someone like them more, and then realize the person doesn’t really like to do that one thing. I would think the couple would know each other well after 20 years, and know what each other likes and doesn’t like.

“Perhaps it was the twenty years of mouse, eaten to please a wife, who he thought liked mice, has worked the metamorphosis,” reveals to me that if someone pretends to be something they are not, they lose their own identity and become something they don’t want to be. I think the theme of this story is be who you are and voice your opinion.

A & P

While reading M. Gilbert Porter’s critique of John Updike’s “A& P,” I was enlightened with a few lines from the story I missed while reading through the story the first time, like “women with six children and varicose veins mapping their legs” and “once you begin a gesture it’s fatal not to go through with it.”

Porter believes Sammy looks down on the customers and thinks he is better than them, because he is a teenager, “such are the verdicts that Sammy hands down on the patrons of the A & P, rather harshly investing each with his most characteristic animal feature.” I have worked in places where I have been a cashier. I know how strange the people can be some days, and how stressful customers can be on the cashiers. I had one customer who spent like 15 minutes just screaming at me because he didn’t want to follow the company’s policy.

I agree with Porter when he writes about how Sammy was right in letting the girls continue to shop with only swimsuits and asks, “Does the attire of the girls satisfy the requirement of ‘decency’ which the policy of A & P demands?” Since we don’t know exactly what the store’s policy is on paper, we can assume there’s nothing about swimsuits on there.

When I was at work one time, some kid came in with a t-shirt that had the “F” word on it and security made him cover it up with duct tape. Some people’s definition of decency is different than others.

I do agree with Porter when he writes, “That no to follow the voice of conscience is to be false to one’s own integrity and therefore to live a lie, and Sammy has chosen to live honestly and meaningfully.” The manager’s behavior was in the wrong. He targeted those girls based on his own personal opinion, and Sammy had every right to make his own opinion matter.

John Keats

             John Keats had a passion for reading and medicine.  He didn’t write poetry until he was 18 years old.  He felt he was going to die early and “applied himself to his art with desperate urgency.”  His works were brutalized by political and snobbish critics.    His great promise was cut short and he could have been even more extraordinary as he stopped writing at age 24.  His writing and phrases reminded his friends of William Shakespeare.   He wrestled with evil and suffering in the world.   He died at the age of 25 of tuberculosis. 

Montagu, Hogarth, and Johnson

 Lady Mary Wortley Montagu taught herself Latin and grew up wealthy.  She feuded a lot with Alexander Pope, politically.  She didn’t like Jonathan Swift because he was friends with Pope.  She also “pioneered in introducing the small pox inoculation to England.”  She was one of greatest writers of letter pieces and poems.  Women and people from her own social circle read her work.  She reveals the mind of a woman who is not willing accept stereotypes imposed on her by men.

 William Hogarth‘s father was teacher and unsuccessful writer.    Hogarth himself was an engraver and a painter.  He inspired a copyright law called “Hogarth’s Act.”  He was successful in art and writing.  Charles Lamb compared him to William Shakespeare.  He love to write satires and about art.  His writing was “a feast of interpretation that draws the reader in.”  He was considered “a writer of comedy with a pencil.”

Samuel Johnson was famous as a talker and a “great generalizer.”  He wrote poetry to earn money, until he received a pension.  He didn’t feel the need to write anymore.  He grew up in poverty and wrote about the facts of being poor, so people with a similar background would have read his work.  He wrote about the power of wishful thinking and desires that let to false expectations.  His wit is “timeless,” because it deals with human experiences anyone can relate to.

The Necklace

In the story, The Necklace, Mrs. Matilda Loisel is an unhappy woman who always desires better things. She borrows what she assumes is a very expensive necklace from her friend, Madam Foestier, for the party and then realizes she has lost it. Matilda and her husband spend a lot of money to find a perfect match to replace it with. Ten years later, her friend tells Matilda her original necklace was a fake.

I, like many others, sometimes have insecurities like Mrs. Loisel, not feeling like we are good enough and wondering what it would be like to have more. I feel like the theme of this story, is don’t always look to the things you want in the future, but appreciate what you have now. I don’t think I would ever borrow expensive jewelry, for fear of losing it. I thought the story was a good example of irony, with Mrs. Loisel wanting expensive things like the necklace, when she could have afforded it in the first place, because it was a fake.

Killing the Bear

As I read the short story Killing the Bear by Judith Minty, I was reminded by the camping trips I have taken.  I feel like the protagonist wanted to protect her dog.  I would protect my cat with the same defensiveness.  I feel the protagonist idolized bears when she was a child and had teddy bears, but now real bears are a lot wilder.  She is marking down the days of calendar to bear season or marking off the days she hasn’t found any bears.  I feel she was very prepared for a bear attack, but was scared when it actually happened.  I felts like she was using the bear’s death to make money and I was surprised that she turned out to be a hunter, with how scared she was acting.

Alexander Pope

Alexander Pope was called “the only important writer of his generation who was solely a man of letters.”  He was painter as well as a writer.  Pope said Anne Finch is “better than all the other female wits and hence a lonely exception.”  He thought women were limited to “pleasure and power.”  Anne Finch responded to his comment, saying “Men make bad mistakes when they underestimate women’s power.”  Pope was master of style, metrics, language, and satire.  He was controversial and made enemies who wrote criticism of his works in “pamphlets, satires, and squibs in the journals his entire literary career.”  His audience was mostly men, because he was controversial to women.  He was the first write to build a career upon his works.  He wrote satires of women and responded to female authors.  He wrote letters, a mock epic, with a visual imagery of nature.  He moved on to subjects that were “philosophical, ethical, and political.”

Lord Byron

Lord Byron studied lyrical verse in college.  He incorporated the bisexuality of Grecians into many of his poems and into his novel, Don Juan.  He was famous in London.  He gave the royalties away to maintain his status as an aristocratic amateur.  Byron was born into two aristocratic families and supported the Whig party.  He was handsome, had an eating disorder and had affairs with women and men, including his half-sister.  He was ostracized and left England in 1816.    John Pilidori made Byron as the inspiration for the title character in “The Vampyre.”

Addison and Steele

 Joseph Addison and Richard Steele are the first pairs of collaborators I have read from their century.  These friends since childhood, seemed like an odd couple, seemingly polar opposites.  Addison was charming, reserved, calculated, prudent, political, wealthy, and was good at Latin verse.  Steele was impulsive, rakish, imprudent, greedy, in debt, and wrote under the pseudonym Isaac Bickerstaff.  Their goal together, was to establish “a new social literary ethos transcending the narrowness of Puritan morality and the exorbitance of the fashionable court culture of the last century.”  They were innovative in the essays and the fact that Addison was wealthy and a former politician, probably brough them a large audience.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

             Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey “planned to establish and ideal democrat community in America.”  Coleridge went from being a radical to a conservative.  Coleridge collaborated with William Wordsworth and finished some of his poems, after Wordsworth’s death.  He was “repeatedly charged with gross plagiarism” and struggled with an opium addiction.  His friends thought he lacked “applications and staying power,” but had “great promise.”  Mary Shelley was a fan of his work and used one of his stanzas in her book, Frankenstein.  He wrote about political and gothic subjects.    

Finch, Prior, and Swift

    Anne Finch was a Countess of Winchilsea, so she grew up around rich writers.  It didn’t help because at the time women weren’t accepted as writers.  Her audience were probably people with religious education background, other aristocrats, and women.  She wrote poems based on stories of the Bible. 

            Matthew Prior was a diplomat, but a man for the public.  He didn’t belong to aristocracy and that made him more available as a writer.  He was friends with Jonathan Swift.  He found himself in trouble by the law with his job as Secretary to the Embassy.  He was a successful writer and made a lot of money, because he appealed to the general public.  His writing was simple to read, while being brilliant.  His poems are self-explanatory, and he wrote as a lyricist while writing satire and epigraphs. 

            Jonathan Swift was clergyman for the Anglican Church and was against anything that threatened his faith.  He had Meniere’s disease in his adult life.  He was the master of Prose.  He believed in “Proper words in proper places.”  He reminds me of Wilmot in his satire.  Although he was a man of faith, he was controversial.  He even wrote a piece called “Argument against the Abolishing of Christianity in England.”  His audience were probably people who were anti-Catholic and believed in separation of church and state. 

The Mother

I had to read Lynn's criticism of the short story, The Mother. I like when Lynn explains to us what he thinks new criticism is, and that we should only use and examine the words the author has written, instead of the author’s background, time period, or reasons for writing what he or she did.

I like the way he goes through line by line, and takes notes, calculating what it means and how some lines contradict others. I liked how he set up the guidelines for shaping our essays, brainstorming ideas to write about, and drafting your critique of someone’s writing.

When he writes, “It [abortions] can’t make “you” remember or keep “you” from forgetting” in note A, the critic seems to believe that the mother is haunted by her decisions. I also agree with the critic, when he wonders “if your child is not living, is that person still considered a mother?” I like how he wants us to look at the intent of the characters and what is important about what they are telling us.

Like the critic, I’m glad I wasn’t the only one who was little confused by the line “you got that you did not get.” He writes “Either you got them or you didn’t, it would seem.” It got me thinking of what that sentence means and I think it means that speaker has hope for the children who she aborted, and hopes they got a second chance at a new life somewhere else.

The critic asks us to examine why the poem is called a certain title, like this one is called “The Mother,” even if it is about her abortions. My initial response was that the author wants us to believe she is the Mother of guilt or regrets, but now reading through this critique, one reason for the title being “The Mother” is to refer to her being the mother and letting the readers to know it was a female telling the story, and not the father.

I like when he wrote, “It’s fine if your ideas aren’t similar to those above. In fact, it’s great because I would certainly be bored if everyone thought the same things.” Anybody who critiques a poem isn’t going to have the same set of notes. People think of different things when they read something, and none of the thoughts we have are good or bad, they are just unique.

I thought it was interesting when he asks us to think, “What holds it together?” referring to the poem. He basically says to examine the work and it is okay to ask questions. I like how he sets up a basic formula when drafting your essay from your notes, and the notes in the margin.

Like the critic, I also thought the mother was dividing herself in half, “as a murderer and a murder.” I agree when reading poems we need to develop a theory and a thesis of what we think the poems means, and give several reasons why we think what we think about it.

Usually when I write a paper on someone’s writing, I try to be objective in my response and look at both sides of the equation. I think with this certain poem, if you’re Pro-Life, you should look at it like someone who is Pro-Choice, and vice versa. I think when critiquing, you need to develop a different feels for the writing from all of the issues. I feel like the author of this critique did the same. I feel like the critic also didn’t put a personal stance of the mother’s decisions. I think you have to remain neutral and look at both sides of the issue like he did.

In conclusion, I think this critique of “The Mother” will be very helpful to me when I do the other assignments on other poems, because he set up a formula to follow. There wasn’t much I didn’t like about his critique, besides some of his notes that I commented on above. He did give reasons for why he wrote what he did that I didn’t agree with, and made me think more about the concepts with a different perspective.

Critical Approaches to Literature

Gidget by Frederick Koehner
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
Merchant of Venice by William Shakespeare

Summer Semester Begins

I just started summer semester at Weber State, and I will be a junior at the end of this semester. I'm taking three English classes (British Lit: Neoclassical/Romantic, Critical Approaches to Literature, Structure of English) and it will last 8 weeks. I have to say that I like how short it was compared to other semesters (15 weeks).