Week 2 - February 12
We
Begin at the Beginning - with the Fall Adam and Eve and Prometheus
Campbell: "where you stumble there is your
treasure"
Ziolkowski:
The Sin of Knowledge
"Adam, Prometheus, and Faust* are always with us" (3)…"All
three mythic figures assume for their cultures the role of scapegoat
who must suffer so that humankind may endure."(70) *and Orpheus
1.
Prometheus listening as act of translation
a.
Byron's poem
b. Shelley's Prometheus Unbound
A "reading" with assigned roles Prometheus; Earth;
Mercury; Panthea, Asia, Demogorgon; Jupiter; Spirit of the Hour;
Chorus of Spirits
As
you listen, consider what was at stake for Shelley-why did he
turn to this myth & how did he
turn it to his own purposes
2. Adam --
at break look at paintings of Adam and Eve
Ziolkowski:
After their walk-on performance in the early chapters of Genesis
(2-5), Adam and Eve do not reappear in the Old Testament…Nor,
apparently did Jesus know, or at least care about Adam, who
is mentioned only twice in the Gospels."(12-13)
"Why
should the people who subsequently prided themselves for centuries
on being the People of the Book have placed at the beginning
of history a myth suggesting that the fall of humankind was
due to the desire for knowledge." (18)
"Emerson
defined the Fall of Man simply as the discovery that we exist."
(23)
Milton:
.. "what is dark in me/Illumine"
Orgell and Goldberg:
•
Owing to Milton's blindness, Paradise Lost was dictated, to
whatever willing amanuensis was at hand. (xiv)
• Despite his decision to abandon his projected epic
on the Arthurian legends Spenser's Faerie Queen was an unavoidable
poetic precedent. (xv)
• Adam and Eve choose wrongly, but they do not really
understand what they are choosing. God's omnipotence is a
given, but it is not a reality until it is tested, and to
test it is to fall….This is the nature of moral experience
as Spenser introduces it in his epic: we fall, and then we
pick ourselves up; that is how we learn….(xvii)
• Adam and Eve really are not in possession of enough
information or experience to enable them to make a free choice…What
does the threat of death mean in a world where no one has
ever died? Death is a concept no one poem has any experience
of: not Satan, not the angels, not even God. (xxi)
3. Orpheus
The Look
Back
When Orpheus
and his Eurydice
walked up from the underworld, they thought
of the light up there, how beautiful it was,
how much they longed for, needed it;
but even so, they'd been a long time
in the dark, too long. They'd learned it needed them.
William Bronk
Small group
workshop: "appropriating the myth"
3 tasks:
1. For assigned painting write a poem that captures the painter's
take on the myth of Adam and Eve
2. In groups
of three: for the Orpheus poem assigned you, come up with a reading
of the poet what need did the myth serve him or her & how
did the poem meet this need; what kind of poem did he or she write
to meet this need in Orpheus and Company:
Rilke
(17)
Dugan(16)
Rukeyser (16)
Kelly(16)
Atwood (150
Justice( 15)
Gilbert (14-15)
Bachmann(10)
Orr (8)
H.D. (5-6)
Tsvetaeva I(4-5)
3. For your
own poem explore what need the poem answered in you i.e. why did
you need to write this poem and how did this poem in the form
and voice it took answer this need?
A brief reading
from Paradise Lost
Assignment:
Explore a time when you chose wrongly
or when you experienced your own version of a Fall from the Garden
or when you stole fire
of when you tried to descend to Hades or when you were torn to
pieces by the Maenads
Skim and Bring: "After Ovid"
