Cirrus@Austlit

'Anyone who has “taught” Shakespeare’s sonnets (always a privilege) over a period of time will have encountered various approaches to the topic. To apply the term “strategy” may seem presumptuous. But it reflects my basic conviction, that when Shakespeare set out on this venture, it was to produce a sequence that would be true to the genre, but unlike anything that had gone before. The intent was exploratory, and interrogative. This I shall try to demonstrate, but as the term “strategy” did not come into the English language until after Shakespeare’s death, I take as a starting-point two of the earliest references to Shakespeare as a literary figure in his lifetime, to provide some perspective.' (Introduction)

'Samson Agonistes is the only play that Milton wrote. At the beginning of his career he wrote two masques, Arcades and A Masque presented at Ludlow Castle, 1634 [Comus], but nothing else for the stage. Indeed he makes a point of telling us in the opening note, “Of that sort of dramatic poem called tragedy”, that Samson Agonistes “never was intended” for the stage.1 During the years of the English Revolution, 1640-1659, the theatres had all been closed by official order. Milton, as the foremost propaganda writer for the revolutionary government, might be expected to have agreed with its hostility to the public theatre, something seen as a corrupt institution, identified with royalists, prostitutes and such like. So it is not surprising that Samson Agonistes “never was intended” for the stage; nor is it surprising that the model Milton followed was not that of English Shakespearean theatre, but the archaic model of classical Greece.' (Introduction)

'Considering that T.S. Eliot made more negative pronouncements on Milton than on any other individual writer, it is ironic that he provoked a valuable legacy to Milton studies. This chapter propounds and explores that legacy as twofold: the significance of Eliot’s criticism to Milton studies in the twentieth century and the timely challenge his criticism offers to Milton studies today.' (Introduction)

'The quick answer to that question is because you cannot do without them. Once upon a time, long, long ago in the 1960s, when all the world was young, I taught at the University of Sussex, in the South of England, which then prided itself on its bold thinking – naturally, “outside” every possible box – and on its sweeping ability to re-imagine and reconstruct the curriculum according to the needs of the modern world. A problem area for the most vocal modernists, however, was Religious Studies, which seemed to smack of the very outmoded ways of thinking they were trying to transcend. It was a small “subject group” – we had nothing so traditional as “Departments” – with only three members. Unfortunately, it was popular with a surprisingly large number of students. But there came a time when the Muslim had study leave in Cairo to complete an important book; the Buddhist had retreated in mystic contemplation at the top of a Himalayan pass; and there remained only the Christian to try and carry on with the classes of all three. Quite predictably, he complained to the Dean about his extra workload. Quite predictably, the Dean expressed his most profound sympathy, and did nothing at all. The overworked Christian then pulled out his ace card: “Since you are not prepared to address this crisis constructively, you leave me no choice but to accept the offer of a fellowship in Cambridge, which Sidney Sussex has been holding open for me for the past three months”. And, to the consternation of what was left of his subject group, and many outside it, he departed for the fens of East Anglia.' (Introduction)

'Why would an institution calling itself a university still, in the 21st century, be employing a “professor of poetry”? Surely no-one of the millennial generation would want to spend a lot of money which could have been spent on more professional training, just to be able to talk or write about Les Murray, T.S. Eliot or John Donne? Who are, in any case, all reactionary and/or misogynist. Borderline racist, even. Certainly all white; all men. How about Emily Dickinson, then? Sylvia Plath, Maya Angelou? But surely those who want to will read these poets in their own time? Only the wealthy, or the terminally pretentious, could afford to waste these precious years of education chattering about “Hope is the thing with feathers” or “Phenomenal Woman” or “a country far away as health”. Nor is this only a matter of private expense. A good deal of the financial burden of this professorship is born by the public purse. What could the public utility of such a role possibly be?' (Introduction)

'I wish to explore the basis upon which we think about, plan and act on behalf of our culture. I wish to understand what motivates our intentions as well as our actions; what assumptions, premises even prejudices shape the way we think about the arts and the role they play in our lives.' (Introduction)

'I wish to read the opening passage of T. S. Eliot’s “Burnt Norton,” the first of Four Quartets (1944), because I find it the most difficult part of the poem as well as one of the richest sections of it. Its difficulty and its richness are co- ordinate in ways that need to be specified, and while Four Quartets as a whole continually interprets the opening passage while further enriching it, it is also true that this passage establishes the lines along which we interpret the whole of the Quartets, including what we understand to be the character of its wholeness. “Burnt Norton” was written in the autumn of 1935 and published before the idea of the further three poems came to Eliot.2 That Four Quartets is a whole can scarcely be denied – its unity is thematically and formally insisted upon in “East Coker”, “The Dry Salvages” and especially “Little Gidding”. And yet “Burnt Norton” also exists as a poem in its own right. More exactly, one might say that it once existed simply by itself but now does not. It was progressively taken up into a greater unity, and now the later three sections permeate the first, ramifying and deepening some if not all of its lines. This first poem, section or movement of Four Quartets has two epigraphs taken from Heraclitus, which frame the whole. Let us begin with these.' (Introduction)

'Whether it was coincidence, collaboration or calling, the commissioning of a new play as the centrepiece of the annual Canterbury Festival resulted in the production of some of the early twentieth century’s most significant modern religious dramas, the greatest of which being the two verse plays written for the successive years of 1935 and 1936. While T.S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral (1935) and Charles Williams’s Thomas Cranmer of Canterbury (1936) have had contrasting commercial and critical success in the years since, their production and reception at the time constituted an apotheosis in the religious drama revival of the early twentieth century. Furthermore, in what has been little recognized to date, the events surrounding the writing and production of these two successive plays represented a key moment in the development of an important personal and professional relationship between these two writers. Canterbury not only brought the two men closer together personally, but its shared experience became the foundation for their future professional relationship, a “still point” around which their subsequent writing would turn. (Introduction)

'Civilization and science have been tied together in the West since the eighteenth century, and both have suffered from the way in which they have come to be associated: science by its failure to meet ideals that it could never have met; civilization by the removal of the humanities and culture generally from its core, these becoming mere adjuncts or even leisure activities. In the latter case, this is mirrored in analytic philosophy – in philosophy of mind and philosophy of language for example – where aesthetics is considered marginal, an added extra, to what it means to be human. The common view, if only implicit, is that human beings would not be human beings without language or consciousness for example, but they would still be human beings if they lacked any aesthetic life. This stands in direct contrast to late eighteenth and nineteenth century thought, in which an aesthetic model of the human being is central. At the apex of this tradition stands Schiller’s Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen – “On the Aesthetic Education of Man” – of 1794.' (Introduction)

'Enclosed within the outer case of an old-fashioned gold watch, a silk watch- paper embroidered with the initials “D.N.F” carries to Arthur Clennam’s mother from his dying father a reminder of obligations variously interpreted by the characters in Little Dorrit, Dickens’s novel of 1857. It is a palpable image of memory’s housing in time, of the spatial and temporal dimensions across which memory travels, and of the histories and psychologies it holds in connection from time past and into the future of a legally-binding intent. It raises questions about “the duty of memory” that preoccupy contemporary cultural narrative.' (Introduction)

'“Dulce et Decorum Est”, written and revised between October 1917 and March 1918, and first published in Siegfried Sassoon’s edition of Owen’s poems in December 1920, is almost certainly Wilfred Owen’s best-known poem. 2 In the decades following its publication (especially after Cecil Day Lewis’s 1963 edition of Owen’s poetry) it has been extensively anthologised, included in school literature courses throughout the English-speaking world and become a common subject of scholarly attention. At the conclusion of his biography of Owen, Guy Cuthbertson remarks that Great Britain’s Prime Minister, David Cameron, has cited “Dulce et Decorum Est” as “his favourite piece of poetry”.3 Moreover, it has recently been claimed that in the context of today’s knowledge of the First World War, Owen is now “far more famous than, say, Field Marshal Douglas Haig or David Lloyd George”.4 And in the light of the current focus on the centenary of the First World War, Owen’s fame and interest in his poetry are likely to increase. This, it must be said, is despite some objections that Owen’s poetry has possibly been overpraised, particularly by those who favour its perceived pacifism, and that it has coloured the modern viewpoint of the First World War to the exclusion of other perspectives.5 It must also be recognised that Owen has his detractors, for example, Barry Matthews, who in 2010 published a disparaging biography, Wilfred Owen: the Old Lie, presently unobtainable, in which he accuses his subject of cowardice and paedophilia.' (Introduction)