Content Objectives
Close Reading
I would first and foremost like to instruct my students on the skill of close reading of text. Students, by this point in their academic career are well versed in looking for plot, for setting, and for some elements of characterization in all varieties of works of literature. For middle school students, I still think this unit could be valuable in that regard; good sonnets (like good stories) though shorter still often tell a story in an octave and quatrain. The figurative story of a sonnet being so short, I believe that close readings for transitions will serve students in their reading of longer works—where their attentiveness and awareness of conjunctions, of unusual punctuation such as a dash or semicolon will become transferrable skills. Specifically with high school juniors, I can reinforce instruction on the importance of diction, tone, and mood.
These three elements are critical to reading of the sonnet and literature in general. In a sonnet such as "To an American Painter Departing for Europe," William Cullen Bryant goes into extensive detail in a poetic conversation with the painter Thomas Cole as to the landscape he (Cole) should not forget when traveling through Europe. Bryant's listing of "savannahs where the bison roves" 2 should stand out in their reading. Savannahs smack of the exotic, of Africa, or some far flung geography—but hardly something that Bryant himself, living in Massachusetts, would have personal experience of. This type of encounter and questioning by students can both reveal the personality of the poet (pointing out when they exaggerate to benefit from the lovely meter of "savannah") and also what is important in the imagery the poet is trying to convey.
No less important, juniors should gain facility with describing tone—the field of play within a sonnet being discrete enough where they can make an argument that stands up to the scrutiny of their peers and instructor, and lends them confidence that they can recognize relationships when they are clearly signaled by specific language. The adulatory tone of Whitman comes through in his essay on the assassination of Lincoln (which my students will cover earlier in the early in the year) but more muted there than what readily appears most famously in "O Captain my captain." The exclamation and use of "captain," together with its repetition and alteration with the "my" added to it serve precisely as the basis for a meaningful conversation on tone. That phrase's repetition multiple times will also serve to emphasis the power of Whitman's emotional response to Lincoln's death. Students can also see that they are licensed to critique Whitman through the tone they discover; more stoic types can blanch at the excess of emotion while their converse can embrace it.
Genre recognition
My second objective is to instruct students how to read, recognize, and categorize works within a single genre. As I [suggested] in my introduction, students often [careen] from genre to genre and back and forth between fiction and non-fiction until they are buffeted into incoherence as to the meaning and motive for writing in a genre. Students are often accustomed to insensibility to genre because the most prominent genres covered (the novel and the short story) can be so lengthy that five weeks' reading can be cumbersome to compare to a similar stretch later in the year. But because the sonnet part of the syllabus is compressed into two to three weeks, students can gain familiarity and adroitness with a Petrarchan and Shakespearean sonnet. Covering multiple sonnets by an author like Claude McKay and Edna Vincent St. Millay will also demonstrate that an author versed in the form will develop and demonstrate their own way of playing with the form. Once grounded in over a dozen sonnets, students (at the end of the unit) will be able to conjecture why Gwendolyn Brooks will introduce additional syllables (exceeding the pentameter of her lines) into a sonnet like "The Rites for Cousin Vit" to demonstrate when, in an otherwise tightly formatted sonnet, eleven syllables are necessary: "In parks or alleys, comes haply on the verge" 3 Some characters, like cousin Vit, through sheer excess spill over the 10 syllable line—ironically cascading down at the word "verge." Similarly, they will come, at the end of the unit, to appreciate the decision by Robert Lowell to write his sonnets of 1968 in blank verse. That kind of mastery with one genre will serve students in many facets of their later reading—perhaps determining for them why a work like Huckleberry Finn, while a novel, can also now additionally gain the identity of a sub-genre such as bildungsroman or perhaps a picaresque.
Contextualization
My central objective for giving students a wide array of sonnets across the span of nearly three centuries of American letters is to improve their skill in contextualizing their reading, applying their close reading of diction and tone as well as characterization to identify differences that emerge not only in the style of the sonnet itself, but the content, and beginning to ask critical question as to why. As Paula Bernat Bennett explains in Teaching 19 th Century Poetry, "Having such a diverse audience, poets were encouraged to speak diversely. One only need compare Dickinson's and Whitman's poetry to that of their peers (e.g. Tennyson and Browning) to realize the extensive and deliberate mixing of popular and high culture poetic strategies." 4 Students will have to leverage their close reading of the poems into explicit explanations of characterization and setting to address speaker and audience, identifying the values and perspectives that are unique to America and its transparently vibrant diversity—how Edwin Arlington Robinson may seem to suffer by comparison with Whitman or Langston Hughes, but can be seen to be perfectly responsive to his era, to his audience, and to the ambitions germane to poetic artists of his time. Whitman, by contrast might harbor heroic ambitions for himself and his verse; Harold Bloom remarks of Whitman: "For Whitman, as later for Mallarmé, the world exists in order to end up in a book; and the book is one written by a single lyric poet." 5 Students will be able to reflect why Whitman—writing his great celebrations of America in the 1850's—might have written differently when the leading social challenge was abolition and secession. For a poet like Edwin Arlington Robinson, the foes had become more internalized (industrialization, modernity, and dehumanization of progress). Both are assured to stand apart from our earliest example, that of Royall Tyler. All of them wrote sonnets, and yet the themes and characters, and the approach towards those two elements within the sonnets, will reflect the changes students learn about when studying history. Students will then be able to reasonably and reliably state some of the threads of continuity and difference between eras. They will form their own judgments or questions about each era: are some more abundant in talent, cultural wealth, aspiration and inspiration? Do some poets supersede the limitations, frustrations, and challenges of their eras?
The introduction of poets of color with such sonneteers as Paul Dunbar and Claude McKay will add an important dimension. Immediately, students will be able to recognize a different set of protagonists and antagonists—and find surprise in the fact that McKay will interject as many classical allusions as will Longfellow, that though a century may separate them McKay and Whitman share a passionate intensity and voracity that sets them apart from other American poets. Equally important, students will recognize in the contrast of "O Captain my Captain" by Whitman and "Douglass" by Dunbar, that two contemporaries (Lincoln and Douglass) can prompt the same intensity of emotion, evoke a similar tone, and address two such different social contexts—all at the same time. Students will also learn, however, that significant cultural differences will mark the tone and perspective of Whitman and Dunbar—that common topic will not necessarily correlate to common statement of theme or conclusions.
Equally important, as well, will be the introduction of women and minority poets with the onset of the Twentieth Century. Emma Lazarus will virtually usher them in with her maiden and goddess standing by the golden door to welcome the "wretched refuse" of "teeming shores" 6 The addition of female voices will provide students a compelling contrast to what has come before and we can discuss the difference in details poets focus on, the descriptive cast they lend to those details, and even the differences between women across eras as well. While Alice Dunbar Nelson and Edna St. Vincent Millay both speak to male-female relationships in their sonnets, Dunbar-Nelson's protagonist seems nowhere near ready to jettison a lover as will St. Vincent Millay in "Before this Cigarette is ended." Students will, consequently, be able to discern diversity in multiple dimensions—across race, gender, and time. The facts and events that characterize Modernism will lead them to conclude how and why Dunbar-Nelson and St. Vincent Millay cannot likely treat with love in the same manner.
Improve Composition
Jacques Barzun once said, "Convince yourself that you are working in clay, not marble, on paper not eternal bronze: Let that first sentence be as stupid as it wishes." 7 The virtue of reading a large number of sonnets will, ultimately, be to prompt students to produce their own. Gwendolyn Brooks, when asked why she continued to teach the sonnet even after she herself renounced it as a genre for herself, responded "There are certain hard specifics that can be taught. Sonnet rules. Guards against free verse imperiling. Iambic pentameter." 8 While she may renounce it herself, she does so only after mastery. There are fruits to be had from the labor of sonnet-writing, and Brooks learned them from authors such as Robert Hillyard, who characterized the sonnet as "statement, a development of the statement by metaphor, contrast, or comparison, a secondary development, and finally a restatement that paradoxically may be anticipation of a main idea." 9 Students will finish their unit by following the example of Brooks the teacher—they will imitate and then innovate. The process of writing their own sonnet will begin with structured imitation of an existing sonnet. This will force them to analyze the choices in diction, meter, rhyme, and subject matter of the sonnet.
Subsequent to that, students will realize that, in reproducing the meter, they cannot help but revise and revisit the poem multiple times. The shortness of the genre will allow three things to occur as a consequence—sustained effort on the part of the author because the work is so palpably manageable, close reading and critique by the student's classmates, who will be engaged in the same work as they, and the quick and focused feedback by the instructor that will necessarily start first and finally with content rather than formatting and style (though those still factor in). Students will have gleaned from their prior reading: a firm sense of what the form is or can be, a wide array of topics, a variety of speakers' personae to adopt in their writing, sufficient time and space to revise several times, and ownership (in the end) of their own diction and rhyme schemes. They will grow comfortable with the clay of their own language, their own objects and subjects, and set it to paper.
Comments: