In this course we will study the different ways that British and American poets have reacted to the great spectacle of Venice over the last two centuries. We will begin with Canto IV from Byron\'s Childe Harold\'s Pilgrimage, in which the poet, drawing on the tradition of the anti-myth of the city, established for future generations the \"romantic\" view of the city. However, this will be contrasted with his other great Venetian poem, \"Beppo\", in which he presents a lighter but far more complex picture of a living city, rather than a stately mausoleum. This double view of the city will act as a stimulus for our appraisal of contemporary poems by Shelley and works by poets of the Victorian age, such as Browning, Clough, Melville and Longfellow. We will examine the re-interpretation of the myth of Venice by Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot\'s darker vision of the city in \"Burbank with a Baedeker\". Other 20th-century poets considered will be James Merrill and William Logan. The course will conclude with a study of Anthony Hecht\'s narrative poem, \"Venetian Vespers\", in which the poet brilliantly exploits the tradition of the double-vision of the city, making it serve as an instrument for the exploration of the lacerated consciousness of the poem\'s protagonist.\r\n
The aim of the course will be to explore how major poets, prevalently from northern Protestant backgrounds, have reacted to the stimulus not only of Catholic Italy but of a city that has long been associated with commercial intrigue, sexual laxity and ambiguous morality. Students will be encouraged to observe how these writers have in some cases accepted traditional views of the city, but used them for their own specific purposes, or in other cases have overturned the conventions, helping to complicate our view of Venice and the Venetians. The students will be able to see how some of these writers react directly or indirectly to the works of their predecessors, in some cases showing all the classic symptoms of the \"anxiety of influence\". In addition, the course will stimulate the students to think beyond the simplified categories of standard literary histories, inviting them to question what we mean by \"Romanticism\", \"Victorianism\" or \"Modernism\".
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