Class Summary

For those who missed class on March 5, we missed you! Here are some notes that occurred to me while writing an e-mail to an ill absentee who asked what she missed:

Laurie Schaffler spoke on Ezra Pound's Canto One comparing it to the opening of Book 11 of The Odyssey [Robert Fitzgerald’s translation]. She noted the liberties Pound takes in "translating" 130 lines and reducing them to 66. It was pointed out that this reveals an aesthetic that prizes condensation, compression, and the lyric impulse at the expense of leisurely narrative. The importance of this aesthetic in the modernist revolution sparked by Pound and Eliot. The use of Tiresias -- the blind prophet from whom Odysseus takes counsel in the underworld -- in Eliot's "The Waste Land" and in "Canto One." Can it be that Pound carved his canto out of Book 11 of The Odyssey (in which Odysseus visits the underworld) in part because it affords him the chance to appropriate Tiresias as a prophet regarding his own journey of "The Cantos"? Surely the Ulysses in Dante and Tennyson bears a closer resemblance to that of Homer than does the Ulysses in Pound's Canto One.

Laurie noted that DL spends summers in Ithaca, NY.

Speculation on the symbolic resonance of the Lotus Eaters, the Sirens, and the Cyclops as perils facing the universal mariner. The first two categories are easy enough to understand. But the cyclops? The suggestion was advanced most shyly and tentatively that the cyclops as a beast was "a one-eyed monster," pure phallus with only hungers, no spiritual or intellectual dimension. Matt Cunha pointed out that the cyclops was indeed "a dick."

David West spoke on Ulysses as a character in Dante (canto 26) and Tennyson. Odysseus's last voyage: the inevitability thereof, as how could a man who lived for adventure ever feel quite at home staying in one place, administering the kingdom of Ithaca? Rebellion against age, "rage against the dying of the light" (as Dylan Thomas put it). Condescension to Telemachus. Conception of heroism. Individual lines of Tennyson were quoted and analyzed for their uncanny poetic effects. Cavafy's poem on the importance of the journey, rather than the destination is seen as consistent with the view of Ulysses in Dante and Virgil.

Auerbach's essay was reviewed in brief . Statements about Penelope and Odysseus as a couple equally matched in wits and wiles were summarized. A poem based on the Scylla and Charybdis episode was read aloud.

A heartfelt thank you to Laurie and David and all who spoke out in class.

-- DL