Well, I started my first class at Harvard last week. I’m taking Victorian Poetry and Non-Fictional Prose. I haven’t taken a poetry class since I was an undergraduate at Washington College (Romanticism and Contemporary Women’s Poetry), so my poetry reading skills are a bit rusty. I will say that I like the professor. Her approach is pretty old school. She emphasizes textual analysis (a la Cleanth Brooks) much like my mentor. Our first class was on Tennyson. I was very surprised by him. Granted, he was poet laureate of England, but that doesn’t always mean anything. I think my first paper is going to be on the conflict between the artist’s moral responsibility and his desire to live for his art. Tennyson is actually very much like Andre Gide. He too was conflicted by his attraction to the sensuous world and his strict religious beliefs and upbringing. Definitely read him if you get the chance! I highly recommend The Immoralist. That work really encompasses what he says throughout almost all of his writing. Plus it was one of the books (along with Wilde's Dorian Gray) that I wrote my undergrad thesis on.
This weekend I will be speaking at the Cape Cod AIDS Walk. I’m still working on what I’m going to say, but when I’m finished I’ll post it.
I’ve recently reconnected with a good friend of mine who I went to school with at the University of East Anglia. He recently published two books on D.H. Lawrence. One is his dissertation, the other he co-edited with prominent Lawrence scholar John Worthen. Right now my budget is pretty tight, so I can’t really afford to buy them. I will say that Andrew was the person who got me interested in Lawrence. His graduate work (as I remember) was incredibly insightful and thoughtful. He seems to have made quite an impression with the Lawrence scholars over here. However, he really didn’t enjoy university politics and is no longer teaching. Instead he’s chosen to pursue a career in publishing. He also just signed a contract with Cambridge University Press to do another book on Lawrence. I wish him luck.
