Placing in Context (Step 1) | Close Reading Poetry for Beginners

well welcome everyone to the first lecture on closer reading we are on the first step placing in context now I want us to think about placing in context a special way you know one way to look at it is to think of contacts as a bunch of historical and outside material that you have to research and bring to bear on the poem and sometimes that's true and sometimes such research is worth doing however that can seem pretty laborious and boring I want us to think of of context rather as and not this outside information but as a conversation many of the best poets live their lives in conversation with poetry John Keats is one of the best examples of a life just spent absorbed in poetry John keats's friend Charles Clark lent a copy of Edmund Spencer's the fairy queen to Keats Charles says that keats's first encounter with the book was like a young horse running through a meadow he went through it ramping he says Keats just devoured to the book and he returned to it throughout his life one of the things that really captured keats's imagination about Spencer was Spencer's epithets now an epithet is a short description of a scene or an object or a person now such epithets show how inventive Spencer was you have the phrase a troop of light-footed deities blood red Billows Spencer describes a horse as a froth foamy Steed and he describes a sword as a bright Dew burning blade all of these are really inventive epithets that Keats entered into conversation with one that Keats loved so much was sea shouldering whales Clark mentions how Keats sat up as he was reading the book and said what an image that is see shouldering whales whales shouldering the sea the way a soldier might carry a pack it was a very thought-provoking image now Spencer's art of the epithet influenced much of Keats his own writing and some of keats's epithets constitute a large portion of keitz's own contribution to the English language in English poetry now just to look at some of keats's own epithets that he would go on to write we have his famous sonnet when I have fears that I may cease to be we have several epithets included in fact see if you can find them the poem reads ...