ELISA NEW: Hi, I'm Elisa New.
I'm standing here in historic heart of Harvard University.
And my course is Poetry in America.
This course, Poetry in America, is an opportunity for students everywhere to
talk about poetry.
At the center of this course is conversation, conversation between
students, conversation between students and teachers, conversation
between students and experts, and conversations between and among people
who maybe don't read poetry very often, or maybe have always been
afraid of poetry.
STUDENT 1: The endpoint just fading, fading, fading, fading.
And then we have the word "thing," which is a kind of fading of itself,
because the word "thing" is indistinct.
It doesn't give us an image.
It's as though the language itself is fading.
And there's the lovely weight of words.
Stress actually plays out the concept, because fading things.
Stress and unstressed.
ELISA NEW: Right, the stress, and then we fade away.
STUDENT 2: I was a little bothered, though, by her description of this
toddler, who she clearly loves so much, as a fading thing.
You would think that this that this would be a young child, full of life,
maybe sickly, but certainly not a thing, one would hope.
STUDENT 3: You'd think what are fading things in the Puritan world?
You shouldn't get attached to, what, a fancy dress material?
Wealth, right?
You wouldn't think your grandkid.
STUDENT 2: Right, exactly.
STUDENT 4: But that's also a part of the anger, right?
It is to call her grandchild a fading thing now that she has been afflicted
with grief.
PROFESSOR: See how she's actually done it is to stab
stitch through the paper.
There are some single sheets as well as folded sheets.
And you can see the sewing holes.
So that's another part of the evidence that scholars have used to try to
reassemble what the fascicles were.
The size of the sewing holes, how much stress there would have been on it, in
a certain position.
ELISA NEW: The course is set in a historic place, and it's set in a
place that coincidentally is where the history of American poetry began.
Just a few blocks from here the very first English poems written in North
America were printed.
STUDENT 2: (SINGING) To waters calmly, gently leads.
Restore my soul doth He.
ALL: (SINGING) To waters calmly, gently leads.
Restore my soul doth He.
STUDENT 2: (SINGING) He doth in paths of righteousness for His
name's sake lead me.
ALL: (SINGING) To doth in paths of righteousness--
ELISA NEW: That's beautifully terrifying.
ALL: (SINGING) --for His name's sake lead me.
STUDENT 5: I always think of the portraits you see of people in
military garb, at royal ceremonies, where their dress is not quite, but
nearly as impressive as the royalty that they're standing next to, that
they have this sort of air about them of elevation above a normal level of
life, or distance from it.
STUDENT 6: Another interpretation, if it is a son, in fact, then the fact
that he's using words like, "my comrade" suggests that he's sort of
giving away this relationship that he holds dear to him to the state or to
the bigger, greater cause.
STUDENT 7: Or is it more of a mechanical thing, a standard
procedure, in that its his comrade, its his fellow soldier, and this is
just business as usual?
STUDENT 8: It definitely stands in pretty stark contrast to the lyre
being the instrument that represented poetry.
And now we have the bugle and the drum.
Kind of more subduing instruments instead of accompanying.
STUDENT 9: This huge event has happened that has just been
life-changing, and not in a positive way on the soldiers.
But they've kind of revealed the truth that war is more than just the
physical injuries, the losing of friends.
It's this, like you said, psychic wound.
STUDENT 8: In this course we offer you the opportunity in a very hands-on way
to experience what it is to think through a poem, which is very, very
active process.