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Mr. Walker. Love the lectures. One thought. You might enjoy reading Hopkins a bit more in the style of Walter Jackson Bate. When he read Hopkins aloud, it was completely different from reading, say, Keats. You really have to sit up straight or stand up and play with the timpanis, as it were, focusing on the prosody and not being gentle at all, almost like John Phillip Sousa. “Thrush’s eggs look little low heavens.” Bang bang bang bang bang bang. It only makes sense as a bombastic alliterative audio explosion and it just doesn’t work arranged on lute as you have it. Likewise, when you hit the spondees it’s a real climax as in Most O MAID’s CHILD THY CHOICE … (sotto voce) and worth the winning.” Or “kingdom of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding” only makes sense as music - and as Beethoven, very dramatic music. No offense, one can always have one’s own interpretation, but just so you know, Professor Bate arranged it much bigger and I think it got the essence of why Hopkins was different and was quite effective.

Adam, this was excellent, thank you. As we await the release and discussion of the large canon you've compiled, it made me wonder whether in fact there is such a thing as a singular canon. Or, as I believe you're suggesting, there are as many canons as there are "big questions" which humans grapple with. In which case, should a definitive anthology or master canon best be construed as a compilation of works which address the most common of these big questions? Interested in others' thoughts.

@closereadingpoetry I'm not sure if you'll see this, but I want to point out that "ok" means "and" in Old Norse. Given the Old English/Norse flavour of the songs, it does fit, and reading the texts with this translation in mind makes them much more coherent, I find.

The child is father to the man. Nice commentary on a great poet who should never go out of fashion.

I love this info. But I can't find the downloads on his website. Bummer. But I will keep listening. I love iambic pentameter.

This is awesome

Exciting! I can't wait to hear your thoughts on how to make your own canon

I like your style

I highly recommend reading the original 1949 Oxford University Press Gilbert Highet's The Classical Tradition: Greek and Roman Influences on Western Literature as a sound foundation in navigating the Western Canon waters. There's nothing quite like it to-date, in terms of the prose style, scholastic scope, your attention to the subtleties and nuances of Greek and Latin and how they proved indispensable in setting into motion the emergence of new languages in Europe.

I re-entered the world of literature in earnest a couple of years ago when my mother died. My mother had been an English major and introduced me to literature when I was still fairly young, giving me first an anthology of e e cummings' work and then the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (her own mother's favorite), then the Grand Inquisitor and so on. She also loved classical music and ballet and told us stories of how as a young woman living in New York City she had waited after a performance to see her demi-god, Rudolf Nureyev, emerge from the stage door. She was clearly transported back to the moment as she relayed how gracious he'd been to his crowd of fans, and how they'd swarmed the car that slowly carried him down Broadway, running alongside it chanting, "Rudi! Rudi! Rudi!..." When she slipped away from us I felt brutalized by the silencing of her stories, the snuffing out of the universe that had been her. I couldn't talk to anybody about her, I couldn't go to grief support groups, I didn't know how to go on. Then I remembered a poem my Medieval History professor had read aloud many, many years ago when I was in college, "The Wanderer." So I read it. And then I read more Anglo-Saxon poetry. It was all about all the things I myself was feeling, the bleak landscapes, the ancient ruins of a lost golden age, all that stuff. And it helped. Then last year I got a chance to teach American literature, a subject I never taught before so I streamed lectures on the topic and did a lot of reading and put together a class, flying by the seat of my pants. Most of the time, it worked well because I had such great students who were more than ready to go on this journey with me. So I've decided to keep reading, a pastime I'd loved so much when I was young. It's been great to return to it, it's been like a homecoming. Thank you so much for continuing on this topic. I'm very much looking forward to your canon.

Love this Channel.

Thank you for this video and your advice! <3

Adam: your bit about your mystical childhood experiences in the woods of Louisiana resonated with me. I grew up in the Sierra Nevada mountains of eastern Fresno county, California; and I too, had mystical/religious experiences in the woods. Thank you for reminding me of what makes life worth living: to contemplate the ineffable. Cheers!

Adam: you shouldn't beat yourself up for not currently being able to appreciate restoration era dramas... In my own experience, it seems that the older I get, the more my attention span seems to get depleted, lol....so, for example, I attempted watching your entire English lectures playlist last month; but then once I got annoyed by the poor video quality of your video on the Middle English period of the English language, I gave up. Long story short: the point of this comment is to encourage yourself, and any other person who reads this, to never succumb to self-doubt when it comes to one's passion for reading....so what if you never come to appreciate the restoration dramas? Everyone has their own interests; and there's nothing wrong with that. When I was a teenager, I read a LOT of books at a very quick pace. (I read a lot of Stephen King's novels, several by J.R.R. Tolkien, several by Jack Kerouac, and some philosophy books; by the time I was 17 I had finished reading the Bible. I only started appreciating poetry once I was in my mid-20's.) However, now that I read at a much slower pace; still, I refuse to allow that to derail my life-long education/reading goals. (I own Fagles' trilogy of the Illiad, the Odyessy, and the Aenied; I don't know if I'll ever possess the dedication to read them all from beginning to end, but at least they're there for me to thumb through random passages.) Adam: thanks for doing what you do! Also: I appreciate the shorter-form content of this video; please create some more videos of this length. Have a good day, my friend. (Although we've never met in real life, I still consider you a friend, LOL)

Just prior to you mentioning C.S. Lewis I was remarking to myself how much your words reminded me of Surprised by Joy!

I like this video. You give good advice. Jeff

Hello Adam! Though we only know each other through CZcams, I can’t help but call you a friend. Your work on here has helped kindle a long-lost proclivity for literature. On the topic of canons, I have in mine from Whitman: And that my soul embraces you this hour, and we affect each other without ever seeing each other, and never perhaps to see each other, is every bit as wonderful. And that I can think such thoughts as these is just as wonderful, And that I can remind you, and you think them and know them to be true, is just as wonderful. And that the moon spins round the earth and on with the earth, is equally wonderful, And that they balance themselves with the sun and stars is equally wonderful.

Thank you for the video, it really helped me to structure my studies

Great video👍 especially on reading as self-discovery.

Adam, mate...though separated by age, and a bit by geography (St. Louis) mostly, your experience of the motivation to read, and more particularly, to read to understand the ineffable, made me think back to when, after a divorce at 30, reading mostly non fiction: history, philosophy, politics, etc. I was walking down a rainy St. Louis, October street, and was struck with how I'd been hunting the wrong game. That life wasn't a rational proposition necessarily. It was then I leaned into poetry and fiction generally. For what it's worth, here's my top ten...after all these years: Shakespeare Beckett TS Eliot Emily Dickinson Whitman Gerard Manley Hopkins Bukowski Harold Pinter Sam Shepard - David Mamet I never remarried, though I did read a lot more...Cheers!

Thanks; btw the very brief cv helped explain how that strange mark was left. The tbh I found the comparison between canon reading and trawling for fish a little uncomfortable.

Most conversations about the canon center on the perspective of the reader who is working to compile or receive a list of the best writing a language or culture has produced. It is a daunting but fulfilling task. For me, as a writer and poet, the question is always - how can I produce work that is worthy of such an ancestry as this? How can I deliver experiences that are shaped by an expansive devotion to technique, while sharing in unique modes of expression a variety of feelings and realizations that are common to us all regardless of age, gender, color or creed? I am getting ready to publish my seventh book of Wild Sonnets, taking my own literary adventure to the next milestone of the 700th poem. It is not for me to say that this body of work will ever be included in anyone’s canon. But I consider my practice to be guided by the best of those who have written before me, and hope those who read me now will believe these efforts deserve to be shared with the generations to come. Thanks, Adam, for this channel. It is a delight to have literature discussed with such concentrated intelligence.

The cannon is apocalyptic. There can be nothing new. Its over. Now the educated person is a archivest.

I love your nuanced reading; the attention to detail.

I have a similar experience to yours, a lot of time in nature as a child, although my spiritual awakening was triggered by reading rather than the other way around. Particularly important to me were the sonnets of Shakespeare, which can be read in many ways. Now, it is my goal to write and to pass my experience on to others.

Thanks as always for the great video - and what a wonderful essay. thanks for sharing.

Your thoughts on the canon, as well as the essays by Lewis and others that you mentioned on your other video on the topic, has inspired me to consciously form my own canon. I began the process a few years ago, bringing together works of literature encountered throughout my life together in my personal library only to be struck by a kind of imposter syndrome - the doubt that what I was undertaking was not up to ‘proper literary standards.’ Now, I won’t let self-doubt hold me back from the self-forming work of personal canon formation.

Re: Craig Morgan's Almost Home...I went to a Baptist funeral where they referred to "going home" as death. A funeral is a home coming. The poem about the homeless man going home reminds me of the scene from the movie Groundhog Day, where Bill Murray's character tries over and over to save the homeless man's life, but he cannot. God's plan is stronger than what we can do. I love how you compare modern songs to the great poets. You also did it in your Taylor Swift video. Please do more of that. It gives people an inroad into great literature of the past and shows how contemporary songs are really poetry worthy of close study.

Truth is, we still are expected to know bible studies, the basic at least. I find this expectation not only eurocentric but an implicit religious imposition. I think at some point we have to recognise that biblical references, even though they have been heavily referenced or used as material (Milton), are only ONE way of reading a text. Christianity has been for the most part, a colonial instrument. Expecting students to know bible in order to truly interpret a work is ignorant. (I know this is off topic, but im just sharing the unchanged university syllabus)

APPRECIATE YOU -lit student

I am unable to find the link to download the handout to the above lesson.

Please do make a video about how to create your own canon!!!!

Lana del Rey uses the line nothing gold can stay in some songs

Thanks. I appreciate the context you provide for what happened in the 1980s and 1990s, when I happened to be in college and graduate school. I totally agree with the middle way you seem to be describing. I believe it is cultural suicide to totally throw out the canon. Having a canon gives us a common cultural memory. We need to be able to intelligently discuss, define, and describe what is "great literature" from the past, so that when excellent, new pieces are created, we'll be able to recognize their significance and understand why they may be considered great too. If everything is relative, and there are no standards or guiding stars to look up to, we end up with a pile of nothing.

WOW, six months later and you have FORTY THOUSAND subscribers! It feels wonderful to see great work rewarded this way! And so quickly! I can't speak for anyone else but I suspect it's not only your insight into literature, but also your humility and sense of balance and fair play that are attracting so many people to your work. I'm so encouraged by this, given that we're living through such a contentious time in history.

Well the whole concept of a canon is that it’s widely recognized and taught. You can have your own favorite works, of course, but within any one culture, there can by definition be only one canon - unless there is no canon. You can’t just have your “own” canon (and therefore an infinite set of “canons” across society) because then there wouldn’t be any widely taught and discussed body of work (and therefore there would be no canon). I would say now that we are clearly losing the canon or have lost it. Many know vaguely what it is but people are not usually teaching to it. If you look at the faculty of the American Studies Ph.D. program at Harvard, for example, maybe 2 of the 16 core faculty work on any canonical American texts.

I have thoroughly studied the literature on the canon debates, and it appears you and I agree a great deal about the utility and limitations of "a canon," and we both seem far more interested in the building of a "personal canon". Some of your favorite poets, you say, are non-canonical. All of mine are non-canonical.

Phenomenal video

In a sense, it is also a carpe diem poem.

You are such an inspiration- loving the way you teach thank you

I’ve read a lot of Blooms writing on Shakespeare and I had noticed myself that he does expect you to take a lot of what he says as fact without him providing enough evidence. For example in Hamlet he says that ‘To be or not to be’ is absolutely not a contemplation of self slaughter, maybe so but he doesn’t really give his reasons for thinking so. He says thay Hamlet is totally incapable of love, he doesn’t love his father or Horatio or Ophelia. again maybe so but he just says it and moves on. He also totally dismisses the notion of a oedipus complex because of Hamlets last words to his mother. I think it certainly can confuse and distract a reader if they take these things as gospel and let it influence their own conclusions too much.

But does this rather egalitarian/epicurean view - that literature should be for pleasure - account for the commercialization of literature? I, too, struggle with this idea of to Canon, or not to Canon? Yet, I also fear that making literature too utilitarian will strip some fundamental characteristic from what we define as “literature,” which takes as a fundamental part of its definition something exclusive. I have spent a good portion of my life working in factories and rubbing elbows with blue-collar workers (in fact, in between semesters, over the summers, I still work in one), many of whom could care less about “literary value” and “canons” and “literature,” seeing it all as an ivory-tower sort of practice. So, I also wonder, if, in a move towards a kind of equitability, “literature,” itself, needs to change? Because, while there is the Garnderian idea of being the torch which lights the way - a sentiment shared by Bloom in his How to Read and Why and Dickinson in her poem “The poets light but lamps” - if that torch is being ignored, only followed by those inclined to follow it, aren’t we just arguing for the survival of our own exclusive discipline? And, if so, how are we to promote the necessity of literature (in its elitist definition) without devaluing it to something commercial? Or, is that the greatest irony of all: that literature, in a pragmatic sense, is valueless and that is its greatest quality? This, of course, circles back to my original question of commercialization: what would be lost without the specialized study of literature? The intensity of being moved rather than just having an emotional response? Is literature - Dante, Milton, Shakespeare, etc. - just about the same kinds of pleasure we can get from, say, Marvel movies? Or, is there something about the difficulty of the pleasure that separates it (a separation that would inherently led to a certain elitism)? Is that what makes something Art (i.e. THE canon) rather than mere entertainment? And should there be a distinction between the two? As stated, this is a question almost perpetually on my mind and I appreciate and enjoy your articulation of it. Yet, as most of life seems to be throwing language at a thing until it makes sense, or “clicks,” I could use some more volleys.

you are absolutely adorable, thank you for making me fall in love with poetry

I saw one of your videos that came up and watched it and I am happy I did. I love your videos, you are so smart, easy to listen to, and make everything easy to understand. I look forward to seeing more of them. I subscribed to your channel a day or two ago. These videos about Poetry are wonderful. Thank you so much, Jeff

Like most people, my thoughts on the canon are complex. I see the harm that it has done, where writers and texts have been excluded for arbitrary reasons like taste and morals or for more systematically harmful reasons like race and gender, and as a result the works are denied the wide readership that canonical literature enjoys. Because of the canon's exclusive nature, we miss on a lot if we limit ourselves to it, if we take the list and stick to it, if we come to believe that texts not on it are in some way less than. But... most of us don't do this. I love Dickens, I love Shelley, Frost, Austen, and Shakespeare, and I'm grateful to the canon for having made them so easy for me to find and approach. I'm indebted to these writers and I don't think I'd love reading as much as I do without them. But I'm also grateful that all a canon is, at the end of the day, is a list. A really good list, but still just a list. We're not beholden to it in any way, though some may act like we are. I like to think of it along the same terms I do my lit surveys. These courses are meant to be samples or tastes of what we'll ideally want to continue eating, and they're usually developed with a canon in mind. If the canon's the trunk, then surveys are their branches. And, as said, their purpose is to get us to want more of what they offer or to see where else they lead; what we get from them are the leaves and apples and whatever else they grow or we read. Canons introduce us to something that will be invaluable to us in our lives. I like the positive you mentioned, about how our time is precious. For me, literature and reading make my hours and my life more rich, and the canon is part of what helped me find this love and this richness. Do I think many of them are in need of reform? Certainly. Do I also think that, for all their faults, canons are necessary for what Wordsworth and then Helen Vendler called "what we have loved"? I do. Excellent think-piece, and I am excitedly awaiting your video on our own canons.

Happy Independence Day mr Adam. Thank you for your wonderful cultural literary channel. I gathered main information about topic you mentioned briefly here it’s canon is term derived from Ancient Greek word for measuring, or standard. Canon means too acceptable or rule . Literary canon is technical term used to describe set of texts that serve as recognized standard of stylistic quality, cultural or social significance, and intellectual value . Canon have great influence of formation of American canon autonomous traditions was exercised by critical career of willam dean Howells who supported many writers, - not only those we now consider traditional ( such as Henry James , mark Twain, Stephen crane ,Frank Norris). Book can be considered part of canon book has to be more them great and able to withstand test of time . Current canon has important themes and lessons, but from of these themes are uninteresting to audiences, because outdated they are . Poetic canon is list of authors works considered to be central to identity of given literary tradition or culture. Example of canon can also be body of work like Shakespeare canon which , includes all bard plays and poems. English canon poets such as Edmund Spenser, sir Philip Sidney, Christopher marrow, Ben Johnson, John Donne. Literary canon refers to highly valued , high cultural texts , it’s makes professors, famous authors , editors of prestigious journals have been canon determined by elite group of scholars and critics who embraced work of art , and sent defying realm . I hope you like my research. Best wishes for you your dearest ones .

This is one of the most beautifully made video i have seen recently. Thank you. ❤

“Canon building is empire building. Canon defense is national defense. Canon debate, whatever the terrain, nature, and range… is the clash of cultures. And all of the interests are vested.” - Toni Morrison

This video and Adam's opinions remind me of Nicanor Parra's poem "Young Poets." A short, beautiful piece encouraging artistic liberties and innovations. I'd recommend a brief Google search to read the poem! :-)