A Medley of Lyric Poems

Homer
The Iliad
The Odyssey

Virgil
The Aeneid

Aeschylus
The Oresteia

Sophocles
Oedipus

Boethius
Consolation of Philosophy

Dante
The Divine Comedy
Passages from “La Vita Nuova” (“The New Life”)

Chaucer
Canterbury Tales
“The Prologue” & “The Knight’s Tale”
“The Miller’s” & “The Reeves Tale”
“The Friar’s,” “Pardoner’s,” and “The Summoner’s Tales”
“The Wife of Bath’s,” “The Franklin’s” and “The Clerk’s Tale”
The Three Church Male Officials
The Women in Chaucer

The Protestant and Catholic Souls
Milton, Paradise Lost
Dante, The Divine Comedy 

Shakespeare
All’s Well That Ends Well 
Merchant of Venice
Othello 
Midsummer Night’s Dream 
Antony and Cleopatra 
Winter’s Tale 
Hamlet 
King Lear
Pericles
The Tempest

Dostoevsky 
The Brothers Karamazov

Melville
Moby-Dick 
Billy Budd 

Hawthorne 
Scarlet Letter 

Jane Austen
Pride and Prejudice


Short Stories:
Eudora Welty 
“Why I Live at the P.O.” 
“Petrified Man” 

E. B. White 
“Once More to the Lake” 

Earnest Hemingway 
“The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” 
“A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” 
“Hills Like White Elephants” 

Flannery O’Conner
“A Good Man is Hard to Find”
“Greenleaf”
“Revelation”
“Heart of the Park”

 William Faulkner 
“That Evening Sun” 

Returning to Long Narratives:
Katherine Anne Porter 
“Flowering Judas” 

Hemingway
Old Man and the Sea

Faulkner 
The Sound and the Fury 
Go Down, Moses 
The Hamlet 
The Town 
The Mansion 

Flannery O’Conner
The Violent Bear It Away

G. K. Chesterton
Orthodoxy
And Other Works

C.S. Lewis 
Till We Have Faces 
Humanitarian Theory of Punishment
Abolition of Man

J.R.R. Tolkien
The Lord of the Rings

T.S. Eliot 
Murder in the Cathedral 
“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (divided into parts, treated as lyric read before class) 
The Four Quartets (also divided up and read before starting the assigned longer works) 

Scripture
Gospel of Matthew
Gospel of John
Book of Revelation

Apologetics
St. John Paul II - Fides et Ratio
Pope Benedict XVI - Regensburg Address
G.K. Chesterton - Orthodoxy
C.S. Lewis - Abolition of Man

 
Community Talks/Public Lectures

Lyric Poetry (all the lyrics were read before taking up the longer works in each class. The aim was twofold: to give students some experience of the lyric (the third of the three genres, lyric, drama, and narrative); and also to reinforce an important principle, that all works of literature take their rise from a principle of music: the lyric only makes that principle explicit. 

Psalms, Ovid, medieval lyrics, Chaucer, Raleigh, Wyatt, Shakespeare, Donne, Herbert, Blake, Browning, Wordsworth, Hopkins, Jones Very, Yeats, Kavanagh, Dickenson, Housman, Frost, Eliot, Gioia, Wilber, Gjertrud Schnackenberg, Tate, and others…. 

Readings from Plato, Aristotle, and St. Thomas (the Summa and other works). 

Overview Discussion Topics

Prospective Works, in the Making and Coming Up:  
Aeschylus, The Trilogy (Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers, and the Eumenides) 
Sophocles, Oedipus Rex and Oedipus at Colonus 
Austen, Mansfield Park 
Dickens, Tale of Two Cities (Great Expectations) 
Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment 
Conrad, “The Heart of Darkness” 
Joyce, The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Camus, The Stranger and The Plague
Eliot, “The Waste Land” “Gerontiun,” “The Hollow Men,” and “Ash Wednesday” 
Hemingway, Old Man and the Sea 
McEwen, Atonement 

And maybe, if Suzanne survives me and has to do it (!) Tolkien’s’ trilogy and the Hobbit 

The movies: 
Winter’s Tale (Shakespeare) 
Departures (Japanese—sub-titled) 
The Judge 
The Reivers
Dog 

Woodcuttings 
Dürer, “The Mass of St. Gregory”