A Broadsheet for the Examined Mind
Dispatches, close readings, and revision notes filed under Early Modern.
A complete sonnet-by-sonnet companion to the forty-six poems on the ENGL-200A reading list: the procreation sequence, the rival poet, the constancy poems, and the Dark Lady sonnets, each with a close reading and a route into an essay.
A study of Shakespeare’s Dark Lady sonnets: the anti-Petrarchan beauty of Sonnet 127, the anatomy of lust in 129, the parody of the blazon in 130, the puns on ‘Will,’ the two loves of 144, and the soul-and-body dialogue of 146.
A close guide to the opening book of Milton’s epic: the invocation and its theodicy, Satan’s rhetoric of the unconquerable will, the catalogue of fallen angels, and the building of Pandemonium as a parody of divine creation.
A study of Shakespeare’s first sonnet cluster: the procreation sonnets, the assault of time, the rival claims of children and verse, the gender trouble of Sonnet 20, and the consolations of love and memory in Sonnets 23, 29, and 30.
A canto-by-canto study of Book I of The Faerie Queene: Redcrosse’s wandering, Una’s constancy, Duessa’s falsehood, the House of Pride, the House of Holiness, and the dragon that turns a failed knight into Saint George.
