Original subtitles

Hello everyone, I'm Dr.

Adam Walker, and I'm here to introduce a course that I'll be teaching on Patreon

in the spring of 2025.

And I will also be releasing some of the lectures from that course on the YouTube

here. The course is called The Bible in English Poetry. Let me tell you a little

bit about the goals of this course.

This is beginner-friendly, by the way.

So it invites readers who have never read the Bible, as well as those who are

acquainted with it.

and the focus is really going to be upon the literary influence of the Bible. But

as the title suggests, there are two goals, and the first is to provide an

introduction to the Christian scriptures as compiled in the Old and New

Testaments of the King James Bible, also sometimes called the Authorized Version

of 1611.

we're going with the king james not because it's the best translation there

are better english translations but we're going with the kjv because this is

the bible that really influenced literature this is the bible that for

the following three centuries after its publication was on every shelf of pretty

much every major poet and in every major household for the sake of brevity we

will not be considering the apocrypha which was published in the KJV in 1611.

Instead, we're just going to focus on the kind of scriptural canonical works

of the English Protestant tradition, which is just simply the Old and New

Testaments. And the lectures, the readings, the discussions will all aim

at introducing the Bible to readers of literature and in a way that introduces

it to people who really have very little experience with it as well.

The second goal is to consider how English and American poetry engages with

the Bible, not only through allusions. And we can often think of, okay, well,

poetry is indebted to the Bible because there's this allusion to Deborah or

Mary's song.

But there's more than just allusions that's important in English literature

in relation to the Bible. We're not going to just be looking at...

what these allusions mean. We're also going to be looking at borrowed imagery

and how poets, religious and non-religious, have reimagined

and creatively appropriated modes of the Bible through its discourse, through its

imagery, of course, as well as its cadence and rhythm, along with its

methods of social critique, narrative art, and philosophical and theological

perspectives. All of that's going to be there.

In this respect, there is no such thing as a literary sanctity. Anything that

falls within the bounds of human life and experience and its representation in

literature will be fair game.

However, one thing to keep in mind is that this is a literature course.

So it's not a theology or religion course.

It's a literature course.

Theology... history religion will all be considered often especially in the

context of the poets we're studying but the focus is on the bible as literature

and as a sport as a source of literary inspiration matthew arnold wrote that to

understand that the language of the bible is fluid passing in literary not

rigid fixed and scientific is the first step towards a right understanding of

the bible

I think this is at least true for a right understanding of the Bible as

literature. And this statement, I think, is helpful to keep in remembrance, as

this course will invite us to consider how the Bible can be all six of these

things, fluid, rigid, passing, fixed, literary, and scientific.

All kinds of readers are encouraged to...

watch along in the videos or join the course on Patreon.

The more discussion we have, the more religious and non-religious diversity we

have in the discussions, I think the more those discussions are going to be

enriched. So many times people of different traditions or outside of the

Christian and Judeo-Christian perspective will often see things that

those of us within it I don't see. The diversity here is really encouraged.

Readers who are deeply committed as religious people and are committed to a

certain hermeneutic, a way of interpreting scripture, will actually

need to be flexible in this course.

They should be willing to recognize that the Bible has been the source of many

kinds of literary creativity, many kinds of philosophies, practices, and

theologies. As the enjoyment of fiction, depends upon what Samuel Taylor

Coleridge called the willing suspension of disbelief.

This course, or at least our critical readings of the Bible, will depend upon

your willing suspension of belief and disbelief alike.

And so you're going to have to step into this world to understand how the poets,

many of whom were believers and who did approach the Bible reverently, saw it

as a source of inspiration.

to believe in it and we're also going to have to imagine different possibilities

of believing what is said in this text so right i am a literary person i did

spend some time in seminary studying hermeneutics and also some philosophy a

little bit of church history but my focus is it will be on literature so

this is a literature course

Some of the poets we're going to be reading in this round, and I might offer

this course several times in the next few years and just do a different set of

poems each time because there's just so much you can do.

Here are some of the poems, or rather the poets, whom we'll be discussing in

this course in this particular cycle.

Dylan Thomas, Christina Rosetti, W.H. Auden, Siegfried Sassoon,

Emily Dickinson, Wilfred Owen.

John Henry Newman, George Herbert, John Donne, John Milton, William Wordsworth,

Christopher Smart, Marianne Moore, Lord Byron, Walt Whitman, Allen Ginsberg,

John Keats, Alfred Lord Tennyson, William Butler Yeats, T.S. Eliot, Edith

Sitwell, among a couple others.

So these are the big, big names here. Something to mention, something I should

mention, is that for the readings each week, I've selected about 30 minutes

worth of reading from the King James Bible itself.

We're going to go in order from Genesis all the way to Revelation.

And we're not going to be reading everything. Of course, you know, if you

have the time, you could read through the entire Bible in a semester along

with me in this course.

But really, I've selected just about 30 minutes to 40 minutes of reading from

the King James version of the Bible each week.

So it's manageable. You can do it on your lunch break or whenever you do your

reading The other thing that's going to be so there are three components each

week of the readings. The first is the King James the second is a handful of

poems that I have listed on the syllabus and Then the third is this optional

reading Reverend Noah Bailey who is a minister here in Cambridge,

Massachusetts, he's also a PhD candidate at Queen's University Belfast, has

written a summary of the entire Bible with footnotes to the references.

Reverend Bailey and I have collaborated on an article on poetry and homiletics

recently, and he's very familiar with the Bible, so he's put together this

summary so that you can have this bird's eye view of the entire story. And it's

told from a very, like, historically Christian, pretty much Western

narrative of the Bible, meaning that...

the christian traditions that have existed in england since the medieval

period whether it's early christianity roman catholicism or protestantism would

all pretty much agree with what this summary says and that that packet is

part of a book we're working on introducing the bible as literature and

with literature one component of the book has the summary of the bible the

other has

introductions to the poetry so for those of you who want to be able to be

confident in navigating the bible in understanding what its major genres are

how the books are divided this packet is going to be indispensable to you and

reverend bailey is also going to be giving one of the lectures for this

course this document will be provided on patreon now let me tell you about some

of the lectures that i'll be delivering live the first one a lecture's titled

the bible in you Myth as personal history. Week two, lecture Christian

typology in English poetry.

And this is a really important concept that often gets overlooked.

So we're going to be considering the importance of typology, which is a type

of symbol, you might say.

Lecture three, biblical symbols in the devotional mode.

So if you're looking at the devotional mode in English poetry, the Hebrew roots

of romantic verse.

The sacred history in English poetry.

Sacred history would be the historical books of the Old Testament dealing with

the kings and the kingdoms.

We have two weeks on the historical books, sacred history, and the sacred

present will be the next lecture I give.

After that, we'll be into the prophets.

Major and minor prophets.

We'll have some readings from Jeremiah, Isaiah,

Ezekiel, and Lamentations.

And this lecture is going to be called Poetry in the Prophetic Mode.

Then we'll have Spring Break, and then Week 8.

We'll have psalmody and hymnody in the English tradition. So my lectures, you

can see, it's really focused on the literature and the engagement with the

Bible and literature. So you really get both halves.

First with Reverend Bailey's packet, and the other half.

with my lectures here they really go hand in hand the next lecture is going

to be poetry and the parable we're going to be focusing on the gospels and i have

selections from each of the four gospels mostly parabolic next epistles and

experience be reading mostly the pauline epistles here and uh john dunn's sonnet

so this lecture will be on dunn's engagement with the pauline epistles in

his holy sonnets

In the last week of course the apocalyptic imagination, and I think

we've got Yates. We've got Blake It's gonna be a lot, but it's gonna be a lot

of fun So the main thing is what are you going to get out of this?

The Bible is long our time is short so as I said We won't be reading every

single book of the Bible But by the end of the course if you stick with me you

will know what each book of the Bible contains

You will have a basic concept of the narrative structure of the Bible, the

whole arc from Genesis to Revelation, and how it all fits together. You'll be

more confident in navigating its books and chapters, and you'll also be

confident in identifying the major genres.

And you'll also, I hope, be more sensitive to the literary reverberations

of the King James Bible.

traditions of English language poetry so if you're new to the Bible or if you're

familiar with it already and you want to learn a little bit about its influence

on literature

this is really the course for you. So I hope you'll join either on Patreon, or I

hope you'll tag along at least for the lectures on YouTube, which are sponsored

by the patrons on Patreon.

You can find the syllabus to this course in the description below. You can also

find the link to Patreon if you want to join, and along with some other

information there that I think might be helpful.

Thanks everyone for watching, and I look forward to seeing you all next spring.