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Introduction
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Worlds and Lives (AQA Poetry Anthology)
In this course, Professor John McRae (University of Nottingham) explores the fifteen poems that make up the ‘Worlds and Lives’ cluster for GCSE English Literature (AQA). Each poem is read in detail, with a short commentary highlighting aspects of language, style, themes, motifs, and so on. In the case of Wordsworth’s ‘Lines Written in Early Spring’, for example, we think about the importance of the concordance between man and nature in Romantic thought, while in Percy Bysshe Shelley’s ‘England in 1819’ we think about the hope with which Shelley ends the poem – and so on for the same collection.
The poems discussed in this course are:
1. William Wordsworth, Lines Written in Early Spring (1798)
2. Percy Bysshe Shelley, England in 1819 (written 1819, published 1839)
3. Emily Brontë, Shall earth no more inspire me (written 1841, published 1850)
4. George Eliot, In a London Drawingroom (written 1869, published in 1959)
5. James Berry, On an Afternoon Train from Purley to Victoria, 1955 (1990)
6. Raman Mundair, Name Journeys (2003)
7. shamshad khan, pot (2007)
8. Seni Seneviratne, A Wider View (2007)
9. Liz Berry, Homing (2014)
10. Imtiaz Dharker, A century later (2014)
11. Louisa Adjoa Parker, The Jewellery Maker (2018)
12. Raymond Antrobus, With Birds You’re Never Lonely (2019)
13. Roger Robinson, A Portable Paradise (2019)
14. Grace Nichols, Like an Heiress (2020)
15. Caleb Femi, Thirteen (2020)
Introduction
In this lecture, we provide an introduction to the set of poems that make up the Worlds and Lives cluster, exploring some of the themes that run through the collection, and especially the conflict between man and nature, and the relationship between past, present and future.
Hello. I'm Tom McCray,
00:00:06and the program we're talking about is World and lives for the AQA.
00:00:07And these are poems,
00:00:13and you mustn't be put off by the fact that these are poems
00:00:16because They could be many of them could be rap,
00:00:19many of them could be a comedy scene.
00:00:22They are social descriptions their political descriptions,
00:00:25their personal descriptions.
00:00:29They cover the world of nature, which is the old way of
00:00:31seeing the environment.
00:00:36We know, consider so many things to be environmental problems.
00:00:37Wordsworth would have called it the world of nature, but
00:00:43what we're showing here is how tremendously relevant some of
00:00:47these older texts are, and how they fit very nicely
00:00:51with some of the concerns of modern writing.
00:00:56One of the things that all of the texts have in common
00:01:00is that they are trying or they think they are trying to use
00:01:05ordinary language.
00:01:11I e the language of people.
00:01:13Now, when wordsworth was doing that. He was reacting
00:01:16against the writers of a century before him, whom he
00:01:20admired, people like Alexander Pope,
00:01:24but he wanted to get away from the highfalutin artificial language
00:01:28that he felt was dominating poetry.
00:01:33When we look at the language of the texts from the nineteenth century
00:01:36in this, we'll find the language accessible
00:01:41but it's not the same as the language from the writers who
00:01:45are writing in the twenty first century.
00:01:48In the twenty first century, we have a new kind of killer.
00:01:52We have a world vernacular,
00:01:56not just a polite English vernacular.
00:01:58So you get lots of binaries
00:02:01between
00:02:06spoken language and written language. There's one.
00:02:07Between the world of man,
00:02:11not meaning any do with gender, man, meaning humanity, mankind,
00:02:13and the world of nature, or the
00:02:19a lot of these texts are about what mankind
00:02:23has done to this world.
00:02:29So the worlds
00:02:32include our world today,
00:02:35the world of the past, and how it influenced
00:02:38our world. The world of the city
00:02:42contrasting with outside the city
00:02:45You see, one of the things that we forget is that we live in
00:02:49the post industrial age.
00:02:53The world of nature, Arcadia, the ideal
00:02:56world of nature
00:03:01is pre-industrial on.
00:03:03And ever since the industrial revolution,
00:03:07people have been harking back to that ideal world of nature.
00:03:10That's why we like the trees and forests and go into the countryside.
00:03:14And these things are in danger now of being destroyed
00:03:19by the very industrialisation
00:03:24that tried to replace them.
00:03:27So we're talking about another binary,
00:03:31successful world, and failing or failed
00:03:35worlds.
00:03:40There's a wonderful thing in the George Janet poem that
00:03:42you're going to read about fog
00:03:46Fog
00:03:49is something we're coping with now. It's the quality of
00:03:50the air that you breathe.
00:03:54There's all this fuss in London and other cities about
00:03:57non polluting cars, the Ules,
00:04:03that is exactly the environment of pollution and corruption of the environment.
00:04:06Which is very
00:04:13mid twenty first century, but it's been growing.
00:04:16It's been growing. It's been growing.
00:04:19All of these issues,
00:04:22the seas being corrupted with plastic,
00:04:26the loss of nature.
00:04:30That's another binary lost and found
00:04:33individual and society.
00:04:38Now, I think what you should do is start making a list of these
00:04:40binaries that I've been telling you, and we'll see as
00:04:44we go through these texts,
00:04:49we're almost
00:04:52inevitably, but there's no guarantee you'll be asked to compare
00:04:53something from a previous time with something from a more modern time.
00:04:58We'll be able to see the give and take, the way the voices
00:05:04differ, the way the accents differ. The way the skin color differs.
00:05:08We're talking about
00:05:14individuality in terms of voice, of gender, of sexuality,
00:05:16of a social position. We're talking about
00:05:23immigration we're talking about strangers as they're sometimes called.
00:05:27We live in a country in the United Kingdom,
00:05:33which has always been a magpie country
00:05:37in terms of languages,
00:05:41in terms of cultural influences,
00:05:43in terms of the races of people who live here.
00:05:45This shows the world
00:05:51of many
00:05:55kinds of people.
00:05:57And that modernity
00:06:00is contrasted
00:06:04with what brought us to this point.
00:06:06So it's not historic
00:06:10so much as influential.
00:06:12What influenced us getting here
00:06:15there may be a question by the end of this program.
00:06:19Where do we go from here?
00:06:24Because
00:06:26quite a lot of the feeling is that we're going downhill,
00:06:28that things are not getting better.
00:06:32So a thing I want you to look for is optimism pessimism as a binary.
00:06:35Positive and negative.
00:06:41Most of these texts will have some positives and some negatives.
00:06:43Most of these texts will have some kind of hopeful aspect,
00:06:48but if you look at the politics of what's going on,
00:06:53very often these poems are critical.
00:06:57Now that's why I like to talk about rap as a voice
00:07:01Unfortunately, none of these texts is an actual wrap, but
00:07:06one or two of them are heading that way.
00:07:11Many of them, but almost all of the more recent ones,
00:07:17are performative pieces.
00:07:21Pieces that speak, that use the voice, that use the
00:07:24rhythm, that want to communicate,
00:07:28and that is an essential part of what these texts do.
00:07:32The older texts might look as if they're just sitting on a page
00:07:39but actually they are raising
00:07:43the kind of issues that need to be talked about loudly
00:07:46and openly and brought into the discussion
00:07:50of who we are and the world we're living.
00:07:55
Cite this Lecture
APA style
McRae, J. (2023, September 22). Worlds and Lives (AQA Poetry Anthology) - Introduction [Video]. MASSOLIT. https://massolit.io/courses/worlds-and-lives-aqa-poetry-anthology/liz-berry-homing
MLA style
McRae, J. "Worlds and Lives (AQA Poetry Anthology) – Introduction." MASSOLIT, uploaded by MASSOLIT, 22 Sep 2023, https://massolit.io/courses/worlds-and-lives-aqa-poetry-anthology/liz-berry-homing