Week 2
RE-WRITING THE HYMN: ISAAC WATTS TO SUFJAN STEVENS
(includes Blake poems, Ginsberg's Naropa class, texts of hymns and extracts from criticism)
William Blake, Songs of Innocence and Experience (Blake's images: online at the Blake Archive)
Allen Ginsberg, 1975 Naropa Class on William Blake
Listen to Kevin Hutchings' recordings of Blake's songs on myspace
Ginsberg, Songs of Innocence and Experience (with Peter Orlovsky): and listen to his recording with Orlovsky
Hymns:
Isaac Watts, ‘Joy to the World’
Reginald Heber, ‘Holy, Holy, Holy’
Henry Francis Lyte 'Abide with Me'
John Newton, ‘Amazing Grace’: either Throwing Muses version; or Elvis or traditional choir [or any version on youtube]
Anon, ‘Lo, How a Rose E'er Blooming’
Anon, ‘Bring a Torch, Jeanette, Isabella’
Please also listen to the above hymns as covered by Sufjan Stevens on his Christmas album:
Sufjan Stevens, Songs for Christmas (2001-2006)
More Christmas songs here: Silver & Gold (2006-2010)
Further reading
J. Bilbo, ‘Who Are Lost and How They’re Found: Redemption and Theodicy in Wheatley, Newton, and Cowper’, Early American Literature, 47.3 (2012): 561-589
Alan Blackstock, ‘Dickinson, Blake, and the Hymnbooks of Hell’, The Emily Dickinson Journal, 20.2 (2011): 33-56
M. M. Forell and Janet Todd, English Congregational Hymns in the Eighteenth Century (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1982)
E. David Gregory, Victorian songhunters : the recovery and editing of English vernacular ballads and folk lyrics, 1820-1883 (2006)
Thomas McGeary, ‘Clarissa Harlowe’s “Ode to Wisdom”: Composition, Publishing History, and the Semiotics of Printed Music’, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, 24.3 (2012): 431-458
Brett C. McInelly, ‘Raising the Roof: Hymn Singing, the Anti-Methodist Response, and Early Methodist Religiosity’, Eighteenth-Century Life, 36.2 (2012): 80-110
Maureen N. McLane, Balladeering, Minstrelsy, and the Making of British Romantic Poetry (Cambridge University Press, 2008)
S. C. Robinson, ‘Of “Haymakers” and “City Artisans”: The Chartist Poetics of Eliza Cook’s Songs of Labour’, Victorian Poetry, 39.2 (2001): 229-253
Mike Sanders, ‘“God is our guide! our cause is just!”: The National Chartist Hymn Bookand Victorian Hymnody’, Victorian Studies, 54.4 (2012): 679-705
Florence Saunders Boos, ‘The Poetics of the Working Classes’, Victorian Poetry, 39.2 (2001): 103-109
J. R. Watson, The English Hymn: A Critical and Historical Study (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997)