Professor Borges - A Course on English Literature

Ship was nought to me, nor I to her, / Yet I pursued her with a Lover’s look; / This Ship to all the rest did I prefer: / When will she turn, and whither? She will brook / No tarrying; where She comes the winds must stir: / On went She, and due north her journey took.”
    CLASS 13

1. This story first appeared in the magazine
The Yellow Book
in July 1894, and was first published in the book
Terminations
, in London by Heinemann and in New York by Harper in 1895.
2. Martino Dobrizhoffer (1717–91), Austrian Jesuit. He worked as a minister among the Abipones, a tribe north of the Guaraní zone, along with Father Florian Baucke or Paucke in the middle of the eighteenth century. The original version of his book is written in Latin and consists of three volumes. It is called
Historia de Abiponibus: equestri bellicosaque Paraquariae natione
. It was published in Vienna by Josph Nob de Kurzbek in 1784, translated into German the same year, then into English in 1822. A copy of the original Latin can be found in the
Sala del Tesoro
of the National Library in Buenos Aires.
3. Originally published in 1817.
4. Coleridge studied at Christ’s Hospital, not at Christ Church.
5.
The Fall of Robespierre
was first published in 1794.
Joan of Arc
(1796) is actually an epic poem.
6. Borges refers to Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” as “The Ancient Mariner” throughout.
7. According to John Spencer Hill, “The entire
Biographia
, written as it was in under four months, shows signs of hasty composition; but nowhere has this haste left more clearly defined marks than in chapters 12 and 13, the last to be composed, in September 1815. As has long been known, chapter 12 of the
Biographia Literaria
consists largely of extended passages of translation, some of them verbatim and none of them acknowledged, from F.W.J. Schelling’s
Abhandlungen zur Erlaüterung des Idealismus der Wissenschaftslehre and System des transcendentalen Idealismus
. Chapter 12 is not the only place, nor is Schelling the only German philosopher from whom Coleridge plagiarises in the course of
Biographia Literaria
; but the fact remains that the bulk of unacknowledged borrowings in the book appear in this chapter, which Coleridge must have composed with Schelling’s works open before him. Speed of execution will not, of course, excuse such behaviour (the case for exculpation rests on other and more complex proofs), but it surely does go a long way toward explaining why the borrowings are so extensive at this particular point.”
A Coleridge Companion
(New York: Macmillian Press, 1985), p. 218.
8. Macedonio Fernández (1874–1952), Argentine writer, humorist, and philosopher.
9. Amado Nervo (1870–1919), Mexican poet.
10. Johannes Scotus Eriugena (815–77), Irish theologian, philosopher, and poet.
11. In Chapter 15 of his
Biographia Literaria
, Coleridge asserts “that Shakespeare, no mere child of nature; no
automaton
of genius; no passive vehicle of inspiration, possessed by the spirit, not possessing it; first studied patiently, meditated deeply, understood minutely, till knowledge, become habitual and intuitive, wedded itself to his habitual feelings, and at length gave birth to that stupendous power ... attracts all forms and things to himself, into the unity of his own ideal.... Shakespeare becomes all things, yet for ever remaining himself.”
12. As well as a son, whom Borges fails to mention.
13. See Class 8, note 3.
    CLASS 14

1.
Everyman
is one of the morality plays of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries that deal with the urgent need to repent, the ephemerality of life, and the fate of the human soul in God’s hands. Probably based on a Flemish original,
Everyman
was written around the year 1495.
2.
The Golden Book of Coleridge
, edited by Stopford A. Brooke, volume 43 of Everyman’s Library.
3. “Dejection: An Ode” was written on April 4, 1802. The idea Borges is referring to is found in section VI of “Dejection: An Ode,” which reads as follows: “There was a time when, though my path was rough, / This joy within me dallied with distress, / And all misfortunes were but as the stuff / Whence Fancy made me dreams of happiness: / For hope grew round me, like the twining vine, / And fruits, and foliage, not my own, seemed mine. / But now afflictions bow me down to earth: / Nor care I that they rob me of my mirth; / But oh! each visitation / Suspends what Nature gave me at my birth, / My shaping spirit of Imagination. / For