Browning Studies
Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Ill INTRODUCTION (CONCLUDED): OUR PLAN OF STUDY IN THIS COURSE A Word about our plan of study in this course. 1. There is no way to understand Browning except by reading Browning and reading a large amount of Browning. This brings our minds into harmony with his, and we understand him easily. Nothing can ever take the place of this. 2. The surest rule for dealing with a passage which is difficult to understand is the rule already in vogue among Browning students: Read it. If you don't understand it, read it again. If you don't understand it then, read it again. If still you don't understand it, read it again. And read it until you do understand it. This is scientific. The trouble is that either the thought or the method of expressing it is unusua1. Therefore, we need to have our minds tuned up to it. By re
...ading it we are tuning our minds up to Browning's when he wrote it, ? and presently it is plain and easy to us. 3. These principles, that the only way to understand Browning is to read much of him and to read till we understand, will govern our study in this course. 4. Our general plan will be to go from short poems to the longer and more complex ones. Sometimes I shallhave to assign more than we can discuss in class. We will begin with some of the short poems next time.1 1 In the college classes, at the close of each lecture, the poems to be discussed at the next meeting of the class have been assigned. The assignment has grouped the shorter poems and could usually be read in two hours, though sometimes it would take more. Reading once the assignments has been required. Students have been also advised to read twice, if possible, all assignments, i.e. before the lecture dealing with them and after the lecture. Twice reading could not, of course, be required, ...
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