Carl Dennis: Mid-Course Corrections (January 1997)

In this lecture on “poems that seem to change genre in mid-stream,” Carl Dennis explores how such changes reflect a shift that opens a poem up in unexpected directions. In close readings of Horace’s “Ode on Octavian’s Victory Over Cleopatra” and Lowell’s “For the Union Dead,” Dennis explores how these poems move between a more public mode and a more private, elegiac one; he closes with an investigation of Bishop’s “At the Fishhouses,” considering the power of this poem’s shift in perspective and vision.