Last week, Yale students demanded their curriculum be rewritten. The Major English Poets module, they point out, features far too many major English poets.
Frankly, we agree.
It is ridiculous to expect English majors to risk discomfort from texts that make no attempt to reinforce their world-view – even if they do form the bedrock of the language and culture they are supposedly interested in.
So, as a service to the English faculty and their vulnerable students, Heat Street has edited a selection of classics to make up for the authors’ shortcomings.
Soliloquy from ‘Hamlet’ – William Shakespeare
[To be performed by Rachel Dolezal]
To be, or not to be black is the question:
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of the patriarchy
Or to take arms against a sea of white men
And, by a protest, end them. To die, to tweet
No more – and by a tweet to say we end
The heartache, and the thousand natural shocks
That non-white flesh is heir to…
Paradise Lost – John Milton
OF XIR first disobedience, and the fruit
Of that oppressive tree whose white male taste
Brought death into the World, and hetero-
Normativity, till the ugendered one
Restore us, and regain the blissful Seat,
Sing, diverse Muse, that, on the secret top
Of Oreb, or of Sinai, didst inspire
That Shepherd, or perhaps a Shepherdess,
In the beginning how the heavens and earth
Rose out of Chaos: or, if Zion hill*
Delight thee more, or that Safe Space that stood
Fast by the oracle of God, I thence
Invoke xyr aid to my adventrous song,
That with unproblematic flight will soar
Above the Aonian mount, while it pursues
Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme.
[*Which belongs to the people of Palestine]
I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud – William Wordsworth
I wandered lonely as a guy
Who knows deep down he is a girl,
When all at once I saw, oh my!
A host, of golden daffodil;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze…
My Heart’s In the Highlands, Robert Burns
My heart’s in a Safe Space, my heart is not here,
My heart’s in a Safe Space and we’re all trans-queer;
Ignoring perspectives I’d rather not know,
My heart’s in a Safe Space, wherever I go.
