Major Poets, Fall 2001

Abstract:: Emphasis on the analytical reading of lyric poetry in England and the United States. Syllabus usually includes Shakespeare's sonnets, Donne, Keats, Dickinson, Frost, Eliot, Marianne Moore, Lowell, Rich, and Bishop. This subject follows a course of readings in lyric poetry in the English language, tracing the main lines of descent through literary periods from the Renaissance to the modern period and concentrating mostly on English rather than American examples.

Major Poets, Fall 2005

Abstract:: Emphasis on the analytical reading of lyric poetry in England and the United States. Syllabus usually includes Shakespeare's sonnets, Donne, Keats, Dickinson, Frost, Eliot, Marianne Moore, Lowell, Rich, and Bishop. This subject is an introduction to poetry as a genre; most of our texts are originally written in English. We read poems from the Renaissance through the 17th and 18th centuries, Romanticism, and Modernism. Focus will be on analytic reading, on literary history, and on the development of the genre and its forms; in writing we attend to techniques of persuasion and of honest evidenced sequential argumentation. Poets to be read will include William Shakespeare, Queen Elizabeth, William Wordsworth, John Keats, T.S. Eliot, Langston Hughes, Sylvia Plath, Elizabeth Bishop, and some contemporary writers.

Abstract:: ""Reading Poetry" has several aims: primarily, to increase the ways you can become more engaged and curious readers of poetry; to increase your confidence as writers thinking about literary texts; and to provide you with the language for literary description. The course is not designed as a historical survey course but rather as an introductory approach to poetry from various directions – as public or private utterances; as arranged imaginative shapes; and as psychological worlds, for example. One perspective offered is that poetry offers intellectual, moral and linguistic pleasures as well as difficulties to our private lives as readers and to our public lives as writers. Expect to hear and read poems aloud and to memorize lines; the class format will be group discussion, occasional lecture."