NEWS: 6-18-99  The books ordered for this course are listed at the end of the description.

Our focus will be on that large body of poems in English, from the fourteenth century almost to the twenty-first, that have been, or might be, set to music--"lyric" poetry in its most literal sense.  Students do not have to be musicians to take this class, but they will find it helpful if they enjoy music, because we will often find ourselves listening to these poems in their musical settings.  But we will also study poems that are, like the title Yeats gave to one of his volumes of poems, "Words for Music--Perhaps."

Most lyric poems fall into one of three broad classes: songs (and sonnets)--short, intense expressions of reaction to an emotional experience or of a particular state of mind and heart; ballads--story poems told in the form of reports of intense episodes at key moments in the story; and odes (or elegies, or meditations, or "conversation poems")--longer poems that do not tell a story, but rather work through some intense emotional crisis or philosophical issue before the eyes, as it were, of the reader.  Intensity, then, will be the keynote of our study.

While we will compare and contrast poems from different periods, in these different varieties, that deal with universal topics such as love, loss, commitment, and betrayal,  we will not attempt to establish a history of the lyric poem.  Rather, our emphasis will be primarily on what the poems of the past have to offer us who live, feel, and sing in the present day, and to a secondary extent on the question of which poems of the present may have such value for future readers.  Authors may include, but will certainly not be limited to, Shakespeare, Jonson, Finch, Donne, Herrick, Blake, Shelley, Keats, Burns, Bradshaw, Tennyson, Barrett Browning, C. Rossetti, Dickinson, E. Bronte, Yeats, Hopkins, Brooks, Larkin, Thomas, Dylan,  Hughes, Walcott, and of course the immortal "Anonymous."  Creative projects will be encouraged but not required.

Kowitt, Steve.
Six Centuries of Great Poetry, ed. Robert Penn Warren.
Mentor Book of Major American Poetry, ed. Oscar Williams
Trouble the Water, ed. Jerry W. Ward, Jr.