Craddock
Until very recently, almost all English-language writers shared a common heritage of literary experience which included a number of "book-length" poems (often very thin books, of course). These poems usually tell stories, and they can be approached very comfortably with the techniques students are used to using in dealing with fiction. But they also have the beauty and intensity of poems..
Allusions to such poems occur in both poetry and prose of many later writers. The GRE and many graduate programs still tend to assume that students are familiar with these works. But in an ordinary course, these poems must be skipped, or read only in excerpts. This course will focus on three or four such poems, for instance Spenser's Faerie Queene, Milton's Paradise Lost, Pope's Dunciad, and Tennyson's In Memoriam. The choice of the poems, and how many we do, will be determined by the class.
We will take our time and read the poems you have always heard of, but never had time to read. Students will keep reading journals, and grades will be based on journals, reaction papers and class reports, and perhaps the production of one formal paper. There will be no exams.
We will start with Paradise Lost, even though we may choose to go back and read earlier poems, because it is probably the most influential long poem ever written in English. It is also a marvelous poem, with lots of good controversies to occupy us (for instance, is Milton unconsciously on the Devil's side? Is Milton fair to Eve? Does Milton anticipate space travel?)
Other selections will be determined by the interests of the participants (including me!) and the availability of texts (we will discuss possibilities and make choices early in the semester). We might, for example, include any of the following: the three poems listed in the example, Wordsworth's Prelude, Shelley's Prometheus Unbound, Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh (or R. Browning's Ring and the Book), Whitman's Song of Myself, T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets. The only requirement is that the selections must have been written in English and that they be poems too long to read in the average class, but familiar to the average writer in the English-language tradition. But note that we will include, at most, FOUR poems.
If a student is particularly interested in a specific poem the rest of the class doesn't want to read, that can probably be arranged, but in general the idea of a seminar is to allow a group of people with a diversity of interests, approaches, experiences, and ideas to bring their differences to a common body of material. Usually participants learn a lot not only about the specific works studied, but about the process and purpose of studying literature, and even about themselves and each other. Students who have little previous experience with poetry should not be intimidated by this class; in fact, the leisurely approach and the fact that these poems have stories should help you.