This course will help fulfill the requirements for a number of the curriculum “tracks” for a department major, including but not limited to the British Literature, British and American Literature, American Literature, and Poetry tracks.  It is also strongly recommended for anyone who might consider going to graduate school in English, as well as anyone who just wants to understand about “the poetic,” in many ways the foundation of all artistic feeling.

Course Description

If human history and modern psychology have taught us anything, it is that the poetic impulse — our need to visualize, to fictionalize, to play with different paradigms of reality — has always existed at the root of the human experience.  This course will study in detail primarily lyric poetry, in order to understand the technical interrelationships between poetic structure and meaning and the varied and complex ways by which human “themes” and reactions emerge — in short, what poems mean and how they come to mean what they mean.

In the process, the course will also dabble in trying to define the world-views, cultural beliefs, and assumptions of the artists of different periods and cultures.  We will try to probe the assumptions which underlie the works of art — the “why’s” implicit in the artists’ approaches to their themes as well as the themes themselves.
 

Goals And Expectations

Prior training in studying and analyzing poetry is not required.  If you don’t know much about poetry now, this course will change that.  By the end of the term you will learn and be expected to demonstrate:

• A solid general knowledge of poetic devices, metrical forms, and other elements of poetics;

• The ability to do a meticulously detailed and discerning analysis of a poem, showing a clear understanding of how the specifics of language, form, and structure create meaning; and

• The ability to draw out and deal intelligently with whatever larger thematic patterns or philosophical issues you find in the poems of different cultures and historical periods.

The course assignments (and other requirements) are designed to ensure that you will have every opportunity to achieve (or enhance) these skills during the course of the term, assuming a normal amount of conscientious effort.

This course is not a course in how to write poetry.  There are other courses and workshops for that.  This is a course that analyzes the themes and structures of poetry and the assumptions of some specific poems.  You will surely learn in this course a great deal about the logic and mechanics of poetry (which might help you to write poetry better) and perhaps about the cultural assumptions of some writers and historical periods.  However, I believe it is even more important for you to learn sophisticated analytical skills that will transfer valuably to almost any subject matter — particularly, a precision in critical thinking and a sensitivity to the subtleties and nuances of language.  I therefore intend that the texts in the course, however interesting they may be in themselves, will also serve as the raw material on which you can hone such skills.