Studies in Poetry (311-0-20)

Instructors

Christine Froula

Meeting Info

Harris Hall L28: Mon, Wed 9:30AM - 10:50AM

Overview of class

"Make It New": Ezra Pound borrows this slogan from an ancient Chinese emperor's bath tub: "As the sun makes it new / Day by day make it new." But what is "it"? In our seminar we'll explore poetry as an art of words, voice, song, speech, story; of describing, expressing, transforming, translating, and revealing worlds visible and invisible; of hiddenness and discovery, paradox and mystery, epiphany and surprise, the everyday, the extraordinary, and the otherworldly. Reading selected poems and related prose texts on poetics by Baudelaire, Whitman, Dickinson, Yeats, Eliot, Pound, H. D., Williams, Bishop, Hughes, Brooks, and other poets both earlier and later, we'll see how particular poems emerge in creative dialogue with other poems across historical moments, locales, languages, cultural surrounds, and sensibilities. We'll practice close reading, analytic, and comparative skills to discuss, appreciate, and write about the formal and linguistic virtuosity by which poets create poems-as-worlds that enrich the resources of English poetry: verse lines and forms, sound patterns (meter, rhythm, music, tone), diction, rhetorical tropes, figurative language, personae, voices. We'll visit our Special Collections Library to learn about print culture and to see first editions of some of the works we'll be studying. We'll conclude with a Poetry Fest for which everyone will choose and read, recite, or perform a poem for the class.

Class Attributes

Advanced Expression
Literature and Arts Foundational Discipline
Literature & Fine Arts Distro Area

Enrollment Requirements

Enrollment Requirements: Pre-registration -- Reserved for English students.