Spring 2004 Courses

English 135: Poetry (Burt)

How do poems work? What goes on inside them? What are the important kinds of poems? How do we know? And how can we describe them? This course means to introduce you to poetry in English from the Middle Ages to the present, from Northumberland to Karnataka to Saint Paul. We will likely begin with contemporary poems and work our way backward fitfully into the past, examining some of the most important strategies, tactics and categories poems use, and keeping always in mind how poems sound. We'll think about rhyme and metre (and about what goes on in their absence); we'll consider stanzas, sonnets, catalogs, ballads, odes, and other categories, too. (Some of the folks whose poems I hope we'll read are Muldoon, Moss, Rich, Graham, Glück, Ramanujan, Bishop, Williams, Frost, Moore, Housman, Tennyson, Whitman, Dickinson, Keats, Wordsworth, Smart, Pope, Herbert, Donne, Shakespeare, and Skelton.) It's a course in which people who already read poems for fun might discover how to write about them, and in which people who don't already read lots of poetry can find out how to like it.

Course syllabus

Spring 2004 Course Listings