Spring 2009 Courses

English 294-01: Literature & Environment: The Poetry of Dwelling (Krier)

TBA

Language does not impose order on a chaotic universe but reflects its own wildness back. – Gary Snyder

In this course we'll read a wide array of poetry, along with selected creation myths, cosmologies, and essays, to consider poets' sense of what Gary Snyder famously called "Earth House Hold." What environs us? How do we find a dynamic and just principle of dwelling? How do poets evoke the vitality of sensory experience within elemental environments? How do places arouse strong emotions and attachments? How do people in today's environmental movements use poetry? Can poetry about environments teach specific guidelines for living? What are ecopoetry and ecocriticism, and how are they different from nature poetry? What do poets mean when they say that language itself is wild? How can studying poetry fuel or refine thinking about environmental justice?

We'll read from a wide range of poets, including Gary Snyder, Walt Whitman, Alice Oswald, Seamus Heaney, James McMichael, classical Chinese poets, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Robert Frost, Wendell Berry, Wallace Stevens, Dylan Thomas, Lorine Niedecker, Elizabeth Bishop, A. R. Ammons, William Carlos Williams, and that great poet "Anonymous." To focus our thinking we'll draw on prose by thinkers on dwelling like Wendell Berry, Frank Lloyd Wright, Tim Ingold. We'll think about certain kinds of natural habitats and ecotones in poetry: the woods, the river and river banks, the shore and the deep ocean.

This course is open to all students, with or without previous experience of poetry, with or without expertise in environmental issues. We'll learn how to read poetry, and discover what questions to ask of poetry of the natural world.

This course fulfills the College's W (writing) requirement.

*Cross-listed with ENVI 294-01*