Fall 2025
Prereq: none
Units: 3-0-9 HASS-H, CI-H
An introduction to poetry in English. We will explore poems written during several periods and in several genres (nature-poems, narratives, the epic, sonnets, odes, experimental forms).
Focus will be less on names and dates than on tactics of analytic reading. Poets whose work we’ll read include William Shakespeare, John Milton, John Keats, Emily Dickinson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Frost, Langston Hughes, Sylvia Plath, Elizabeth Bishop, June Jordan, Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott, Li-young Lee, Marilyn Chin, and others. Special course-related events (readings, lectures, film screenings) will take place on selected evenings throughout the term. Regular classroom hours will be reduced in the weeks for which a special event is scheduled. [Pre-1900]
Prereq: none
Units: 3-0-9 HASS-H, CI-H
An introduction to poetry in English, chiefly by British and American poets, spanning more than 400 years of literary history. The aim of the class to is demystify and make approachable poetry that has been deemed to be “great,” and to analyze this work collaboratively for insight and pleasure. We will explore Renaissance, eighteenth-century, Romantic, and modernist poetry in some detail. Though the organization of the subject is mostly chronological, our focus will be less on names and dates than on cultivating skills in careful reading and effective writing. Poets to be read may include William Shakespeare, Jonathan Swift, John Keats, Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, Elizabeth Bishop, and Claudia Rankine.