Fall 2025
Prereq: Two subjects in Literature
Units: 3-0-9 HASS-H, CI-M; Can be repeated for credit
In our moment, the lyric poem has become one of the few vehicles for the formal of subjective experience, the voice of “the personal.” At least, that is how we popularly characterize the work the lyric does. But what happens when the lyric’s commitments to the personal, the sublime, or the psychological abut the facts of the social and political worlds and ideologies? How does the “personal” lyric reform when challenged by repressive regimes, absolutist ideologies, or historical traumas? How do poetic forms and ambitions change? does the lyric poem adapt or resist, under such pressures? –or [less defensively], can lyric poetry serve a documentarian purpose? A subversive purpose? Can it bear moral witness or provoke political change? Does poetry really make nothing happen?
We begin the term by looking at several Anglo-American models for comparison –in part because in some cases international writers read those models as well [Walt Whitman, W.C, Williams, W. H. Auden, Audre Lorde, Langston Hughes]. We move through various genres and thematic modes [pressures on the lyric under totalitarian/rightist regimes, under occupation, under conditions of extreme poverty, in situations of repression based on gender or object-choice, in exile, under threat of linguistic extinction, and in other situations.] We consider whether literary Modernism was a dead-end, or incomplete project, and we consider how satire, or pastiche, or laughter, or formal reorganization, can also forms of social “testimony” or witness. We work through poems by South American and Spanish writers [Federico García Lorca, Gabriela Mistral, Antonio Machado, Pablo Neruda], Greek/North African [Constantine Cavafy], Russian [Anna Akhmatova, Boris Pasternak], Ukranian and the Ukranian Diaspora [Taras Shevchenko, Ilya Kaminsky], Caribbean [Aimé Césaire], Palestinian [Mahmoud Darwish]. German [Paul Celan, Bertolt Brecht, Nelly Sachs]. and Polish [Czesław Miłosz, Wisława Szymborska].
Two disclaimers: (1) the reading-list tilts toward Eurocentrism because the languages of those countries are languages I feel confident about discussing (other competencies are welcome and invited!); (2) North America’s robust tradition of poems-of-witness are not the focus of this seminar, because attention to those works is the focus in other seminars (where, I hope, students will encounter them). Discussion-format, in-class reports, final project. No final exam.