Fall 2026
Prereq: Two subjects in Literature
Units: 3-0-9 HASS-H, CI-M; Can be repeated for credit
Is an epic hero just the one who wins the fight — the strongest, the luckiest, the best-armed? Or can an epic do more than celebrate force? In this seminar, we’ll read the work of two early modern poets who aimed to rework classical epic — the grandest, most prestigious poetic genre — to tell a story about the invisible struggles of trying to become a better human being. Edmund Spenser and John Milton came up with very different solutions to the problem of moving epic beyond a preoccupation with violence. Spenser set The Faerie Queene in the era of King Arthur, telling a story of chivalric quests and boss battles in deliberately old-fashioned style — but his wizards, duels and dragons are vehicles for a complex and often surprising moral and historical allegory. Milton took a radically simpler option: Paradise Lost retells the original story of moral choice confronting Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, surrounding it with the precipitating action of Satan’s rebellion and a war in Heaven.
We’ll spend the semester reading these two book-length poems. Each will begin as a difficult read that will get steadily more approachable as we spend time thinking about their language and the author’s style; each will provoke debate and disagreement, including with the authors themselves, and this wrangling with important topics and textual evidence is part of the pleasure these poems reliably offer. As poems, each covers the gamut from low comedy through the most sublime passages of anything written in English. Reading them is a thrilling experience that you will always remember, and one best undertaken in the company of other like-minded readers making their way through the poems alongside you. [Pre-1900]