Department of English

One critic has said that poetry is "simple, sensuous, and passionate," and in this course, we will test the timbre of the simplicity, sensuousness, and passion of poetry in three different periods. We will study poetry from the eighteenth century through the modern period, concentrating on the works of Pope, Wordsworth, Keats, and Yeats. We will consider the place of poetry in the enlightenment view of the polity, the connection between irony and the secularization of morality, the romantic reclamation of pastoral in the imagination, and the modern reaction against the commodious life of Lockean commercialism. Two papers, a midterm, and a final.