Department of English

Emily Dickinson and the American poetic tradition out of which she came will be the focus of this seminar.  We shall read a bit of poetic theory by Emerson, Poe, and Whitman--and quite a lot of poetic theory from Emily Dickinson's letters--but most of our reading will be the poetry itself, hers and that of a dozen men and women whose works would have been familiar to her.  Several short essays on individual poems and one longer paper will be assigned.