Department of English

This is a new course. It is not a workshop course, but a course in poetics. We will conduct a rapid survey of the various models for poetry from Homer and pre-literate societies through the Greeks and Romans (Aristotle, Longinus, Horace, etc); Dante and the birth of the vernacular; the Elizabethans; Augustans; Romantics; down through various modernist revolutions and reactions, on to some of the controversies that enliven the present. The idea is to give you the beginnings of a detailed map of what poetry has been, so that you can write with a greater range of possibilities. Requirements: a lot of reading, both prose about poetry and a wide range of poems; papers; imitations of kinds of poetry. The class will be limited to 15. Please submit a few poems and a critical paper from another English class to Bob Perelman.