Department of English

This course, whilch will stress close reading of texts, will recurrently emphasize the nature of peotry and its social functions; the character and destiny of the poet; the representation of the varieties of love; and the relations of writer, reader, and text. A running theme will be the rise of a "high" theory of poetry among the Romantics, and--after 1830-- a long reversal in which poets make the "death of poetry" in the modern world their own theme.