Kommentar |
This course begins in the sixteenth century and ends in the present, exploring themes that have always enraptured poets: love, frustration, hatred, fear, execution, delight, beauty, nature, disease, death, politics—to name a few prominent topics. Historic influences—the popularity of certain poetic styles at particular times, political conspiracies, plague, revolutions, trade, including the slave trade, will also be discussed. Developing concerns, such as the role of women, will receive attention. We’ll examine, for example, the plot to kill Queen Elizabeth as well as life in colonial America and the American Revolution. Poets whose work we will cover will include John Donne, Robert Herrick, Ben Jonson, Sir Walter Raleigh, Chidiock Tichborne, William Shakespeare, Sir Philip Sidney, Sir Thomas Wyatt, Ann Bradstreet, Phyllis Wheatley, John Dryden, John Milton, Andrew Marvell, John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, Francis Scott Key, William Cullen Bryant, William Blake, Matthew Arnold, Gerard Manley Hopkins, William Wordsworth, John Keats, Robert Frost, T.S. Eliot, Julia Ward Howe, Bret Harte, Emily Dickenson, Walt Whitman, Joyce Kilmer, Carl Sandburg, Sara Teasdale, Dorothy Parker, William Carlos Williams, Allen Ginsberg, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Sharon Olds.
Students need buy no text, since all of the poems we read are online. If there are a few cases in which poems are not online, these will be provided as photocopies. If you wish to have a text, there are many good anthologies, and I’d be happy to advise if you send me an e-mail. |