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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, disease, death, politics—to name a few prominent topics. Historic influences—the popularity of certain poetic style at particular times, political conspiracies, plague, revolutions, trade, including the slave trade, ill receive attention. We’ll examine, for example, the plot to kill Queen Elizabeth I 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, 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, Walk Whitman, Joyce Kilmer, Carl Sandburg, Sara Teasdale, William Carlos Williams, Allen Ginsberg, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Ross Gay, Sharon Olds. Students need buy no text, since all of the poems we read are online. In the rare case in which a poem is not online, I’ll provide photocopies. If you wish to have an anthology, I’m happy to advise—there are many good ones. |
