This course aims to unlock poetry for students as an urgently relevant form of artful communication by focusing on the fundamental tools poets and song writers use to make meaning including style, word-sounds, tone, rhythm, meter, and intertextuality. The course will move through a history of lyric poetry as we consider its often-overt relationships to song. Figures and texts of focus will include Sappho, Shakespeare鈥檚 sonnets, Romantic poets John Keats, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and William Blake, and later nineteenth and twentieth-century poets such as Emily Dickinson, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Walt Whitman, Langston Hughes, T.S. Eliot, and W.B. Yeats. We will juxtapose these more traditional poetic forms with the lyricism of song as we consider music ranging from the cantatas by J.S. Bach to later twentieth and twenty-first century songwriters such as Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, David Bowie, John Lennon and Paul McCartney, U2, Lin Manuel Miranda, Taylor Swift, Harry Styles, and Maggie Rogers.
Readings
- The Broadview Anthology of Poetry, 2nd Edition
- T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land and Other Writings
- The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms
Assessment
- Scansion and writing exercise (10%)
- Two in-class essays (30%)
- Attendance and active and informed participation (15%)
- 3-4 minutes of leading discussion (10%)
- In-class test (35%)
