HOME /

Classes

English 53. Poets: Four poets, English and Irish: Shakespeare, Marvell, Keats, Heaney

Semester: 

Spring

Offered: 

2017

Course Site
Tuesday, 2:00 to 4:00  | Location: Barker 211

Shakespeare’s inventive sonnets; Marvell’s provocative and enigmatic poems; Keats’s revisionary sonnets and Odes; Heaney’s poems of modern Ireland. Lyric genres and subgenres: sonnet, ode, complaint, verse-letter, persona-poem, definition-poem, myths of origin, the lyric narrative, political poetry, etc.

Read more about English 53. Poets: Four poets, English and Irish: Shakespeare, Marvell, Keats, Heaney

Aesthetic and Interpretive Understanding 20. Poems, Poets, Poetry

Semester: 

Fall

Offered: 

2016
Course Site

Monday/Wednesday, 12:00 to 1:00  | Location: Emerson 101

A study of poetry as the history and science of feeling: readings in major lyric poems in English. Is lyric poetry autobiographical, and if so, how? What aspects are invented? Problems of invention and execution in a work of art: composition, context, development. The lyric as dramatic speech and as aesthetic experiment.

This course fulfills the requirement that one of the eight General Education courses also engage substantially with Study of the Past.

English 258. The Poetry of Emily Dickinson: Graduate Seminar

Semester: 

Spring

Offered: 

2015

Catalog Number: 48923 | Exam Group: 15, 16
Thursday, 1:00 to 3:00 | Location: Barker Center 269 (Larsen Rm)
The poetry of Emily Dickinson, with some attention to the letters. Ways of grouping the poems into sub-groups for purposes of examination. Dickinson from sublime to sardonic, from intellectual to faux-naive “girl.”

English 90sh. The Poetry of Seamus Heaney: Seminar

Semester: 

Spring

Offered: 

2015

Catalog Number: 19069 | Exam Group: 15, 16
Tuesday, 1:00 to 3:00 | Location: Barker Center 114 (Kresge Rm)
With Heaney’s death, the canon of his poetry has closed. Using Opened Ground and selections from the later poetry, we will investigate the ways into Heaney’s verse, from the political to the autobiographical to the symbolic.

Aesthetic and Interpretive Understanding 20 (formerly Literature and Arts A-22). Poems, Poets, Poetry

Semester: 

Spring

Offered: 

2013
Catalog Number: 5808
Helen Vendler (University Professor; English)
Half course (spring term). M., W., (F.), at 1, and a weekly section to be arranged. EXAM GROUP: 6
A study of poetry as the history and science of feeling: readings in major lyric poems of England and America. Emphasis on problems of invention and execution, and on the poet’s choice of genre, stance, context, and structure. Other topics to be raised include the process of composition, the situating of a poem in its... Read more about Aesthetic and Interpretive Understanding 20 (formerly Literature and Arts A-22). Poems, Poets, Poetry

*English 90jk. The Poetry of John Keats: Seminar - (New Course)

Semester: 

Spring

Offered: 

2013
Catalog Number: 47859 Enrollment: Limited to 15.
Helen Vendler
Half course (spring term). Tu., 1–3. EXAM GROUP: 15, 16
A study of most of the poetry, focusing on influences, genre-changes, poetics, and the Keatsian lexicon.