The goal of this course is to provide students with an advanced
education in the history and evolution of lyric poetry in English,
from its Old English origins up to the extraordinary variety of
contemporary poetic practices. We will study the formal principles
which have traditionally distinguished poetry from prose (meter,
rhyme, stanza and form), poetic conventions such as courtly love and
Romantic nature worship, and poetic genres such as the epic, the
pastoral elegy and the greater Romantic lyric, and we will study how
these forms, conventions and genres have changed from one historical
period to another. In order to fully understand these changes we
will study several of the important texts, written by poets,
philosophers and critics, which have provided the theoretical
foundations for each period?s dominant poetics, and we will examine
how aesthetic judgments have been and are made about individual poets
and poetic schools and styles.


Required Texts:

Course Reader (marked as CR)

Norton Anthology of Poetry, 5th edition, New York, Norton (marked as NA)

M.H. Abrams, A Glossary of Literary Terms, 10th edition, Harcourt, Brace

Course Packet