This seminar will address two interconnected questions: the role of poetry in the shaping of what Kant calls the "sensus communis", and a concentrated study of modern poetry, with primary emphasis on Whitman, William Carlos Williams, and Wallace Stevens. There will be in addition to major works by these three poets a short course reader / anthology that will include poetry by French, Latin American, and German poets, along with theoretical and critical texts.

The seminar is open to graduate students in any humanities department (with course registration handled both by English and Comparative Literature). Other students my enroll with permission of the instructor.

TEXTS:

Walt Whitman, Library of America
William Carlos Williams, Collected Earlier and Collected Later Poems
In the American Grain & selected essays, Paterson
Wallace Stevens, Collected Poems, Opus Posthumous, The Necessary Angel
Poems by Baudelaire, Valery, Rilke, Neruda, Paz and others
Selections from Kant, Taine, and contemporary critical studies of the poets on the syllabus.