The poems that we will read in this course represent or exemplify the visionary experience. With the exception of the biblical book of Revelation, which will serve as an introduction to the concept of literary vision, our readings will span the 200-year period between the end of the eighteenth century and the end of the twentieth. Beginning with British romanticism, we will progress through French symbolism and Anglo-American modernism to American postmodernism. Though our focus will be on close reading poetry, we will also study one play and its film adaptation, for the sake of variety.

To define the concept of the “visionary” is tricky. For visionary poets, physical sight is often less important than the working of the so-called mind’s eye. Visitations, hallucination, dreams, second sight, divine revelation, spiritual mania, drug-induced delirium, madness, utopianism and progressive politics can all serve as vehicles to—or content for—the production of visionary literature.

Most modern literature (and the scholarship surrounding it) takes materiality for granted; literature emerges from a world that is physically visible, legible and scientifically verifiable. In considering the theme of vision, we will in a sense be dealing with a form of anti-modernism. Fittingly, then, our genealogy will commence with an anti-Enlightenment reactionary, William Blake, and his idiosyncratic national and theological allegories. In the course of our reading, we will also explore the supernaturalism of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the prose poetry of Charles Baudelaire and Arthur Rimbaud, the Irish mysticism of W.B. Yeats, the Beat revelations of Allen Ginsberg, the New American spiritualism of Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov, the feminist revisions of Adrienne Rich, and the postmodern phantasmagoria of Tony Kushner's two-part play Angels in America.

Texts:

• A course pack (available at the Ave Copy Center).
• Tony Kushner’s. Angels in America both volumes.