Literary critics often discuss poetry as though it existed in some transcendental aesthetic realm far from the vagaries of everyday life. That is, we too often study poetry as a relatively ahistorical, intertextual tradition while ignoring its importance as a collection of primary historical sources. In this course, we’ll try to keep history front and center. As we explore the work of five major American poets—Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Langston Hughes, Robert Lowell and Susan Howe—we’ll attempt to draw some conclusions about modern American poetry and, more generally, about American culture since the Civil War. We’ll treat poems as cultural artifacts that register not only formal developments but also the material and social conditions within which they were produced.

A few questions we’ll consider in this course: What themes and ideas recur from one poet to the next? What aspirations and anxieties do these poets share? How do these poets respond to the changing face of American democracy? How do race, class, gender and sexual identity affect the poet’s role in society? Does the shift from an industrial to an information-based economy impact the form of American verse? Students will explore these and other issues in class discussion, presentations, short writing assignments, and a 10-12 page final essay

Texts:

• Walt Whitman. Leaves of Grass: The “Death-Bed” Edition.
• Walt Whitman. The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Reading Edition.
• Walt Whitman. The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes.
• Robert Lowell. Life Studies & For the Union Dead.
• Susan Howe. The Europe of Trusts.