Birds, Beasts, and Bards: The Poetry of Animals

Catalog description

If you love animals but are sad because you can't keep them in your dorm room, poems may well be the perfect substitute. Evoking the bodies and spirits of non-human creatures has always been one of the special domains of poetry. In this course, we'll consider a wide range of poems that take many different approaches to unlocking the mysterious otherness of animals, using all the tricks and techniques of this venerable art: rhythm, form, metaphor, observation and imagination. In discussions and essays we'll explore the ways in which poems about animals raise major questions of ethics and epistemology, while achieving the primal magic of translating life into language. Poets to be studied include Blake, Whitman, Dickinson, Frost, Lawrence, Moore, Bishop, Hughes, and many others.