Poetry and Desire

Catalog description

A close reading of poems of love, lust, and longing from Sappho to the present. In this seminar, we will consider the erotic impulse as central to lyric, while also understanding poetry as a record of shifting attitudes toward sex and sexuality, love, marriage, and gender. Alongside theories of desire, we will examine the erotic poem's relationship with the elegy, the ode, and the political poem. Frequent written assignments, critical and creative, will respond to poems by a range of authors from Shakespeare and Crashaw to Whitman and Cavafy, Lucille Clifton, Louise Glück, and Carl Phillips.