Old English Anew

Catalog description

Why are the thoughts, feelings, and actions of English poets a millennium ago still so important in modern and contemporary poetry? Early English literature has long had an extraordinary influence on later writers from John Milton to Elizabeth Elstob, William Morris, W. H. Auden, Seamus Heaney, Evan Boland, Denise Levertov, Jorge Luis Borges, and Maria Dahvana Headley. This course will ask what is so special about these creative connections across time. We'll closely examine English lyrical, devotional, heroic, and fantastic poetry from the tenth to the twelfth centuries to consider the themes, ideas, and emotion that motivated later poets to adopt, adapt, and echo their age-old predecessors. Students will learn?through hard work?how to translate and evaluate Early English (getting an excellent knowledge of English grammar, lexis, and form into the bargain) in order to produce their own inventive poetry in the vein of inspired Old English shapers of verse.