19th Century US Poetry/Poetics

Catalog description

A study of 19th-century US poetry and poetics. Topics may include the transcendentalists(Emerson and Margaret Fuller); poetic responses to slavery, racism, and the Civil War (George Moses Horton, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Herman Melville, etc.);the circulation of poetry in media and manuscript; Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass; Emily Dickinson's unpublished corpus of poems;Reconstruction poetics;and late-19th-century proto-modernisms(Sarah Piatt, Stephen Crane, Paul Laurence Dunbar). The course emphasizes both the sociopolitical work of 19th-century poetry and the skill of reading poetry.