EN 1439Introduction to Poetry

Catalog

This course surveys the aesthetics, forms, histories, and politics of poetic expression from ancient, modern, and contemporary periods, focusing primarily on English-language examples while simultaneously incorporating works across world literatures, in original texts or in English translations. Attention may be given to epic, dramatic, and lyric modes, to elegies, odes, repeating forms (sonnet, villanelle), and short forms (epigram, haiku), and to specific architectures of poetry including address, assonance and consonance, closure, lineation, meter, rhyme, rhythm, and stanzaic structure. Recommended background: None.