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Introduction to Lyric Poetry: A Close Reading
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This course is meant to furnish students with an adequate general understanding of the development of European lyric poetry from the Renaissance to the 20 th century. Poems will be read closely in class to reveal meaning and technical features, giving students the critical experience and language necessary for future explorations of Western poetry.
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Like an experimental aircraft testing the limits of flight, poetry tests the limits of language and what it can do. And, as a science in linguistic extremes, the study of poetry comes with its own technical language. What is a sonnet? A ballad? What are iambs, dactyls, pentameters, hendecasyllables, alexandrines? How does blank verse differ from free verse? And what of rhetorical techniques, like alliteration, enjambement, chiasmus, tmesis, allegory, ekphrasis, and anadiplosis (aka. coblas capfinidas)? Those wishing to better understand what makes a poem soar will master this metalanguage in class. Furthermore, we will constantly employ this language in our readings, which will be by definition close, analytical, and deeply critical. Classes will generally consist of a short introductory lecture followed by group analysis of selected poems. The course will require a considerable commitment of both time and intellectual energy. Students are expected to come to class having read the texts thoroughly, and must be prepared to criticize and question the texts under study. In addition, each student will present once on a poet of choice. Finally, students will perform frequent live readings in class. There are no midterms and finals in this course. Instead, students will turn in 6 short (1-2 page) reader response essays every two weeks. The purpose of the essays is to confirm adequate study of the texts, and to help nurture critical thinking and writing skills in English. Topics will often be provided by the professor. This class also encourages students to try their hand at writing original poetry themselves. Students are permitted to write poems formally imitative of our readings instead of the bimonthly reader response essays. In week 14, all students are required to write an original poem, modeled after the formal style of a poet in our readings, and in week 15, students will translate, into English, a poem originally written in another language. Advanced English is required for this class
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SCHEDULE (Specific readings are listed on the class website: tufslyricpoetry.wordpress.com)
1. Introduction, Ballads 2. Elizabethan Sonnets: Edmund Spenser, Sir Philip Sidney, William Shakespeare 3. The Metaphysical Poets: John Donne, George Herbert Reader response 1 4. Robert Herrick, John Milton
5. Romantics I: William Wordsworth Reader response 2 6. Romantics II: Blake, Coleridge, Byron 7. Romantics III: Keats Reader response 3
8. Comic and Serious poets of the 19th Century: Edward Lear, Lewis Carroll, Emily Dickinson, Gerard Manley Hopkins 9. Modernists I. Yeats Reader response 4 10. Modernists II. Ezra Pound and the Imagists 11. Modernists III. T.S. Eliot and the Relationship to Tradition Reader response 5
12. Elizabeth Bishop 13. Review and closing notes. Reader response 6 14. Imitative Poem Due 15. Translation Due
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Grading Attendance and participation 20% Absences will be excused only if they meet the school policy for Certified Absences. Students are allowed two unexcused absences for the class. Further absences will reduce final grade by 1/3 of a grade (e.g. A- becomes a B+). Four or more unexcused absences are an automatic failure for the course.
Quizzes 15% Quizzes will be administered as often as weekly, to ensure that students have studied the readings well. They will consist mostly of simple character and passage IDs.
Six 1-2-page reader response papers 50% These are short essays exploring a particular theme or passage you find interesting in one of the readings. You are expected to cite specific passages in the text, and to perform reasonably close readings of that text.
Imitative Poem 10% This will be an original composition by the student. The poem must be written after the formal style of one of the works studied in class. Thus, it will imitate the meter, rhyme schemes, lexicon and subject matter of the model poem.
Translation 5%
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