English 190

Research Seminar: Music and Poetry

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Description

From a number of different angles, we will approach a single, complicated question: what is the relationship between poetry and music? The two arts have been paired for millennia, and there have been many moments in literary and musical history in which they have been integrally connected, but this connection has become decreasingly material and increasingly metaphorical in the modern period. And yet, many poets have continued to conceptualize their art in musical terms. After a brief survey of the way in which this relationship has developed historically, we will spend most of our time in the 19th and 20th centuries, reading quite selectively across the work of a handful of Romantic (Blake, Keats), Victorian (Tennyson, Swinburne, Pater), Modernist (Yeats, Pound, Loy, Stevens, Hughes, Zukofsky), and contemporary (Heaney, Bergvall, Harper, Dove, Brathwaite, Mackey) poets. We'll look in detail at several poets who have produced works specifically tied to musical analogues: Gerard Manley Hopkins, T.S. Eliot (Four Quartets), Basil Bunting (Briggflatts), Maggie O'Sullivan, and Linton Kwesi Johnson. We'll also do a lot of listening: to classical music, jazz, varieties of popular music, poets reading their work, rap and slam poetry. This is not a class about musical settings of texts, but rather about what happens when poems (made of words) imagine themselves as music (made of sounds). Readings will be available on-line and/or in a course reader; there will be one short essay (3-5 pages) and one research paper.

English 190 replaced English 100 and 150 as of Fall '09. English majors may fulfill the seminar requirement for the major by taking one section of English 190 (or by having taken either English 100 or English 150 before Fall '09). Please read the paragraph on page 2 of this Accouncement of Classes for more details about enrolling in, or wait-listing for, this course.

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