English 190

Other Readings and Media

Course Reader

Description

I have emarked on this course to help us think about an emergent situation for poets—the earth in crisis.  In this seminar we will explore how poets represent, and think about their place in, their natural environment.  Our primary focus will be American literature, from the nineteenth century to the present.  We will read such essayists as Emerson and Thoreau, and such poets as Whitman, Dickinson, Frost, Moore, Stevens, Jeffers, Snyder, Merwin, Ammons, Ryan, Hass, Glück, and Graham.  For context and alternatives, we will also consider English and Anglophone poets (e.g., Wordsworth, Coleridge, Tennyson, Hopkins, Lawrence, Muldoon, Kinsella) and theorists (e.g., Darwin, Ruskin).  Topics (so far) include the representation of the natural world, Nature, creation and evolution, abstraction and specification, place, species (extinction), and global warming.  We will be guided in part by essays in ecocriticism and ecopoetics.  We will go where the poetry takes us.

Please read the paragraph on page 2 of the instructions area of this Announcement of Classes for more details about enrolling in or wait-listing for this course.