English 180L

Other Readings and Media

A course reader.

Recommended:  The Norton Anthology of Poetry  (The Norton is recommended and not required because the poems in it that we will discuss are widely available and are probably included in anthologies that you already own.)

Description

This course is an immersion in the history of lyric verse in English. We will read most of the standard warhorses. The focus of the course will be on the poems as poems, on what they do to minds in the time it takes to read or hear them, and only incidentally on their authors and the historical pressures that shaped them. The aim is to see why certain poems persist in the culture and on syllabuses like this one, while thousands of others – many of which say apparently similar things in similar ways – get attention for a while and then are forgotten.