ENGL 205
The Art of Poetry Fall 2009
Division I
This is not the current course catalog

“If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off,” Emily Dickinson wrote, “I know that is poetry.” This course will explore the particular pleasures and excitements of poetry, taking up a wide range of poets–John Donne, Robert Frost, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Hayden, e.e. cummings, Louise Glück, William Butler Yeats, Stephen Dunn, Elizabeth Alexander, Edwin Arlington Robinson, and many others. We will raise such questions as, How exactly is poetry different from prose? Can we ever determine the “true” meaning of any poem? Can we reasonably argue that some poems are good and some are bad? How is our reading of a poem affected by what we know about the author, or the historical moment when the poem was composed, or the shape of the book in which it first appeared? What, finally, can a poem do to us?