ENGL 111
Poetry and Politics Fall 2012
Division I Writing Skills
This is not the current course catalog

Class Details

“Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world” wrote Shelley in his 1821 “Defence of Poetry,” countering the widely held view of poetry’s airy irrelevance to the material progress of humanity. His claims are echoed a century and a half later in Audre Lorde’s “Poetry is Not a Luxury,”; in which she argues that poetry is a vital and essential part of her own political struggle as a Black lesbian feminist. But when W.B. Yeats–himself a very politically involved poet–writes in 1917 that “from the quarrel with others comes rhetoric; from the quarrel with ourselves comes poetry,” he implies that poetry would suffer from too much involvement with the “quarrel with others” that is politics, becoming, perhaps, something more like advertising jingles for political dogma. And when W. H. Auden writes in 1939 that “poetry makes nothing happen” he appears to locate poetry’s value precisely in its irrelevance to politics as such. This course will focus on the vexed relationship between poetry and political struggle, reading predominantly poetry and poetics (writings about poetry) of the last two centuries in an effort to answer the questions: what can poetry do for politics? what does politics do for (or to) poetry? Is poetry essential to political struggle, or do poetry and politics mix only to the detriment of both, producing, on the one hand, bad poetry, and on the other, mere distractions from the “real” work of politics? The primary goal of the course is to make students better readers of poetry, and better readers and writers of argumentative prose.
The Class: Format: discussion/seminar
Limit: 19
Expected: 19
Class#: 1568
Grading: yes pass/fail option, yes fifth course option
Requirements/Evaluation: active class participation and 20 pages of writing in the form of frequent short papers
Prerequisites: none; no prior experience with poetry (or politics!) is expected
Enrollment Preferences: first-year students who have not taken or placed out of a 100-level English course
Distributions: Division I Writing Skills

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