ENGL 310
Rebels, Revelers, and Reactionaries: The Poets of the Seventeenth Century Spring 2013
Division I
This is not the current course catalog

The decades following the death of Elizabeth I were a period of scandal, schism, dissent and decadence, culminating in a bloody civil war and the beheading of a king. It was, in other words, a world turned upside down by every kind of upheaval: in civics, philosophy, politics, religion, and science. It also produced writers of some of England s finest lyric and satiric poetry, and its greatest epic poet. How the century s poets successfully dramatized the critical events and feelings in this time of turmoil will be the focus of the course. While primarily a course in close reading, we will nevertheless try to reconstruct the lives and contexts of the writers, and examine some of the critical and theoretical issues involved in contextualizing the poems. Authors will include Donne, Jonson, Lanyer, Herbert, Herrick, the Cavalier Poets, Milton, Marvell, Cavendish, Dryden, and Rochester.