Renaissance Poetry

4.0; 3.0 credits · Undergraduate

Renaissance humanists thought learning should be fun and wanted to replace stodgy scholastic disputation with rhetorical playfulness. So, the poetry of this period takes pleasure very seriously. In the course, we’ll be looking at how the poets of the 16th and early 17th centuries emphasized the relationship of poetry to the senses; how poetry was a privileged medium for inspiring erotic feeling, religious devotion, and political action; and how the print revolution changed the character of verse writing, its authors, and its readers. Authors will include Wyatt, Surrey, Gascoigne, Shakespeare, Marlowe, Whitney, Lanyer, Wroth, Donne, Herbert and others. This course can be used to fulfil the pre-1800 requirement.