Devotional Poetry

Harvard HDS

This course surveys the work of English and American lyric poets writing in the devotional mode, primarily from the Christian tradition, from the seventeenth through the twenty-first centuries. Poets include the English Metaphysicals (Donne, Herbert, Vaughan, Traherne), John Milton, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, T.S. Eliot, R.S. Thomas, Denise Levertov, Franz Wright, Christian Wiman, Jericho Brown, Anya Silver, and others. Poems and poets are approached thematically…