Creature Poetry

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

The world of Harry Potter may have its fantastic beasts - and it may be able to tell you where to find them - but this course contends that British and Irish poetry has been a central place to locate such creatures - animals both fantastic and mundane - for the past hundred years. Throughout the semester, we will encounter many of the most important creatures to come out of this poetry, from W.B. Yeats's rabbits and swans and D.H. Lawrence's bats, to Ted Hughes's "Thought-Fox" and Seamus Heaney's otters and skunks, to the more otherworldly creatures of Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill's mermaids and Edwin Morgan's Loch Ness Monster. Though the course will touch on many cultural concerns through its poetic focus on the "creaturely" - concerns such as those surrounding gender and class, race and the postcolonial - its running interests will include that of anthropomorphism and the depiction of nonhuman experiences and phenomenologies, including the ecological fantasy of human annihilation. In addition, we will examine literary features such as genre and form, and will pair several weeks' poems with non-poetic fictional texts. Students will be graded on class participation, a project of collaborative design, several small writing assignments, and two substantial writing assignments.