Reading Lyric Poetry

4.0 credits

The seminar will focus on ways of reading lyric poetry, taking stock of lyric poems’ immediacy and music, how poems play, how they remember, their conversations with ordinary language, how poems open up to vulnerable forms of thought and feeling, their negotiations with silence, even nonsense. We’ll be centering on two crucial bodies of lyric poetry in English, Shakespeare’s sonnets and the poems of Emily Dickinson, as well as sampling pieces by various other poets. We’ll also look closely at different traditions of critical and theoretical writing about lyric, including work by William Empson, Allen Grossman, Sharon Cameron, Anne Carson, Jonathan Culler, Susan Stewart, and Susan Howe.