Course description

This seminar has two related objectives: to cultivate a critical vocabulary for talking and writing about poetry, and to examine the function of intertextuality and allusion among poems from the Renaissance to the 21st century. By tracking poetic tropes as they recur in poems across historical periods, we will uncover how poets sample, reuse, and comment on the work of their predecessors. We’ll begin by reading (aloud!) and annotating poems from the Renaissance to the 20th century to develop a set of tools for poetic analysis. We’ll then expand this foundation by looking closely matters of form and figuration in a selection of sonnets. Once we have built a common critical vocabulary, we will turn our attention to two key tropes in Western poetry, the bird and the garden. These tropes have long galvanized poets, and they continue to perform powerful figurative work in 21st century poetry. Beginning with Milton and Marvell, we will trace the recurrence of these tropes across the 17th to 20th centuries to consider how the subjects and objects of poetry accrue layers of meaning across time and how images and themes are reshaped in different historical and cultural contexts. We will conclude each unit by reading poems by 21st century poets, including Andrew Feld, Brigit Pegeen Kelly, Angie Estes, and Paisley Rekdal.