In this course we will work together to learn how to read some of the very greatest, most important, most powerful poetry written in English over the past hundred years. A crucial mission of this class is to make you comfortable with talking and writing about poetry. No prior experience with (or even love of!) poetry is required. Our mini-course will present you with basic instructions in and tools for interpretation; it will also present you with some poets whose work you’ll want to keep reading long after this class is over.

You’ll write two essays (c. 4-5 pages each) for this class—both focused on close-readings of particular poems; there will be an optional revision of the first essay.

We will be working not from an anthology but from the original volumes in which these poems were published, studying each poem in one of its earliest natural habitats rather than in the different environments forced upon it by subsequent editors. We’ll be reading, talking about, and writing papers on an extraordinary assembly of poets, most of them more or less our contemporaries: poets whose work we’re likely to study include Claudia Rankine, Louise Glück, Anne Carson, Wilfred Owen, Robert Frost, Kaveh Akbar.