American Poetry

American poetry traces how a national literature found its voice through verse, moving from Puritan devotionals and slave-narrative lyrics to the formal ruptures of modernism and the political urgencies of the Harlem Renaissance and beyond. You'll read closely across roughly four centuries, building the technical vocabulary to talk about meter, image, and form while writing two essays and a group presentation that situate poems within their aesthetic and historical moments. As a spring junior-year requirement in AMER, it sharpens the close-reading muscles your senior seminars and thesis work will lean on, and pairs naturally with the fiction and cultural-history courses that frame the rest of the major.