Poetry and Poetics

Close reading is the engine here: you learn to hear what a poem is doing at the level of meter, sound, image, and form, and then translate that hearing into argument-driven prose. The seminar moves chronologically from Romantic sonnets and odes through Tennyson, Dickinson, Yeats, and into modernist and postwar American voices like Whitman, Loy, Plath, and the Harlem Renaissance, with a paper proposal at midterm and a term paper as the final. Required for the ELIT major, it builds the technical vocabulary and interpretive habits you'll lean on in every later genre and period course.