Thinking with Poetry

This is a senior-level seminar that treats poetry as a mode of thinking rather than just aesthetic expression, tracing how poets from Hesiod and Lucretius through Keats, Tennyson, and Eliot have grappled with the same durable questions philosophers do: how to live and die, what nature is, what we owe each other, whether there is a God. Class time is built around close reading and discussion of a thematically grouped course pack, and you are assessed largely on how you talk about the poems, through participation, performance, a midterm, and an oral exam at the end. It sits at the upper end of the ELIT track and assumes you can already read difficult verse historically; the payoff is learning to use poems as primary philosophical texts rather than illustrations of ideas argued elsewhere.