This genre course will provide graduate students an advanced introduction to the art of poetry from a critical perspective. Our conceptual focus involves the shifts from romanticism(s) to modernism(s) to postmodernism(s) as they occurred in both the U.S. and U.K. Our goal is to understand the most influential practices of poetic making as well as the theories that underwrite them, thus developing a comprehensive sense of literary history, analysis, and evaluation. To that end, students may expect both to acquire strategies for approaching "difficult" texts with confidence and to attain a refined vocabulary with which to discuss a crucial process of reading, writing, and thinking. Thus what you will be learning in this course about literary analysis and evaluation is portable to other English classes—and, ideally, to your own literature classrooms.

We will focus our attention on inventive and influential work that stands as a definite contribution to the art of verbal expression in English. This will include poems and/or essays by many of the following writers, all of whom were born between 1770 and 1930: William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor, Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Edgar Allan Poe, Robert Browning, Matthew Arnold, Thomas Hardy, William Butler Yeats, Mina Loy, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, Langston Hughes, Sterling Brown, Basil Bunting, Louis Zukofsky, George Oppen, Lorine Niedecker, Robert Hayden, Gwendolyn Brooks, Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Ed Dorn, Elizabeth Bishop, Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery, W.S. Merwin, Thom Gunn, and Samuel Menashe.

N.B. No previous experience with poetry and poetics is required.