ENGL 315 Lyric Forms
This seminar will explore the development of lyric poetry and of theoretical reflections on lyric in Anglophone modernity, with a focus on the historical evolution of three poetic kinds since the Renaissance: the sonnet, the elegy, and environmental poetry (especially pastoral and georgic). Canvassing the ways “lyric” has functioned as a term for particular kinds of expression, thought, and classification, this class will provide students with a set of tools to read and write about an archive of short poetry from the sixteenth century to the contemporary moment. Even though it is ostensibly the most personal and hermetic of literary genres, lyric poetry is often produced by what the philosopher Theodor Adorno calls a “collective undercurrent”--a complex shuttling between individual voice and the social structures that shape the forms and possibilities of expression. We will attend to how lyric has crystalized different historically situated understandings of self and society, with an eye towards how the form of a short poem exposes aesthetic, philosophical, and political questions of great urgency.
Major Requirement Met: Group I
Prerequisite
One 200-level English class