9:05a-9:55a MWF (30) 3 cr.
This course offers a focused overview of American poetry from its beginnings in the first English religious colonies to the end of the 19th century. The material will be organized into a general chronological pattern, but with poets and poetic traditions grouped in various ways for intellectual coherence. The interplay of chronology and topic provides opportunities both to identify major issues and styles and to identify the unique contributions of individual writers. It also enables us to address the engagement of these writers with some of the pervasive concerns of American culture: literature as the expression of common public values or private anxieties; the uniqueness or imitativeness of American literature in its descent from English literature; the special relationship of Americans in their unprecedented geographical and historical environment to nature, to God, and to progress; the tension between salvation and success. Poets to be studied include Anne Bradstreet, Edward Taylor, William Cullen Bryant, Edgar Allan Poe, the Fireside Poets (Longfellow, Lowell, Whittier, and Holmes), Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, and Emily Dickinson, with brief glances at lesser and minority writers.
Class meetings will proceed mostly by discussion. Besides reading and
talking, students
will be expected to participate in a group presentation focused on the
work of one poet, to
write two brief analyses of individual poems and two short essays, and
to take two in-class
exams. The texts for the course will include Jane Donahue Eberwein,
ed., Early American
Poetry: Bradstreet, Taylor, Dwight, Freneau, and Bryant; Robert
Bain, ed., Whitman’s
and Dickinson’s Contemporaries: An Anthology of Their Verse;
Whitman’s Leaves of
Grass; and a separate collection of the work of Emily
Dickinson.