Pre-Twentieth Century American Poetry Course Description
This course provides a general survey of American Poetry, beginning with pre-Columbian Native American songs and poems and moving through the early colonial poets Edward Taylor and Anne Bradstreet, the neo-Romantic “Fireside Poets,” Emerson and Transcendentalism, the proto-Symbolist aestheticism of Edgar Allen Poe, to the revolutionary pre-modernist idioms of Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and Stephen Crane. Special attention will be paid to song—African American and European American—and to African-American poetics from Wheatley to Dunbar. Emphasis will be placed on close reading, socio-historic context, and contemporary poetic theory. Course requirements include a close-reading paper of four to five pages, a final research paper of eight to ten pages, class participation, and a final exam.
Required Texts
- The New Anthology of American Poetry. Volume One: Traditions and Revolutions, Beginnings to 1900. Rutgers University Press. 2012. 0-8135-3162-4
