English 45 - Spring, 2013

Introductory Topics in Poetry

Topic: Desire & Poetic Form

Class Information

Instructor: Brown, Nathan
CRN: 62554
Time: TR 1:40-3:00
Location: 212 Wellman

Description

What is desire?

Poetry offers an exemplary medium through which to explore this question, since it takes that which might seem to be at once thoroughly abstract yet resolutely embodied (language) and forms it. One cannot point at desire but there it is, haunting the body, interrupting reason, instigating action, overriding the law, impelling repetition, and seizing upon the senses such that language cannot exactly "express" it but rather emerges from it, just as language might repress, elide, evade, or counter its imperatives. Desire is not what we know we want but, perhaps, the wanting of what we do not know, and thus it agitates speech, cognition, and will in unexpected ways.

Poetry is one among the theaters of this agitation, wherein it plays itself out and wherein we can watch the forms it takes. Thus, with special attention to the relation between desire, language, and form we will read carefully in work by William Shakespeare, John Keats, Emily Dickinson, H.D., and Anne Carson, exploring the manner in which desire becomes manifest in poetic making.

Grading

Essay #1: 15%
Essay #2: 20%
Essay #3: 25%
Final Exam: 25%
Attendance and Participation: 15%

Texts

The Sonnets and a Lover\'s Complaint, William Shakespeare
Complete Poems and Selected Letters, John Keats
The Poems of Emily Dickinson, A Reading Edition, Emily Dickinson (Franklin Edition)
Collected Poems, 1912-1944, H.D.
Plainwater, Anne Carson