ENGL 4030 - [Poetry in Process]

(crosslisted) AMST 4030
(LA-AS, ALC-AS)

Spring. Not offered: 2021-2022. Next offered: 2022-2023. 4 credits. Student option grading.

R. Gilbert.

Like all of us, poets change over time. In this course we’ll track the shifting visions and styles of three major American poets whose work spans two centuries. Whitman, Stevens, and Ammons differ in many ways, but they share an expansive perspective that celebrates mind, body, and creativity while acknowledging violence, loss, and death. Rather than reading each poet separately, we’ll move back and forth among them, comparing the phases of their careers, charting their formal and stylistic innovations, and exploring the lines of influence that connect them. Ammons taught at Cornell from 1964 to 1998, and we’ll consider how his work synthesizes Whitman’s rugged physicality and Stevens’s meditative subtlety to produce a poetry that draws equally on scientific thought and religious feeling.