Learning Outcomes:
1. To help students master a basic critical vocabulary for the analysis of poetry, acquainting students with resources for the study of poetry which are also likely to promote their critically-informed reading of literature more generally.
2. To encourage students to engage fully with textual and linguistic complexity.
3. To empower students as readers of poetry and to build confidence in their interpretive abilities, whilst engendering a love for poetry and its expressive possibilities.
4. To acquaint students with key poems and forms in the history of poetry.
5. To help students to understand how poems function on their own terms, and in relation to the social, material, and ideological systems of which they are a part.
6. To develop students' capacities to write effectively and fluently on poetry.
Indicative Module Content:
Each week, we will attend to a particular aspect of poetic analysis (eg, sound, meaning and pattern; denotation and connotation; rhythm and meter; figurative language, etc), integrating it with aspects already covered and gradually building a fully-equipped poetry-reading toolkit.