ENGL 202 - Lyric Poetry

FC ARHU WINT

4 credits
There are many reasons to read a poem. We might do it because it’s pleasurable, for example. Or because it provides insights into our own emotional lives. Or because it connects us to the lives of others. Or we might do it because lyric poetry offers excellent training in the fundamentals of literary analysis and critical thinking more generally. For lyric poems famously require “slow reading”: the kind of focused, sustained, precise attention to language that is increasingly rare in our fragmented, hurry-up world. This class will require a lot of slow reading. And it will introduce various techniques for appreciating, understanding, and communicating effectively about lyric poems.