In this class, students will learn to analyze poetry across a wide range of genres, styles, and historical periods. Studies in Poetry will also develop students’ critical writing skills, preparing them for upper-division English courses.
This section of Studies in Poetry is organized around significant poetic traditions, from alliterative meter to iambic pentameter to free verse, with an emphasis on the twenty-first-century United States. We ask what it means for a poem to belong to a tradition and how a diversity of traditions have shaped contemporary poetic practice.
units
Why poetry?
Tetrameter and ballad meter (spotlight: Emily Dickinson)
Pentameter and the sonnet (spotlight: Anne Bradstreet)
Triple meters and the limerick
Alliterative meter (spotlight: the Exeter Book elegies)
Free verse
Contemporary North American poetry and the lyric (spotlights: Anne Carson, Victoria Chang, Prageeta Sharma, Edgar Garcia, Peter Gizzi)
- Victoria Chang, Tree of Knowledge (2026)
- Edgar Garcia, Cantares (2026)
- Peter Gizzi, Fierce Elegy (2023)
[pictured: LeRoi Jones aka Amiri Baraka]
Eric Weiskott 