L&S Curricular Connections

Although this course is not specifically designed for students who think they don’t like poetry, it may have particular appeal for them. The course will ask what it is about poems that causes anybody to value them—what it is, not what it ought to be—and will attempt an answer. Poems, after all, rarely say anything worth hearing. So why all the fuss? The course will look hard at a generous sampling of the war horses of English and American verse in an effort to find out what the poems that have been best and longest loved have in common and what it is they do for readers that paraphrases of them do not.