English 242 - Long Poems

How do long poems come together–and hold together?  Can they maintain a lyric intensity, or do they inevitably give way to the looser energies of narrative or extended meditation?  We will read works in many forms–including heroic couplets, ballad stanzas, and free verse–by poets from the eighteenth century to the present, including Alexander Pope, Walt Whitman, Amy Clampitt, James Merrill, and Paul Muldoon.

Fall semester.  Writer-in-Residence Hall.