English 130 - Introduction to Poetry: The Sonnet

[Before 1800] Students will learn how to read and write about anglophone poetry from different time periods by focusing on one particular poetic form: the sonnet. Students will have opportunities to engage with poets and the local poetry community, handle rare books, and learn how to use the library’s resources, with a view to writing both poetry reviews and argumentative essays about poetry. As one of the most enduring poetic forms in the Western tradition, the sonnet is a form that contemporary engage with in order to have a dialogue with poets from the past. Broadly defined, it is a poem with fourteen lines, a strict rhyme scheme, and the expectation that there will be a turn in the argument or logic of the poem at some point. These constraints have long been considered an opportunity for poets to display their technical skill. And yet, as Terrance Hayes puts it in his poem “American Sonnet for my Past and Future Assassin,” the sonnet’s constraints can also be “part prison.” Studying sonnets therefore opens up conversations about the kinds of games contemporary poets are playing–and what kinds of critiques they are making–when they choose to experiment with this particular poetic form. We will begin by studying Tyehimba Jess’ Olio  (2016). We will then go back to the very beginning of this tradition, to read translations of poems by the fourteenth-century Italian poet Petrarch, who invented the conventions that poets are still responding to today. In the third unit, we will study how early modern British writers, including William Shakespeare, Edmund Spenser, Lady Mary Wroth, and John Donne, adapted this Italian form in English, and consider reasons that the sonnet fell out of fashion, only to resurge in the late eighteenth-century. Finally, we will  read twentieth and twenty-first century sonnets in dialogue with the earlier sonnets we have studied. This course will satisfy the department’s requirement to take a “pre-1800” class, but it is also open to anyone who is curious about poetic form and poetic tradition. 

Limited to 18 students. Fall semester. Professor Worsley.

How to handle overenrollment: If over-enrolled, preference will be given to first years and seniors who need this requirement in order to graduate.

Students who enroll in this course will likely encounter and be expected to engage in the following intellectual skills, modes of learning, and assessment: The majority of class time will be spent close reading poetry together, both in class discussion and small group work. A significant amount of class time will also be spent introducing students to college-level research and writing skills. No previous knowledge of poetry or essay-writing will be assumed–we will build the skills needed to close read, do research, write essays, and attend poetry readings together. Course grades will take into account class participation as well as both formal and informal written assignments.