English 361 - SEM: POETRY OF WAR

This course studies a range of poetic representations of war. After reviewing some of the writings of Homer, Virgil and Shakespeare that were most influential for British poets of the 19th and 20th centuries, the course moves from Tennyson, Hardy and Kipling to the poets of the first and second world wars (Rupert Brooke, Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon and others). We situate the poetry with relevant historical and theoretical materials, as well as prose responses to war by authors such as Vera Brittain and Virginia Woolf. We end by reading poets who did not see combat (W.B. Yeats, W. H. Auden, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath) but whose work is nevertheless profoundly concerned with the complex relation of the martial to the lyrical, the destructive to the creative. By permission of the instructor. Enrollment limited to 12.

Instructor Permission. Not open to first-years, sophomores