AN Introduction to Poetry, A complete online course, lectures
Introduction Students often cringe at the idea of studying poetry. In our experience, they do so for two main reasons. Either they fear that studying something meant for pleasure goes against its nature (students sometimes tell us that poems, like songs, are simply meant to be enjoyed, so why not just leave it at that?) or they fear that they’ll never be able understand poetry. It’s a foreign language. They have been exposed to poetry in middle school and high school—a little Shakespeare, a little Emily Dickinson, a little Robert Frost—and they could never figure out how the teacher got from the words of the poems to the meaning the teacher ascribed to them. And why did it matter anyway? If a poem had anything to say why not just say it? Why dress it up with convoluted sentences and archaic words and rhymes? An Introduction to Poetry starts off where so many of our students start off, with the very misunderstandings they bring with them to the course. Having tau...