Thinking in Verse

What kinds of thinking was poetry good for in the Enlightenment? To examine how habits of mind correspond to techniques of verse, this seminar will focus on ambitious poems of Britain’s long eighteenth century, beginning with John Milton’s Paradise Regained (1671). Milton’s sequel is light on narrative and heavy on argument. Though these features made it less attractive than Paradise Lost to some early readers, they also made it more accurate in identifying the paths that were excitingly open to Enlightenment poets. We will study a range of different verse types—georgic, loco-descriptive, philosophical, satirical, prophetic—that share a resistance to plot or a desire to displace plot onto other organizing principles. We will consider the consequences of this non-narrative tendency for ecological, political, and moral thought especially, and we will discuss how poetry’s alternatives to plot might cut across some of the strong conceptual binaries associated with the Enlightenment: materialism and idealism, empiricism and rationalism, classicism and modernity, colonialism and anticolonialism. But instead of treating poetry as a vehicle for thinking that could be done just as well in other forms, we will set out from the hypothesis that the formal and technical qualities of verse facilitate distinctive ways of making sense of the world. The course aims to acquaint students with some major poets of the period, combining familiar names (Dryden, Behn, Pope, Gray, Blake) with figures whose reputations have changed dramatically of late (Finch, Thomson, Williams, Barbauld). It also introduces students to the questions that shape the study of Enlightenment poetics today and the methodologies that scholars are developing to pursue answers. The seminar does not assume prior knowledge of the eighteenth century. It will treat the unfamiliarity of these poets as a virtue, giving us a fresh opportunity to think about what poetry aspires to do in a messy and exuberant age. Students specializing in the period ought to find the course useful, but so should people in contiguous fields or with broader interests in poetry and poetics.