Worldmaking in the Long Poem

In this seminar we will take as our topic the long poem and the worlds, exterior and interior, that it both perceives and creates. Following some initial conceptual work to pin down the genre (if that’s the right word for it) as it developed before modernism, the heart of the course comes in the close study of three main examples in their entirety: The Seasons by James Thomson, The Task by William Cowper, and The Prelude by William Wordsworth. These major English poems, which date to the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, are all about growth, and they are in truth really, really long. They just keep growing and growing. They push, you might say, against their finitude. We will confront their too-much-ness and figure out how to think and feel about it, but also how to work with it, how to ride it. From week to week we will ask how the expansiveness of these authors relates on the one hand to their smaller-scale poetic techniques and on the other to their grand social, environmental, philosophical, and spiritual ambitions. The sheer energy these works demand of their readers can (this is the gamble of the long poem) make experiencing them deeply meaningful. In their own time they became tremendously influential models, radically reshaping what poetry could do and be, and they still have much to teach critical readers and creative writers today. Interspersed among the main examples on the schedule will be a few other (shorter!) poems from the same period. Along the way, although our focus will stay on primary texts, we will sample several different works of exemplary criticism. And we will end our semester with a glance ahead to the twentieth-century long poem. Active contributions (in and out of class) to discussion, a short paper, and (of course) a long paper make up the required coursework.