Geopoetics

A long poem has space to pull a lot of the natural world into the world it builds. This seminar explores the overlap between these two worlds. It asks what long poems are and what they can teach us about nature. Though we will sample a range of poets, old and new, and will draw upon some contextual and critical materials along the way, our semester together will be structured mainly by the reading of four exemplary long poems from the eighteenth century in their entirety: An Essay on Man by Alexander Pope, The Seasons by James Thomson, The Task by William Cowper, and Beachy Head by Charlotte Smith. This is big, ambitious verse that believes in its power to see and shape reality. It aims to describe a changing Earth and aspires to use its descriptions to change the way readers think. Now the poems may be long, but the writing assignments will mostly be short. The course meets a pre-1800 distribution requirement for English majors, and it could be of interest to anyone curious about the history of poetic practice or about the interrelations among literature, philosophy, and ecology.