Places for Poetry

This seminar asks how poetry claims places. The poets come mostly from Britain or its former colonies. The poems range from the seventeenth century all the way to the present day, with the majority (around two-thirds of the schedule) drawn from the long eighteenth century. In that period, an age of increased urbanization inside Britain’s borders and increased mobility around its expanding empire, the main distinction that organized cultural conversations about place was the divide between the town and the country. But poems about the virtues of rural life often spoke from a distressed urban perspective, and poems about the dynamism of the city frequently described it from the viewpoint of an outsider or newcomer. What the eighteenth century can teach us about the poetry of place, then, is that it might secretly be poetry of movement, poetry about how one seemingly stable location (or type of location) might pick up and go somewhere else. Starting from this insight, we will wrestle with larger questions about how shareable the poetry of place can be. Does staying faithful to a single place—its grainy specificity, its deep history, its rich tradition—risk making a poem unintelligible elsewhere? To what extent does a place-based poem need to shed its local attachments and try to speak a more universal language? How can a poem communicate its rootedness with people who don’t have roots in the same spot? When is a poem an extension of place, and when is it an escape from it?

Instead of proceeding chronologically, our weekly seminar will largely be arranged by settings that various English, Scottish, Irish, Caribbean, Anglo-Indian, and American poets have evoked. For the first ten weeks of the term, we will move from one type of place to another: from country houses to city streets, perhaps, or battlefields to bridges, hills to dales, walking paths to railway stations, outer islands to outer space. For the final few weeks, we will shift our organization and sample several major poets of place—one or two from the eighteenth century, one or two from the following centuries. Your final project for the class will imaginatively map the poetry of one of the places that you claim or one of the places that claims you.