Early American Poetry and Poetics

What was American poetry before Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman? In this advanced undergraduate seminar, we will survey the diverse poetic forms and traditions from the British North American colonies to Dickinson’s and Whitman’s Civil War-era writings. Most class sessions will be devoted to the poetry of a single author, including the Puritan epics of Anne Bradstreet, the colonial satires of Ebenezer Cooke, the antislavery ballads of George Moses Horton, the Ojibwe verse of Jane Johnston Schoolcraft, and the historical lyrics of Herman Melville. Our course will consider historically-specific theories of poetry and ask how these theories lead to varying conceptions of the aesthetic merit and spiritual and/or social purpose of poetry. Through discussion-based close readings, we will approach these poems with an eye toward the capacities of their formal qualities for absorbing and reflecting the social and political issues of early America.