- Teacher: Simon Swift
This seminar will enable you to focus in detail on some of the strangest and most powerful lyric poetry of Nineteenth-Century America: the poetry of Emily Dickinson. Classes will be organized around careful, slow close reading of Dickinson’s spare, tight and tonally ambivalent verse. On the way we will engage with the long history of efforts to define what lyric poetry is, from the eighteenth century until now, and consider issues of lyric voice and personhood, space, mobility, stasis, death, the body and gender, rhyme, meter, typography and syntax, as well as Dickinson’s relation to a world that takes in the Bible, classical myth, the English literary canon, and the philosophy and literature of her contemporaries.