01 CAC MTH1 10549 SILVER MU-114
Poetry and the Public, from Manuscript to Print
This course explores anglophone (English-language) poetry written between 1660 and 1800, the period sometimes called the Enlightenment. That period is the one associated with the emergence of modern science, and also with globalism, empire, and the modernization of industry. It also witnessed the emergence of a surprising range of poetic forms, when poetry went from a private genre, mostly written by hand and passed in manuscript, to a public one, appearing in print in broadsides, newspapers, magazines, and books. In that transformative age, poetry wasn't just a genre for the spontaneous overflow of powerful emotion. It was expected to do politics, philosophy, satire, and social justice; it communicated ideas and captured landscapes; it made sense of city living and rural labor. That was also the era in which literary and cultural criticism first emerged, when a professional class of critics (and their students!) first started learning how to judge poetry and its effects, filling whole journals and newspapers with essays on culture and the arts.
This class takes advantage of the resources of the Scarlet Letterpress, the Murray-Hall book-arts makerspace. We will make ink and paper, write with quill and set type, examine literature in its original form and edit, bind, and publish small books of edited verse. We will become critics, joining that class of public-minded people, sharpening our skill as judges—and maybe as poets, too. As we read, we will constantly ask "what is this poem doing?," thinking capaciously about the written word as a living force—in their world, and in our own.