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“So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,/ So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.“ This final couplet from Shakespeare’s sonnet no. 18 refers to the poem’s immortality and to the poem’s potential to immortalise its subject – the beloved. Starting with sonnets by William Shakespeare and his contemporaries, this class will cover a wide range of 17th century poetry: in terms of poets, genres and topics. In addition to reading Shakespearean sonnets we will read epigrams and elegies by Ben Jonson and study examples of Metaphysical poetry by John Donne and Andrew Marvell. We will focus, too, on poems by women writers such as Katherine Philips and Aphra Behn. In terms of poetic genres, there will be sonnets, satires, epigrams and elegies: there will be love poems – “innocent“ and highly erotic, poems on friendship and on death. We will read these texts with a close eye to their characteristics as verse, focussing on the uses of poetic devices and stylistic specialities. Furthermore, we will place the poetic texts in their specific historical contexts – and read them as part of debates about writing poetry, about religious issues, gender relations, and the discovery of the New Americas.
The texts of the poems – and additional background material – will be available on moodle at the beginning of the semester. |
