ENG 252—Poetry

This course introduces students to the forms, language, and history of poetry, and to methods of poetic interpretation. It aims to help students improve their language awareness, their ability to read poems with recognition, understanding, and appreciation, their awareness of the historical, social, cultural, and political contexts in which poems are written. By reading a wide range of verse written between the 1600s and the present, students will explore poetry’s four defined historic functions (to imitate, to teach, to express, to invent), its different partitions (genres), and how and why it differs from prose.