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English 230a |
T. Festa |
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TTH 2:30 - 4 |
HU III |
God, sex, death, and politics: these enduring concerns form the core topics repeatedly and even obsessively discussed by the poets we will read. This course is designed to introduce students to the poetry written during the seventeenth century, a period of political upheaval and religious transformation that had a formative and lasting influence on Anglophone culture. Beginning with a close study of the major poets before the English Civil War, most notably the poets of the so-called metaphysical school, we will consider the development of key stylistic and generic innovations while investigating the conditions within which the notion of authorship began to emerge in the period. In addition to devotional and courtly lyrics, emphasis will be placed upon longer poems, including Donne's Anniversaries and Lanyer's Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum, which reveal the intersections between the scientific, religious, and political experimentation of the period. In this connection we will also take up a small number of selected prose works from the age, which will help to illuminate the intellectual contexts in which the poets wrote. The second half of the course will consider the diversity of poetic voices to which the Civil War and Restoration gave rise by focusing on such topics as the country house, "cavalier" and "roundhead" poetry, celebrations of republic and monarch, and establishment and sectarian devotion.
Poetry by:
John Donne
Aemilia Lanyer
Ben Jonson
George Herbert
Robert Herrick
Andrew Marvell
Katherine Philips
John Milton
John Dryden (and others)
Short selections from prose works such as:
Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning
John Donne, Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions
Sir Thomas Browne, Religio Medici
Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan
Margaret Cavendish, The Blazing World
John Bunyan, The Pilgrim's Progress
Requirements: class participation, a bit of historical research, and three papers (6-7 pp.).
Brief description for the catalog:
An exploration of 17th century British poetry in relation to its aesthetic, intellectual, and political contexts. Poets studied will include Donne, Marvell, Herbert, Herrick, Jonson, Milton, Dryden, Lanyer, and Phillips.