Instructor: Elisa New, PhD and Gillian Osborne, PhD
Day & Time: On Demand
Summer 7-week session | CRN 35008
No Enrollment Limit
This course covers American poetry in cultural context through the year 1850. The course begins with Puritan poets, some orthodox, some rebel spirits, who wrote and lived in early New England. Focusing on Anne Bradstreet, Edward Taylor, and Michael Wigglesworth, among others, we explore the interplay between mortal and immortal, Europe and wilderness, solitude and sociality in English North America. The second part of the course spans the poetry of America's early years, directly before and after the creation of the Republic. We examine the creation of a national identity through the lens of an emerging national literature, focusing on such poets as Phillis Wheatley, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Edgar Allen Poe, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, among others. Distinguished guest discussants in this course include writer Michael Pollan, economist Larry Summers, Vice President Al Gore, Mayor Tom Menino, and others.
Syllabus
Required sections to be arranged.
Harvard College students: this course counts for the Aesthetics and Culture Gen Ed requirement and is equivalent to Gen Ed 1172. It does not count for the College's divisional distribution requirement.
The recorded lectures are from the HarvardX Poetry in America Series.