Ateneo - UPO

Comprehension; Apprehension: Prosody and the Project of Poetry

The Norton Anthology of Poetry (eds. Ferguson et al.). Students should also all have access to, and familiarize themselves with, the online site www.poetryfoundation, which is comprehensive and includes critical articles alongside a magnificent curation of poetry and poets in English.

This semester-long course for senior undergraduates proposes to survey an extrapolated canon of English poetry with a view to asking how poetry works and why it is made. There will be regular meetings for the close critical analysis of poems (to be supplied) from the Middle Ages and early Renaissance to contemporary times, and there will be opportunities for experimentation in students’ own creative writing.

B2 level of English

Lecturing (minor), seminar discussion and Socratic dialogue. All activities will be in English.

The course will be taught by Prof. Peter Anderson, who is an Associate Professor and Distinguished Teacher of the University of Cape Town (South Africa), a former Rhodes Scholar, and an acclaimed and established poet internationally.

Students with physical disabilities, Learning Disabilities or Special Education Needs can request specific services and tools via the Staff Sviluppo e Coordinamento Carriere e Servizi alle Studentesse e agli Studenti, consulting the University webpage: https://www.uniupo.it/en/services/services-students-physical-or-learning-disabilities Students with disabilities, learning disabilities or special education needs, once they have contacted the University Staff, can refer to the tutor in charge of the course to define the examination modalities, concerning academic aspects.

Assessment will be by two essays of 10 000 characters each. Essays will be set, but students may propose essays, critical translation exercises, or critical creative writing, by consultation. The use of Artificial Intelligence is prohibited, both in the intellectual formation and the prose composition of the essays.
Grading: Emphasis will be placed on integrated argumentative prosodic analysis, which is to say that summaries of the “message” of the poem will be penalised.
Basically: skills of critical analysis will make up 80% of the grade, with 20% awarded for command of English prose in the writing of the essay.

I propose to read, among others, anonymous medieval lyrics, Skelton, Wyatt, Shakespeare, Donne, Herbert, Pope, Charlotte Smith, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, Christina Rossetti, Tennyson, Eliot, Auden, Macneice, Ashbery, Hill, Forché, and selected South African poets, male and female, as an introduction. I am interested in translation studies and exercises, and students may elect a critical paper on a translation into or out of Italian.

Students will gain critical and analytical skills in abundance, a sense of the history of English poetry, and exposure to questions around the genre of poetry. There are opportunities for creative writing and for translation.