Poetry: Image, Sound and Word

If you love somebody and you think you know exactly why, in spreadsheet mode, you’re thinking in prose.

If you love somebody and you keep realizing that there’s more to love than you thought there was yesterday, you’re thinking in poetry.

The difference will come out when you try to say why and how you love. Prose uses words as labels for the contents of thought; poetry asks you to think of words as contents in themselves. The dictionary meaning of a word matters in poetry just the way it does in prose, but in addition poetry reminds you that words have sounds the way music does, and associations with other words and their sounds. It’s a richer way of experiencing life through language. And you’ll see when you learn in this course how to experience language that way: the better you get at noticing words, the better you’ll get at loving them and loving the world they’re part of.

Text: The Norton Anthology of Poetry

Two exams, a five-page paper, and a final. We’ll also be doing some technical exercises with verse form, and one more big assignment will be for you to write a sonnet. That one will be graded pass-fail, for technical accuracy only and with infinite rewrites allowed until it takes off its training wheels and passes.