Reading Poetry: An Introduction - from Shakespeare to the 21st Century

Building on the introduction to poetry in the Grundkurs, this course is designed to deepen your skills in understanding, analysing, and interpreting poetry. Reading poetry requires different skills, different levels of attention, and a different “mindset” in comparison with reading novels or plays. Poetry asks for particularly close reading techniques, requires time and patience, expects our willingness to question the obvious and to acknowledge paradox and ambiguity. Poetry remains the paradigmatic literary genre, the genre best suited to teach us how language works, how meaning is constructed and emerges from a text, and what literature can “do”. We will discuss approaches, concepts, and theories in relation with poems from all periods (early modern to contemporary), of all forms (sonnet to free verse), and dealing with a wide variety of themes (from subjectivity to ecology). We will discuss individual poems against the backdrop of selected chapters of Tom Furniss and Michael Bath’s Reading Poetry: A Complete Coursebook, third edition, London: Routledge. 2022.