This seminar is designed to provide English majors with intensive and closely supervised work in critical reading and writing. Although sections of the course may address any literary question, period, or genre, they all provide an introduction to critical and methodological problems in literary studies.

[Poets] were called, in the earlier epochs of the world, legislators, or prophets: a poet essentially comprises and unites both these characters. For he not only beholds intensely the present as it is, and discovers those laws according to which present things ought to be ordered, but he beholds the future in the present…Poets are...the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present. --Percy Bysshe Shelley, *A Defence of Poetry* These seem like extravagant claims, but, as Shelley suggests, tradition was on his side--a tradition at least. Like many traditions, it was cobbled together out of different, even incompatible legacies. The models of prophecy presented in the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, and classical sources do not cohere into anything like a unity. Nor, perhaps, do the hundreds of disparate practices we lump together under the term “poetry.” Still, the durability of the habit of identifying the one with the other suggests a common thread which, if it does not link all poets to prophets--or even all poets (or prophets) to each another--links some of them to a singular understanding of the poetic vocation, enlisting them into a trans-historical solidarity. Here is one articulation of this shared understanding: To be a poet-prophet is to make a claim to moral and political authority that is also a claim on the future, and to bind that double claim to the temporal operation of poetic form itself. We will work together to flesh out and refine this formulation by testing it against individual cases, beginning with the great age of English prophecy: the English Revolution and its immediate aftermath. Female authorship more than doubled in this period, with prophets making up the majority of these new writers. As we’ll find, their claims on the future did not need to be claims *about* the future, much less infallible predictions, to carry prophetic authority. Tracking expressions of this authority through some prophetic poems of the Romantic period and our current moment, we’ll consider its strategic value when access to regular sources of authority has been blocked, or when trust in the legitimacy of these sources has collapsed. Most importantly, we’ll examine how prophetic poets understand the relation between prophecy’s articulation and its anticipated fulfillment, and how this understanding, in turn, shapes their approach to poetic form. Because poetic form, like all literary form, requires the passage of time to reveal itself, it offers an analogue of prophecy, whose fulfillment will confirm not only the prophetic status of its initial articulation but the divine artistry at work in history itself, whose shape will only be revealed as it ends. This class satisfies the "pre-1800" requirement for the English major.

Book List

We'll use a course reader. Authors will include William Blake, Abiezer Coppe, John Milton, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Anna Trapnel.

Repeat Rules

Requirements class fulfills