This course is a small, faculty-led seminar on the practice and discipline of literary analysis. It is meant for all students who seek an introductory literature course and would like to improve their ability to read and write critically, including those who may wish to major in English. Focusing on the close study of a few works, rather than a survey of many, the seminar will help students develop college-level skills for interpreting literature, while gaining awareness of different strategies and approaches for making sense of literary language, genres, forms, and contexts. The seminar also will develop students’ ability to write about literature and to communicate meaningfully the stakes of their analysis to an audience.

W.B. Yeats was one of the most widely read poets in the English-speaking world. He was born in 1865, when Queen Victoria was in her heyday, and he died in 1939, just as the European empires plunged again into all-out war. Before that he was a senator in a newborn republic, and before that he was a Romantic playwright trying to dream up a reborn culture for the Ireland he loved. This is a course about the ways Yeats does and does not fit his era—a problem he himself made part of his subject. Yeats was a fence-sitter, a poet who was split in his allegiances, a poet who said that true poetry comes from the “quarrels” within a person. So, we’ll read the poetry of Yeats from his early work to his last poems, and we’ll understand him as a product of many times and worlds, but as first and foremost a poet of the nineteenth century, a product of the Victorian era and its aesthetics, who went on to become one of the foremost modern poets. We’ll think about how to read a poet whose work resists easy classification, and about the ways that might be a part of the meaning of poetry itself. We'll also take a look at some of his prose and other writings. We'll touch on the work of Yeats’s contemporaries, and we'll understand the poetry in terms of form, lyric, political violence, spiritual philosophy, Ireland and England, the natural world, childhood, music, folklore, artistic ambition, and more, all as made manifest in Yeats’s work. Requirements include two four-page essays and one six-page essay, as well as regular attendance and participation in discussion.

The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats, edited by Richard J. Finneran

Repeat Rules

Course is not repeatable for credit.

Requirements class fulfills