Book Title: Introduction to Poetry

Book Description

This book is designed for a first college course in poetry. Assuming a student whose understanding of the subject has not made it beyond prejudices about “openness of interpretation,” “expression of feeling,” and “emptiness of meaning,” it uses written and video lectures as well as a number of illustrated videos on poetics created specifically for this book to guide the student through the tricky question of interpretation, the minefield of poetics, into the valley of forms and figures, and finally through the history of the form itself. This introduction treats poetry as a manifestation of language in general, poems being themselves the manifestation of poetry, which exists in bits and pieces in all ways of using words. In its historical overview it traces the changing ways that poetry has presented itself–how it has existed and what has been expected of it and how it has functioned–from the late sixteenth century through the twentieth. Each chapter is designed to occupy one week of a full-semester course.