LIT 5038 Spring 2022 Hamby

We will be reading excerpts from the letters of poets, beginning in ancient Rome with Ovid and Horace, and moving on Alexander Pope, Byron, Keats, Emily Dickinson, Rimbaud, Rilke, Langston Hughes, Elizabeth Bishop/Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, and ending with Allen Ginsberg’s letters to Jack Kerouac and Gary Snyder. In many of these letters, poets discuss ideas that have become iconic, as in Keats' letter to his brothers in which he works out his ideas about negative capability or Rimbaud's “complete derangement of the sense” and “I is nobody.” They also share their work in their letters, so we can see the genesis of great poems as well as failures. Some great poets won't be addressed, not because they didn't write letters, but because they weren't great letter writers. In this group are Wordsworth and Whitman. And though the concerns of each poet may be different, we will also find the similarities through the ages. Written assignments will include weekly responses to the readings and a final project that can be critical or creative. Please feel free to contact me if you have any questions.