"Poetry, perhaps more than any other genre, shows us how important it is to connect with a real human presence. The class I am teaching this semester is an undergraduate survey of lyric poetry. It's a class I enjoy teaching and one I offer whenever I can. Modeled on a course I took as an undergraduate, in which the poet, professor, and painter Peter Sacks brought us all to tears in his full-throated lectures on Milton and Shelley and Bishop, the class begins with some anonymous Middle English lyric poems and does a quick swoop through the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries before concluding with Modernism, mid-century American poetry, and some contemporary work."
"I tell students, most of whom are sophomores and juniors, that I want them to leave the course with a sense-to paraphrase T.S. Eliot-of tradition in their bones. I want them to leave excited to go out and read whatever strikes their fancy, but to do it with a poet's sense of the long history of poetry in English and a feel for the way poetry reprises older traditions or echoes older verse, sometimes without the poets themselves even knowing it."
"This semester, though, I approached the class with an argument in mind: I wanted to show my students how fundamental a sense of real human presence is to what we understand as poetry. I gave the class a new title: "'This Living Hand': Lyric Poetry and the Writing 'I.'" The quoted phrase comes from a fragment by John Keats, a bit of poetry written towards the end of the poet's short life, before he died of tuberculosis in 1821 at the age of 25."
"This living hand, now warm and capableOf earnest grasping, would, if it were coldAnd in the icy silence of the tomb,So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nightsThat thou would wish thine own heart dry of bloodSo in my veins red life might stream again,And thou be conscience-calmed-see here it is-I hold it towards"
An undergraduate lyric poetry survey traces Middle English lyrics through the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries, then moves into Modernism, mid-century American poetry, and contemporary work. The course includes poets such as Shakespeare, John Donne, Lorine Niedecker, and Terrence Hayes, and it emphasizes learning tradition through close reading. Students are encouraged to feel the long history of English poetry and to notice how poems reprise older traditions or echo earlier verse, sometimes without the later poets knowing. The course reframes its focus by arguing that real human presence is fundamental to what readers recognize as poetry, using Keats’s “This living hand” fragment to foreground the lyric “I.”
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