Syllabus

Course Description
The course highlights both major poets—from Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson through T.S. Eliot, H.D., Amy Lowell, Hart Crane, Langston Hughes, Muriel Rukeyser, and many others—and influential movements. The course mixes historical overview with close readings of individual poets and poems. Most courses give only one instructor’s point of view. This one matches the diversity of US poetry with lectures by a score of talented faculty. They bring their special perspective to the material while also presenting a coherent view of more than fifty years of US poetry.
This is a course that takes advantage of the medium to bring you sights and sounds that would be difficult to incorporate in classroom lectures.

Textbook
If you are interested in further reading, many of the poems you will encounter in the video lectures are readily available online.