The course uses musical vocabulary to examine the elements and functions of poetry, exploring how to make things move and stop, stop and move, just like in music. You’ll see how the compositional aspects of poetry create their own music, independent of what’s being said, and act like a film score to underpin and color your ideas.

The course provides examples from great poetry—both via text and video—from such poets as Shakespeare, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Algernon Charles Swinburne, William Butler Yeats, Robert Frost, D.H. Lawrence, e.e. cummings, W.H. Auden, Howard Nemerov, Allen Ginsberg, Galway Kinnell, and others. The focus of the course is not on inspiration and “flowology,” though it will help you shape your inspiration more powerfully. Rather, the focus is on composition and how to craft your writing for maximum effect.

Each week, you’ll have a new poem and a new tool to manipulate, moving through the counter-pointing of lines against phrases, use of rhythmic composition in blank verse, and ending in two traditional sonnet forms. When you post your poem, the instructor and your classmates will comment on your work, with special focus on how your structures help color and enhance your ideas. By the course’s end, you will see poetry differently, both in terms how to approach writing in general, as well as the way that poetry can positively affect your lyrical output.

By the end of the course, you will be able to:

• Write clearly and strongly
• Precisely control form and composition
• Counter-point lines against phrases to create musical effects
• Use language rhythms to create tension and resolution
• Understand the relationship between poetry and music
• Deeply understand prosody, the fundamental principle underlying not only poetry, but art in general

Syllabus

Lesson 1 Prose vs. Poetry

Lesson 2 Managing End-Stops

Lesson 3 Managing Caesuras

Lesson 4 Managing Enjambment

Lesson 5 Writing in Iambic Pentameter

Lesson 6 Substituting in Iambic Pentameter

Lesson 7 Writing in Blank Verse

Lesson 8 Blank Verse Again

Lesson 9 Using Rhyme

Lesson 10 English (or Shakespearean) Sonnet

Lesson 11 Italian (or Petrarchian) Sonnet

Lesson 12 The Terza Rima

Requirements

Prerequisites and Course-Specific Requirements