How to Listen to a Poem, How to Read a Song

This course aims to unlock poetry for students as an urgently relevant form of artful communication by focusing on the fundamental tools poets and song writers use to make meaning, including style, word-sounds, tone, rhythm, meter, and intertextuality. The course will move through a history of lyric poetry, considering its often overt relationships to song. Figures and texts of focus will include Sappho, the Song of Solomon, songs from some of Shakespeare’s plays, Romantic poets William Wordsworth, John Keats, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and later nineteenth and twentieth-century poets such as Christina Rossetti, Walt Whitman, Georgia Johnson, Langston Hughes, Countée Cullen, T.S. Eliot, Gwendolyn Brooks, and W.B. Yeats. We will juxtapose these more traditional poetic forms with the lyricism of twentieth-century and twenty-first century songwriters such as Charlie Chaplin, George Gershwin, Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, David Bowie, The Beatles, Lin Manuel Miranda, Taylor Swift, and Harry Styles.