You're invited to observe Dr. Dan Moss, a 2024 Altshuler Distinguished Teacher Award Winner, for a session of his Introduction to Poetry: A Poet-Guided Tour course. In this course, the poets themselves guide students through the formal elements and literary-historical evolution of English and American poetry. During the first half of the semester, each week will emphasize a different technical or generic aspect of poetry, focusing on a representative poet in each case. We will learn rhythm with William Blake, rhyme with Emily Dickinson, sonnet-form with William Shakespeare, persona with Langston Hughes, free verse with Walt Whitman and Allen Ginsberg. The second half explores perennial themes: poets addressing and questioning God; poets protesting social injustice; poets in love; poets struggling with age and loss; poets pondering nature, art, and poetry itself. Guest speakers include John Donne, Aphra Behn, John Keats, Christina Rossetti, Robert Frost, W.H. Auden, Elizabeth Bishop, Sylvia Plath, Gwendolyn Brooks, Yusef Komunyakaa, Seamus Heaney, and many more. Who knew there were so many great poets? Come meet them.

There are 15-30 students in this undergraduate-level class. In this session, they will be finishing their week on free verse, having spent the first half of the semester studying formal poetry. The previous two classes will have been spent on especially wordy free verse poets—Walt Whitman and Allen Ginsberg—but this Friday they will take a look at William Carlos Williams' radical reduction of poetry to the famous/notorious "Post-It Note" poem, "This is Just to Say." After discussing Williams' technique and practicing close-reading, I will then surprise the students with an in-class reading of the beginning of John Milton's epic, "Paradise Lost," with the final twenty minutes of class devoted to a debate as to whether Williams' tiny poem should be considered a version of the Garden of Eden story.

If you choose to attend this session, the instructor will introduce you to the class and explain why you are there

Please note that you will receive an Outlook calendar invite with the class location after registering.