Comparative Literature Department
Spring 2008 Course Announcement
Writing Structured Verse
Douglas R. Hofstadter College of Arts & Sciences Professor of Cognitive Science Professor of Comparative Literature
CMLT C400 Course No. 25625 / CMLT C611 Course No. 13008 3 credit hours Fulfilling Arts & Humanities Requirements
Tuesday / Thursday 11:15 a.m. - 12:30 p.m. Ballantine Hall 217
In the twentieth century, structured verse suffered a dramatic decline, in favor of free verse. This effectively meant that the sonic or musical charm of poetry, long considered a central element of the art, was lost, replaced by more abstract and less accessible features. As a result, a large fraction of well-educated people today find much of modern poetry austere, and possibly even opaque and meaningless.
Is structured or "musical" verse completely outdated, or can it be revived and made to live and express important ideas today? The premise of this seminar is that structured verse deserves a central spot in today's poetry. Students in this seminar will thus read and write structured verse of many forms, including novel forms that they themselves dream up. We will also study and critique structured and nonstructured verse by a wide variety of authors and lyricists, including Dante Alighieri, Alexander Pushkin, Climent Marot, Cole Porter, Oscar Hammerstein, Kellie Gutman, Vikram Seth, Dylan Thomas, John Updike, Richard Wilbur, Vladimir Nabokov, William Carlos Williams, Seamus Heaney, and many others, some well known, some little known.
Students' grades will of course be based on a portfolio of their own works written over the semester, but also on their day-to-day contributions to the discussion of poetry, its aims, and its degrees of success and failure.
Books consulted will include:For additional information, please contact Helga Keller: htkeller at indiana.edu / 855.6965
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