Event Details 

Forms of Verse in British and American Poetry
This course offers a brief introduction to the way poets have used rhythm and meter to express thought and feeling over the centuries. We’ll explore the
connection between form and expression through the whole history of poetry in English, from Langland and Chaucer to Bishop and Heaney. Readings will be
drawn from a short anthology of favorite passages and poems the instructor will make available, rather than a textbook. Participants will read and hear
examples of different verse forms: songs. sonnets, couplets, alliterative verse, blank verse, free verse, really free verse, and poems in unusual meters
and stanzas. We will study how poetry works as narrative, as a vehicle for experience, and as self-expression. James H. McIntosh is Professor Emeritus of
English and American Culture at U-M.