Eighteenth- and 19th-Century Literature

A comparative survey of late seventeenth to early twentieth-century poetry written in English, French, German, and Japanese, during the height of print culture or what Walter Benjamin called the “age of mechanical reproduction.” As we read poems that address themselves as much to the reading eye as to the listening ear, we will give special attention to these poets’ engagement with the nearby visual arts—painting and sculpture as well as the emergent genre of photography. Special emphasis on the following poets: Basho, Buson, Issa, Blake, Keats, Baudelaire, Dickinson, Rilke, with additional poems by Apollinaire, H.D., Lorca, Mallarmé, Pound, Wordsworth, and Yeats.