Department of English

We will analyze poetry by breaking it down into basic elements—like music, the line, imagery, and figurative language—and examining the ways these elements work together to create an effective whole. To accomplish our goal of learning how to write poems that resonate both on and off the page, you will be asked to study craft concepts, read published poems that exemplify those concepts, complete exercises, and draft, workshop, and revise original poems of your own. By the end of the semester, students will have a revised portfolio of poems as well as a heightened understanding both of poetry as a whole and of themselves as individual writers engaging with language on the page.