English 255 - For the Love of God and Woman:
Seventeenth-Century Poetry
Sharon Seelig
MWF  10:00-10:50

This course deals with the remarkable variety of poetic forms and voices in one of the richest and most diverse periods in English literature, a time of religious and political upheaval, of major social and scientific change.  The readings include poems by John Donne, "the best poet in the world for some things"; Ben Jonson, who escaped hanging for murder; George Herbert, who ventured to differ with God; Henry Vaughan, who "saw eternity the other night"; Andrew Marvell, man of many masks and many voices; Robert Herrick, lover of a good time and of transient beauty; as well as work by their brilliant contemporaries, the Cavaliers, by the baroque poet Crashaw and the visionary Traherne, and by several of the women poets of the period--Aemilia Lanyer, Mary Wroth, Katherine Philips and Aphra Behn.  The poems we will read are sacred and secular, idealistic and cynical, senuous and visionary; they deal with love and death, isolation and society, the individual and the universe, celebration and deprivation.  Our emphasis will be on the careful reading of excellent poems, on the rival and related traditions within which they were written, and on the social and intellectual circumstances of their composition .  The course will proceed by discussion, occasionally supplemented by lecture.

There will be several papers, some informal writing, and a final examination.