We will be reading a broad range of seventeenth-century poetry-love lyric, religious meditation, social commentary-against the background of troubling changes in the way people are being forced to think about sexual love, political authority, and where people stand in the scheme of nature and nature’s God. (These changes in outlook are the remote but recognizable beginnings of modernity. They’re still working themselves out-still around us, and still troubling.)

Special attention will be paid to meeting the challenge of learning how to spot and respond to subtle cues in the passionate and argumentative language of seventeenth-century dramatic monologue, and especially to its distinctive way with figures of speech. This will call for practice in class-careful reading of major poems by Ben Jonson, John Donne, George Herbert, Richard Crashaw, Henry Vaughan, Thomas Traherne, and Andrew Marvell. There will be two papers and two exams.