F24-01 Reading Poems About People
Class | Available (Membership Required)
Poems about others stir up our judgments and sift the soil of our own nature. For instance, Yeats describes a woman’s beauty and her “pilgrim soul.” Her soul matters most, he says, but her beauty does too. Perhaps this is why the line, “How many loved her moments of glad grace,” gathered like honey at his nib. In The Glory Trumpeter, Derek Walcott daubs a ravaged, old Caribbean jazz man: “Old Eddie's face, wrinkled with river lights, / Looked like a Mississippi man's.” We’ll read poems about the old and young, people at work, people in love, and the dead. Poets will include Dickinson, Yeats, Hardy, Milton, Frost, Shelley, Ponsot, and Li-Young Lee.
Don Barkin MA
Don Barkin received his BA from Harvard College and his MA. in English literature from Cambridge U. He has taught undergraduate seminars in poetry and prose writing at Yale for several years, and at Wesleyan's Graduate Liberal Studies Program. He has published three books of poems that have also appeared in national magazines, and is a former schoolteacher and newspaper reporter