SEMINAR PROFILE

H13 -
Through Me the Voices: The Continuous Invention of American Poetry--Leaves of Grass, The Waste Land, Ariel

In his Prologue to Leaves of Grass Walt Whitman observed that Americans expect the poet "to indicate the path between reality and their souls." The most public and the most private realms are to be brought together by the poet, who must have at once a private and public voice, a prophetic interest in social reality and a confessor's interest in subjectivity. Since Whitman's observation in 1855, American poets have continued to invent new poetic forms that show the inner and outer world coalescing and that bring together lyric and epic styles to express learned and naive, joyful and aggrieved experience. Religion, art, desire, sex and gender, and cultural florescence and decay are some of the topics Whitman, Eliot and Plath treat in their transformations of the form and content of the American poet's voice.

Scholar:

Theo Theoharis

Location:

Harvard Hillel

Dates:

3/2/2011, 3/9/2011, 3/24/2011

For a complete listing of our courses, download our complete course catalog in PDF format.

H13 -	Through Me the Voices: The Continuous Invention of American Poetry--Leaves of Grass, The Waste Land, Ariel

	In his Prologue to Leaves of Grass Walt Whitman observed that Americans expect the poet "to indicate the path between reality and their souls." The most public and the most private realms are to be brought together by the poet, who must have at once a private and public voice, a prophetic interest in social reality and a confessor's interest in subjectivity. Since Whitman's observation in 1855, American poets have continued to invent new poetic forms that show the inner and outer world coalescing and that bring together lyric and epic styles to express learned and naive, joyful and aggrieved experience. Religion, art, desire, sex and gender, and cultural florescence and decay are some of the topics Whitman, Eliot and Plath treat in their transformations of the form and content of the American poet's voice.

		Scholar:	Theo Theoharis
		Location:	Harvard Hillel
		Dates:	3/2/2011, 3/9/2011, 3/24/2011