Whirlwind of lovers (Illustration to Dante's Inferno) by William Blake; in Birmingham Art Gallery. (Image courtesy of WebMuseum.)
Instructor(s)
Prof. Alvin Kibel
MIT Course Number
21L.701
As Taught In
Fall 2003
Level
Undergraduate
Course Description
Course Description
This seminar offers a course of readings in lyric poetry. It aims to enhance the student's capacity to understand the nature of poetic language and the enjoyment of poetic texts by treating poems as messages to be deciphered.
The seminar will briefly touch upon the history of theories of figurative language since Aristotle and it will attend to the development of those theories during the last thirty years, noting the manner in which they tended to consider figures of speech distinct from normative or literal expression, and it will devote particular attention to the rise of theories that quarrel with this distinction.
The seminar also aims to communicate a rough sense of the history of English-speaking poetry since the early modern period. Some attention will be paid as well to the use of metaphor in science.
Other Versions
Other OCW Versions
OCW has published multiple versions of this subject. 
- 21L.701 Literary Interpretation: Literature and Urban Experience (Spring 2009)
- 21L.701 Literary Interpretation: Beyond the Limits of the Lyric (Fall 2006)
- 21L.701 Literary Interpretation: Literature and Photography: The Image (Fall 2005)
- 21L.701 Literary Interpretation: Virginia Woolf's Shakespeare (Spring 2001)