ENG 7335 Seventeenth-Century Lyric
This course focuses on the later English Renaissance, usually considering the works of Donne, Jonson, Herbert, Crashaw, Marvell, and Milton. Under scrutiny will be concern with language, metaphysical wit and the use of the conceit but death, love, the afterlife, and truth. The course includes instruction in seventeenth-century approaches to meter and the use of figures of speech, complicated in England by the rising preeminence of the plain style and the rejection of multivalence in Scripture. Reading these poets teaches the student how to attend to language, meter, form, and content.