This seminar-style course offers an in-depth look at American literature’s two most path-breaking poets: Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson. Considered canonical today, these two were outliers in their own time, unrecognized by the literary establishment and largely unknown to the public, thanks to their unwillingness to conform to literary expectations.

A working-class gay man, Whitman was the country’s first urban poet as well as the first to write openly about sex. He also was the first poet in English to completely reject traditional rhyme and meter in favor of a free verse of his own design.  

A sheltered middle-class woman of ambiguous sexuality, Dickinson evaded conventional expectations about marriage and religion to devote herself instead to an unconventional poetry of fierce interiority that fractured traditional forms and ordinary syntax.  

This course is limited to 25 students.  Students should come to class having read the assigned reading and prepared responses for class discussion.