Please write and upload an essay that responds to the following prompt:
Imagine that you are at an academic conference for undergraduate students majoring in English (and field related to English, such as Creative Writing or Adolescent Education). You are part of a panel called “The Value of Literary Studies” and you’re tasked with giving a short lecture titled, “Poetry: What it is and Why it matters.”
Your aim in this academic talk is to define poetry and to convince your audience that studying poetry is a valuable endeavor. Your talk should draw upon and refer directly to the works we have read during the first half of the semester, and it should reference examples from the poetry we’ve discussed in class. As you formulate your argument, think about the core questions that have linked together the theoretical and philosophical texts we’ve addressed: What is poetry? What is its purpose? What does it do? How does it work? Answering these questions should help you to arrive at your own personal answer to the core question: Why is studying poetry a valuable activity?
There’s no need to provide citations for any of the poetry we covered in class or for anyone of the works that we read on Brightspace. I would prefer that you don’t use outside sources, but if you absolutely need to do so, please be sure to provide a citation for any ideas you take from those sources and be sure to quote and cite any language that you take directly from those sources.
Poems that can be referenced are:
The emperor of ice cream- Wallace Stevens
Meeting the British- Paul Muldoon’s
When you ae old- W.B. Yeats
Terry Eagleton: “What is Poetry?”
Laurence Perrine: “What is Poetry?”
Matthew Zapruder: “Three Beginnings and the Machine of Poetry”
Stephanie Burt: “Reading Poems”
Perrine: “Reading the Poem” and “Denotation and Connotation”
Zapruder: “Literalists of the Imagination” and “Three Literal Readings”
Plato: from The Republic and “Ion”
Aristotle: from Poetics
Longinus: from On Sublimity
Sir Philip Sidney: from The Defence of Poetry
Edmund Burke: from On the Sublime and the Beautiful
Carolyn Korsmeyer: “Aesthetic Pleasures”