Poetry: Attending to Beauty

Poetry is deep. Appreciating something deep takes time, attention, and guidance.

Attending

Attending is difficult for modern people. Attending to poetry is especially difficult for modern people: poetry books still lack dynamic graphics and slick marketing. Our distracted age pushes us to invest as little time as possible into every endeavor. As a result, we are well-practiced in the art of flitting about from thing to thing. In this course, we will attend. We will read, listen to, and recite great poems from the tradition. We will ask questions and make observations about the poems, but more importantly we will spend time with them. We will let the words work on us, shaping us into the kind of great men and women that have loved these pieces across the centuries. But even more importantly, we will learn to attend, and become more like people who can attend.

Heart-Learning

Learning something “by heart” seems a bit fusty in 2025, but the most important kind of learning is not merely cerebral. If students’ loves need ordering, their hearts need to be filled with lovely things. So the goal is to get into the poems, not to analyze them nor even to completely understand their form, but to love them and make them part of the furniture of the mind and the heart.

Homework

In class, we will spend time reading, listening to, and discussing poems, mostly from 30 Poems to Memorize (Before It’s Too Late). During the week, students will re-read & recite their poems, then submit a recording of their recitation.

Also, two written responses will be submitted during the semester, but the focus will be on the students receiving the pieces, not having something clever to say about them.