What is a Poem?

What do we mean when we call something a poem, and what do we imagine poetry is for? These are not timeless questions with stable answers. They shift alongside changing ideas about art, labor, value, and public life. In some moments, poetry has been treated as moral instruction or civic intervention; in others, as an intimate practice or a cultivated excess; in the contemporary moment, it is often defended for its resistance to utility itself. This course approaches poetry not as a single transhistorical object, but as a set of practices whose meanings, functions, and stakes vary across time, cultures, and forms.

As an introduction to poetry, poetics, and prosody, the course develops a shared vocabulary for describing how poems work and for thinking critically about why they take the shapes they do. Attention is given to sound, rhythm, lineation, and form, alongside questions about how these technical features organize attention, feeling, and thought. Topics may include meter and free verse, lyric and narrative modes, sonnets and elegies, ballads and dramatic monologues, constraint-based writing, and inherited forms such as the ghazal or the abecedarian. The course also examines rhetorical strategies that allow poems to address absent figures, animate voices, and stage tensions between speaker and world.

Readings pair poems with short critical and theoretical texts—manifestos, defenses of poetry, prosody handbooks, and essays on form—to situate poetic techniques within broader arguments about art and meaning. The syllabus ranges from canonical figures to contemporary poets, inviting sustained engagement with traditions as they are made, contested, and transformed. By the end of the course, participants will be equipped to read poems with precision, write about them with confidence, and reflect more broadly on what poetry has been, and what it might yet become.