Courses

Austen relished contemporary verse as did her readers. Studying her perfectly structured novels together with, for example, William Cowper’s rambling, loco-descriptive, blank-verse meditations on nature and society, or George Crabbe’s biting couplets about miserable village life, shall enrich our appreciation of the atmosphere in which Austen cultivated her sensibility, anticipated the taste and moral tenor of her readers, and exercised artistic control. We will read three of her novels —Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, and Persuasion—alongside the poets she and her readers loved and whose poems they enjoyed hearing recited by characters in her novels. Our poets include Johnson, Cowper (her beloved favorite), Crabbe, Smith, Barbauld, Wordsworth, and Coleridge, among others.