| Description |
In his 1880 essay "The Study of Poetry," Matthew Arnold famously proclaimed "[m]ore and more mankind will discover that we have to turn to poetry to interpret life for us, to console us, to sustain us. Without poetry, our science will appear incomplete, and most of what now passes with us for religion and philosophy will be replaced by poetry." This course will ask how "poetry," both broadly and specifically conceived, succeeded and failed in this charge in the nineteenth century. What do poetry and religion borrow from one another? How does the history of the two together help us to understand the fate of each in the twentieth century? |