Poetry as a Form of Life, Life as a Form of Poetry
FAIN: FV-50155-07
President and Fellows of Harvard College (Cambridge, MA 02138-3800)
Helen H. Vendler (Project Director: March 2007 to July 2009)
A three-week seminar for fifteen school teachers on the patterns of poetry and how they mirror the patterns of life.
High school teachers of Literature and related fields are invited to Harvard University for a three-week poetry seminar with Helen Vendler. Our aim in the seminar is to deepen and enlarge our sense of how poetry might be discussed. One of our objectives will be to see how poetry mediates on life, and why it has to have pattern in order to accomplish its task of reflecting life. Reading will range from the Shakespearean sonnet to contemporary American poetry. Weekday excursions to Harvard's libraries and museums, Longfellow House, and Boston's Freedom Trail, and weekend trips to Concord (Thoreau's Walden Pond) and Amherst (The Dickinson Homestead) will augment classroom study.