This course focuses on the poetry of Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, two influential and iconic American poets of the 19th century. First, we will encounter Walt Whitman, a quintessentially American writer whose work continues to bear heavily upon the American poetic tradition. We will explore Whitman’s relationship to the City, the Self, and the Body through his life and poetry. Then, we turn to Emily Dickinson, one of America’s most distinctive and prolific poets. While Dickinson wrote nearly 2,000 poems, she chose never to publish, opting instead to revisit and revise her works throughout her lifetime. Keeping this dynamic of self-revision in mind, we will consider a number of Dickinson’s poems—many seemingly in tension with one another—concerned with Nature, Art, the Self, and Darkness. We will travel to the Dickinson Collection at Harvard’s Houghton Library, and to Amherst, Massachusetts, paying a visit to the house in which the poet lived and wrote until her death in 1886.
The Harvard Division of Continuing Education offers open-enrollment courses, degrees and certificates, and professional development programs.
Harvard University is devoted to excellence in teaching, learning, and research, and to developing leaders in many disciplines who make a difference globally.
The Emily Dickinson Museum is a historic house museum consisting of two houses: the Dickinson Homestead and the Evergreens.
The Walt Whitman Archive endeavors to make Whitman’s vast work freely and conveniently accessible to scholars, students, and general readers.
HarvardX is a University-wide strategic initiative, overseen by the Office of the Vice Provost for Advances in Learning, to enable faculty to build and create open online learning experiences for residential and online use, and to enable groundbreaking research in online pedagogies.
