Humanities 1: Poetry and Analysis
Reading and writing poetry requires a different set of skills than contending with prose. You may think this is a less relevant skill today than it has previously been.
Note that this section was made possible by a generous gift from Kim Meadows.
But the fact remains that a huge portion of the media market today is essentially poetry. Rap and pop music tie themselves directly back to poetic traditions that grew up on the European and African continents in parallel. Today, much of this music is infused and tinged with a little bit of every culture in our globalized society. K-pop leans into the idioms of western pop music and Korean poetic tradition simultaneously. In parallel, older traditions of poetry and libretto continue unabated. People still write operas and beautiful books of poetry today in also every one of the 6000 or so extant languages. Poetry captures a different piece of a culture than literature does and as our daily experience tells us, when we overlay poetry on top of music, we often find something greater than the sum of the parts. What would Beethoven’s 9th symphony be without Schiller’s poem? Without Sarah McLachlan’s haunting lyrics, most of her music would be rather uninspired instrumental music.
Here we will explore how to analyze, interpret, appreciate, and, hopefully, love poetry.