Many, many poets have, for centuries, been deeply attracted to birds. Both the song and the soar, the real bird and the ideal, are compelling sources, provocations, and nourishments for both poet and reader. In this spring discussion group we will focus on four of the great bird poems, and, at each session, at least one auxiliary poem, looking for the common motifs and themes but also for the different ways in which each poet looks for art’s transformations in her or his bird of choice. My goal here is to explore the pleasures and profundities of these poems, and the techniques by which each eachieves its wonderful effects. My choices come from a great passion for these particular poems and for the ways they address different phases of life and art. (A subsequent course will consider other great bird poems such as Hopkins’s “The Windhover,” and Whitman’s “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed.”) Participants should read all of the poems in any standard edition before the first meeting, and Shelley’s poem the day before.

October 7: Shelley’s “To a Skylark”
October 14: Keats’s “To a Nightingale”
October 21: Hardy’s “The Darkling Thrush” (Keats’s “What the Thrush Said”)
October 28: Frost’s “The Oven Bird” (Amy Clampitt’s “The Kingfisher”)

$200 ($180 members)

Instructor: Christopher Jane Corkery, Poet & Essayist, Instructor, Holy Cross College

BIO HERE.

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