Any lover of Shakespeare, or of the Romantic poets, can concede that poetry is pleasurable. But is it good for us, and can it teach us anything?
These questions may seem odd, but they have beguiled and engaged eminent critics for millennia.
Plato believed that poems were lies, and there was no place for poets in Plato's Republic. To him, poets were unreliable, substituting dreamlike visions for the true essences of the world that a responsible philosopher should seek. If the only authentic beauty is the truth found in nature, he asked, then what use is man-made beauty, fabrications loaded down with fantasies and lies?
Ever since Plato laid down this challenge, critical theorists have striven to prove that poetry is more than pretty phrases, that it has the power to instruct and improve its reader.
In this course, you'll follow the strands of this "conversation" between philosophy and the literary arts down the millennia, profiting from in-depth analyses of works by Plato, Aristotle, Horace, Sir Philip Sidney, Dryden, Pope, Wordsworth, Shelley, Coleridge, Matthew Arnold, T. S. Eliot, Northrop Frye, Foucault, Derrida, and more.
