Mary Olivers and W.S. Merwins Nature Poetry - Single View

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The poetic oeuvres of Mary Oliver and W.S. Merwin are distinguished by their decades-long engagements with the natural world. Though drawing on rather different forms, the lyric poems of both U.S. American writers seek to capture experiences of the nonhuman ranging from familiarity to revelation, from appreciation to crisis.

In this seminar, we will sample the extensive work of both poets by close-reading a range of their nature poems. Discussing notions like place, wilderness, and landscape, we will reflect on the relationship between humanity and nonhuman nature emerging from the poems. We will also inquire into their explicit and implicit politics, exploring issues such as class, ecological destruction, and the ways in which the texts grapple with American history. On occasion, we will tackle more philosophical questions about the concept of nature. Through interpreting the rich work of those two poets, we will address an overarching concern: the significance of nature poetry at the beginning of the twenty-first century. What are the possibilities and potential pitfalls of nature poetry at a historical moment which seems to mark a crisis in human-nature interactions? What, if anything, is the point of reading nature poetry today?

Oliver, Mary. Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver. New York: Penguin, 2017. 

Merwin, W.S. Migration: New and Selected Poems. Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon, 2005.

Additional readings will be provided via Moodle.

Students are expected to attend the class regularly and to have read the assigned texts. Those seeking to get either an ungraded pass/fail note or 3 credit points have to submit one reading response, once per semester either minutes or a thesis statement, and, at the end of the course, a reflection. Students seeking to get 6 credit points are required to submit a term paper instead of the reflection, in addition to the other course components.