Fall 2007

E 379S • Poems in Process: Manuscripts and Books at the Ransom Center (Senior Seminar)

Course Description

This seminar explores the questions that arise from studying literary works in multiple versions. Using materials from the Ransom Center collections, along with a handful of critical sources on manuscripts and book history, we will study poems in several different states of composition and publication--manuscript notes and drafts, proof copies, magazine printings, first editions, pulp editions, and anthologies. Seminar sessions will be composed for the most part of close readings of different manuscript and published versions of individual works. We will also spend time learning the "ins and outs" of a special collections library: not only will all class meetings involve discussions of original collections materials, but students will conduct substantial research across the Ransom Center collections throughout the term.

Grading Policy

Two 3-page papers 20%
Treasure hunt 10%
Annotated bibliography 20%
12-page final project 40%
Class participation and presentation of final project 10%

Texts

Primary readings will be drawn from the following list:
George Herbert, The Temple
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, "Rime of the Ancient Mariner"
Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass
Edward Fitzgerald, The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land
William Carlos Williams, Spring and All
Anne Sexton, Transformations
Robert Lowell, Notebook
Individual poems by Lord Byron, Edith Sitwell, and Gregory Corso

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