Teaching Poetry in the Age of AI

The class I am teaching this semester is an undergraduate survey of lyric poetry. It’s a class I enjoy teaching and one I offer whenever I can. Modeled on a course I took as an undergraduate, in which the poet, professor, and painter Peter Sacks brought us all to tears in his full-throated lectures on Milton and Shelley and Bishop, the class begins with some anonymous Middle English lyric poems and does a quick swoop through the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries before concluding with Modernism, mid-century American poetry, and some contemporary work. We read William Shakespeare and John Donne, Lorine Niedecker, and Terrence Hayes. I tell students, most of whom are sophomores and juniors, that I want them to leave the course with a sense—to paraphrase T.S. Eliot—of tradition in their bones. I want them to leave excited to go out and read whatever strikes their fancy, but to do it with a poet’s sense of the long history of poetry in English and a feel for the way poetry reprises older traditions or echoes older verse, sometimes without the poets themselves even knowing it.