FUN– Not Competitive

Beginners are welcome.

Poems That Might be Great | Don Barkin

Wednesdays 11:30 am– 1:30 p.m.

In-person at the Claire Teague Center in Great Barrington

Limit: 15

Six Sessions; 4/17, 4/24, 5/1, 5/8, 5/15, 5/22

Course Description: What makes a poem great? This spring we’ll read some of the most famous poems in English, and along the way try to figure out what “great” means. Here’s a sampling we’ll choose from: Yeats’s “Easter 1916,” Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey,” Dickinson’s “I Heard a Fly Buzz…,” Whitman’s “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” W. H.    Auden’s “September 1, 1939,” Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale,” Frost’s “Home Burial,” Hardy’s “The Darkling Thrush,” Bishop’s “The Armadillo,” Stevens’ “The Idea of Order at Key West,” an excerpt from Milton’s Paradise Lost, Moore’s “Diligence Is to Magic as Progress Is to Flight,” and Shakespeare’s “Th’expense of spirit in a waste of shame.”

Instructor Bio: Don Barkin has degrees from Harvard College and Cambridge University. He taught seminars for a number of years at Yale and Wesleyan Universities.  The author of three books of poetry, he has also been a newspaper reporter and school teacher.

Registration will open March 5 at 9 a.m. – berkshireolli.org

Class registration fees for OLLI members:

$50 for 1 course ~ $95 for 2 or 3 courses ~ $125 for 4 +courses within a semester