If you’ve ever wanted to understand what meter is, how it really works, and why poets use it, this is your chance.
Over ten weeks, this course will dive into the intricacies of poetic music through the close study of masterpieces and through assignments in composition designed to foster a mastery of musical technique.
Read the blurbs on the back of almost any contemporary book of poetry, and someone is sure to mention ‘music’ or ‘musicality.’ What does that mean? Few contemporaries, including those who use such verbiage in blurbs, really know. Why is Shakespeare’s poetry actually good poetry? Again: few contemporaries know. (Hint: it has nothing to do with ideas or politics.)
In this course, we’ll discover the secret. We will study in great detail the foundations of melopoeia, or poetic music: rhythm, meter, and sonic mimesis (the function of various types of consonants and the intricacies of vowel pitch in representing phenomena). Indeed, Plato defined poetry as την μουσικήν και τά μέτρα, or ‘music and meter,’ and those who lack technical knowledge of music and meter inevitably struggle to comprehend poems as poems and to appreciate poetry in its fullness.
Professor’s Bio
Ryan Wilson: “If there were a decathlon in metrics,” Dana Gioia has written, “Wilson would take the gold,” noting that Ryan Wilson is “among the best poets of his generation.”
Ryan Wilson is the author of The Stranger World (Measure, 2017), winner of the Donald Justice Poetry Prize, of How to Think Like a Poet (Wiseblood, 2019), winner of the Jacques Maritain Prize for Non-Fiction, and of Proteus Bound: Selected Translations (Franciscan UP, 2021), a book which A.E. Stallings called “a sweeping literary education unto itself.” National Book Award-finalist Shane McCrae notes that “Few American poets working in meter and rhyme today could write poems to match” those in Wilson’s latest book, In Ghostlight (LSU, 2024). Longtime editor of Literary Matters (literarymatters.org) and co-editor, with April Lindner, of Contemporary Catholic Poetry (Paraclete, 2024), Wilson is widely considered one of the finest literary editors in America today and is a poet who writes, as Mark Jarman notes, “with the authority of mastery.” After many years of working at The Catholic University of America and running the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, & Writers (ALSCW), he now teaches in the M.F.A. program at The University of St. Thomas-Houston.
This event will include
- Review of Homework & Written Feedback from Professor
