The Program in Poetry and Poetics brings together a diverse community of literary scholars, poets, and translators working on poetry and poetics across a spectrum of regions, historical periods, and theoretical approaches at the University of Chicago. The faculty includes experts on classical Chinese poetry, the French avant-garde, the modern reception of archaic Greek poetry, and contemporary British and American writing. The program seeks to expand the critical understanding of poetics as a field that encompasses not only the study of poetry, but various aspects of literary theory, media studies, and historicist models of inquiry as well. Because many of the faculty members and graduate students presently engaged in the study of poetry and poetics at the university are publishing poets, the program also fosters work that crosses the border between critical thought and creative practice.
Selected Faculty
Sample Courses
CRWR 49300 - Thesis Workshop: Poetry (Srikanth (Chicu) Reddy)
Poetry Thesis Workshops are open to Creative Writing Intensive Majors, Creative Writing Legacy Majors and Minors completing an optional thesis, and MAPH Creative Writing Specialists. Students will build off a project already in-progress to complete a collection of 10-15 polished poems. Students are expected to have at least 50% of an initial draft of their project completed prior to the first day of class.
ENGL 42918 - CDI Seminar: Exploratory Translation (Jennifer Scappettone)
Focusing on the theory, history and practice of poetic translation, this seminar includes sessions with invited theorists and practitioners from North and South America, Europe, and Asia. Taking translation to be an art of making sense that is transmitted together with a craft of shapes and sequences, we aim to account for social and intellectual pressures influencing translation projects. We deliberately foreground other frameworks beyond “foreign to English” and “olden epochs to modern”—and other methods than the “equivalence of meaning”—in order to aim at a truly general history and theory of translation that might both guide comparative cultural history and enlarge the imaginative resources of translators and readers of translation. In addition to reading and analysis of outside texts spanning such topics as semantic and grammatical interference, gain and loss, bilingualism, self-translation, pidgin, code-switching, translationese, and foreignization vs. nativization, students will be invited to try their hands at a range of tactics, aiming toward a final portfolio of annotated translations.
FREN 37701 - Baudelaire (Rosanna Warren)
[Taught in French] Une étude approfondie de l’oeuvre de Baudelaire. Nous lirons Les Fleurs du mal, Les Petits poèmes en prose, et morceaux choisis de sa critique d’art, essayant d’établir une perspective sur ce grand poète à la fois classique et romantique, un artiste tranditionnel et révolutionnaire qui a aide à créer la modernité. [An in-depth study of Baudelaire’s works. We will read Les Fleurs du mal, Les Petits poèmes en prose, and selections from his art criticism, in order to develop a perspective on this great poet, who was at once classical and romantic, a traditional and a revolutionary artist who helped create modernism.]
A list of course offerings specific to Creative Writing can be found at the Creative Writing course page. More courses related to Poetry and Poetics can be found on the English course page.
Poetry & Poetics Specialization
The Poetics Specialization allows students to structure their coursework and thesis around the study of poetry and poetics within MAPH. Students who complete the following requirements will receive a Poetics transcript notation:
● MAPH Core course (Foundations of Interpretive Theory)
● One Foundational Poetics Seminar
● One Pre-Romantic Poetry course
● One Non-Anglophone Poetry course (can be studied in translation)
● One Modern or Contemporary Poetry course
● Complete a thesis with a relation to poetry and poetics under the supervision of a Poetics faculty member
Please direct any questions you may have about specializing in Poetry + Poetics to maph-support@uchicago.edu.
Recent Poetics Thesis Projects
Books on Tape (Poetry Collection)
Alexis Chilson, MAPH ’25
Advisor: Ryan Van Meter
Undertaking (Poetry Collection)
Li Linxuan, MAPH ’23
Advisor: Margaret Ross
"Love, Poetry, and Meaning in Percy Shelley’s Jane Williams Poems"
Erkut Soyer, MAPH TLO '22
Advisor: Frances Ferguson
"Writing Affect In/Through Body Parts: The Aggressive Affectivity of Melancholia in Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée"
Ziki Lei, MAPH '21
Advisor: Sianne Ngai
"The Death of a Chinese Poet: Lyricism, Voice, and Sociality in Yu Dafu’s “Sinking”"
Shen Yanqing, MAPH '21
Advisor: Haun Saussy
"‘Do not move! Just engage’: A Poetics of Metamorphosis in Hijikata’s Dance-Writing"
Caleigh Stephens, MAPH '21
Advisor: Jennifer Scappettone