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Description of  A Way with Words IV: Understanding Poetry

Professor Michael D.C. Drouts remarkable A Way with Wordsseries has increased listeners understanding of the language that we speak, rhetoric that shapes our lives, and the ways we understand the literature that we love. Now, inA Way with Words IV, Professor Drout examines the greatest artistic accomplishments of the English language: the ten centuries of great poetry min English. We live surrounded by poetry, though we do not always recognize it, and at our highest highs and lowest lows, we reach for poems, sayings, and songs. In Understanding Poetry, Drout traces the development of poetry from the Anglo-Saxon period to the present day, celebrating the great achievements of English and explaining the techniques used to create the poems and the methods we use to understand them. The course touches on the greatest poets and poems of the English tradi-tion, including Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Wallace Stevens, and Robert Lowell. Drout skillfully mixes discussion of forms, meters, rhymes, and patterns with a genuine celebration of the joy of poetry in English, enhancing readers appreciation of poems and explain-ing why we love the particular poems we love.