"If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off," Emily Dickinson wrote, "I know that is poetry." This course will explore the particular pleasures and excitements of poetry, reading work by John Donne, Robert Frost, Elizabeth Bishop, e. e. cummings, William Butler Yeats, Mary Oliver, Stephen Dunn, Edwin Arlington Robinson, and many others. We will raise such questions as, How exactly is poetry different from prose? Can we ever determine the "true" meaning of any poem? Can we argue successfully that some poems are good and some are bad? How is our reading of a poem affected by what we know about the author, or the historical moment when the poem was composed, or the shape of the book in which it first appeared? Format: discussion/seminar. Requirements: 20 pages of writing in the form of two or three short assignments of varying lengths, and two 5- to 6-page papers, one of which will be revised, as well as class participation. No prerequisites. Enrollment limit: 19 per section (expected:19 per section). Preference to first-year students. Two sections. This course is writing intensive.