The Sonnet in English with Sean Hughes | Virtual Course

Tuition for this course is $200. Members receive exclusive discounts on our programs and courses. Not a member? Learn more . Please check your spam folder for your email confirmation. If you have questions, please call (215) 732-1600 or email [emailprotected] . A welcome email from the instructor three weeks before the course begins. Zoom links will be sent for the course one week before the first meeting. All online courses are recorded and these recordings are available to watch up to thirty days after the entire course has ended. Registration opens for Delancey Society members on Friday, December 6th, for Rosenbach members on Friday, December 20th, and for the general public on Friday, January 3rd. Registration opens at 12:00 p.m. ET. The Sonnet in English is sponsored by the Sally Love Saunders Poetry and Arts Foundation Register Description The sonnet is one of the most enduring and influential poetic forms. The rules are simple: fourteen lines with regular meter and rhyme. They’re broad enough to accommodate a range of styles and preoccupations but tight enough to challenge some of the greatest poets to achieve their most intense and refined work. The sonnet in English is also a deeply playful tradition. By the 16th century, poets already were writing sonnets about how artificial sonnets are. Moreover, the brevity of the sonnet makes it a great entrance point for learning to love a poet (or poetry in general). In this course, we’ll explore how great poets across the centuries have used the sonnet. Authors will likely include William Shakespeare, Gwendolyn Brooks, John Keats, Christina Rosetti, John Donne, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Terrance Hayes, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Wanda Coleman, William Butler Yeats, and Percy Shelley. This course will be enjoyable for both people who are new to reading poetry and aficionados alike. Each session will have a theme, but our discussions will be guided by your interests. Likely topics will include love, idolatry, and lust; feeling trapped; attention; the massive amount of effort required to seem effortless; the difficulty of meaning what you say; and the morbid implications of our desperate attempts to capture moments in time. Sonnet in English syallabus This course is sponsored by the Sally Love Saunders Poetry and Arts Foundation. About the Instructor Sean Hughes is a Philly-based writer and editor who has taught at Bryn Mawr College and Rutgers University – New Brunswick, where he completed a PhD in English Literature in 2020. His research interests include 19th-century literature, the relationship between literature and philosophy, historicism, and poetics. His article “George Eliot, Typology, and the Moral Psychology of Historicism” was published in the Spring 2022 issue of English Literary History. He has previously taught courses on George Eliot’s Middlemarch and Virginia Woolf for the Rosenbach.