Elective Seminar: History of Western Poetry

The seminar is broad-based. Emphasis is placed on lyric poetry, but it involves at the same time the other two literary genres, since most Western poetry, including epic and dramatic poetry, up to the Romanticism, is written in verse. The broad outline of the seminar allows for the treatment of poetry from Greek archaic lyric and classical tragedy to modern poetry. The seminar focuses on the establishment and construction of formal poetic structures and their dissolution in modernism and the avant-gardes of the twentieth century. In terms of content, given that, alongside thinkers, it is poets who have throughout history articulated the human condition in a pregnant way, it deals with the poetic thematisation of the human relationship to love, death, the sacred and the divine, etc. From the point of view of intra-poetic or intertextual relationships, it takes into account in particular the relationship of later poets to the two fundamental paradigms of Western literature, the Bible and classical myth. In doing so, the seminar introduces also to the basics of interpreting and translating poetry.