Open your poems to the perceptive power of dreams. While dreams and visions may be vividly seen, heard and felt, they are often hard to transcribe. As a strategy to circumvent this poets have often used divine messengers within dream poems, for example using angels, personification allegory, or prosopopoeia to allow imaginary or absent figures and objects to speak.
This course will examine the role of such messengers in poetry as mediators of the imagination to consider how they can be incorporated in written work, what they can articulate and what they cannot.
The texts that will be explored include Macrobius, Hildegard of Bingen, Dante Aligheri, Chaucer and Langland, Teresa of Ávila, Francesco Colonna’s Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, William Blake, John Keats, Christina Rossetti, Emily Dickinson, John Berryman, Denise Levertov, Lucille Clifton, Louise Glück, Alice Notley, and Brigit Pegeen Kelly.
