Most poems are bad.
Yet formal education provides us with few examples, and prefers, not surprisingly, to promote the good and great over the mediocre and trivial. Much of this course will consist of such argument, and many of the poems discussed will be recently published and therefore critically untested. Our aim will be to discover some of the properties of a good poem by describing accurately the failures of a poor one. In this endeavor we will have to challenge and sharpen what we take to be our own values, judgments, and preferences. As a prelude to these discussions, we will spend some time looking at a few poems by major writers about which critics have radically disagreed, examining both the poems and the critical assertions.