This interrelatedness is also meant to allow students oriented primarily toward poetic practice to engage with students whose primary orientation is scholarship. That is, MA and MFA students share the core curriculum, so that their first three semesters of full-time study are very similar. At that point, MA students complete their thesis normally an extensive scholarly essay.
Students come to the program with a variety of backgrounds and interests in poetry.
Likewise, some students are familiar with a range of critical tools and outlooks, while others have developed their own approaches to reading without paying much attention to established criticism. One function of the core courses, therefore, is to create a common literary-historical frame of reference and critical discourse. This is because the assumptions and terminology not to mention the language itself of contemporary US poetry still derive largely from the post-medieval English tradition. But this tradition is broader than its representation in conservative curricula admits. For precisely the same reasons as poets in the US should know Shakespeare and Whitman, for example, they should read anonymous seventeenth-century ballads and look into the history of American popular song.