How do lyrics come to belong to a larger whole, whether through narration or collection or canon formation? The class considers, including from the perspective of narrative theory, some early modern sonnet sequences written in the Petrarchan tradition, as well the material history of lyric collections in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In a third and final section of the class, we consider the impact of earlier poets on some poets working in the twentieth century, as a way of thinking about official and personal canons.
