In this course, we read 18th- and 19th-century poetry alongside the development of linguistics. We discuss theories of language origin, Indo-European and Proto-Indo-European language theory, comparative philology, and phonetics as a proto-disciplinary tangle and think through how these movements impact our understanding of English prosody and poetry. Roughly covering the period of Hans Aarsleff’s classic book From Locke to Saussure, we ask where and how historical discourse in poetics and linguistics intersected and where and how, in the present day, they intersect and diverge.
