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This course aims to unlock poetry for students as an urgently relevant form of artful communication by focusing on the fundamental tools poets and song writers use to make meaning including style, word-sounds, tone, rhythm, meter, and intertextuality. The course will move through a history of lyric poetry as we consider its often-overt relationships to song. Figures and texts of focus may include Sappho, Shakespeare ¹ú²ú´«Ã½ ’s sonnets, Romantic poets John Keats, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and William Blake, and a selection of later nineteenth and twentieth-century poets such as Emily Dickinson, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Walt Whitman, Langston Hughes, T.S. Eliot,  William Carlos Williams, Jeanette Armstrong, John Ashbury, Jayne Cotez, Kamau Brathwaite, and others. We will juxtapose these more traditional poetic forms with the lyricism of song as we consider music ranging from traditional/folk songs to later twentieth and twenty-first century songwriters.