What is the essence of American poetry? This March, revered poet and teacher Edward Hirsch invites you on a personal journey through our national poetic landscape, offering a searching introduction to the poets who tutored his ear and his heart and the poems that changed his life. Guided by Hirsch’s The Heart of American Poetry, the course will explore our nation’s profound verse tradition: its uniquely American forms, inflections, and themes, as well as the emotional and spiritual power of, in Wallace Stevens’s phrase, “the voice that is great within us.”

Starting with the original articulators of a distinctly American poetic identity that emerges “from the margins”—Anne Bradstreet, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Emma Lazarus—Hirsch will move to the Modernist explosion of the early twentieth century, highlighting T. S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, and Marianne Moore alongside Harlem Renaissance visionaries Langston Hughes and Sterling Brown. Midcentury trailblazers Frank O’Hara, James Wright, Philip Levine, Adrienne Rich, and Julia de Burgos enlarge poetry’s attention to everyday life and people, while Allen Ginsberg, Michael Harper, Garrett Hongo, Joy Harjo, and Lucille Clifton engage the losses and betrayals of history and look with hope, courage, and humor toward new beginnings.

Following the last course session on April 2, registrants will be invited to a special bonus session the next week, April 9, featuring former U.S. Poet Laureate Joy Harjo in conversation with Hirsch.

An acclaimed poet, scholar, and champion of poetry with a unique ability to communicate his passion and knowledge to readers of all backgrounds, Edward Hirsch is the best-selling author of How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry, 100 Poems to Break Your Heart, and other works. He is president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.