ENG 650 Epic Poetry & Mirror Imagery
This course focuses on several epic poems—Dante’s La Divina Commedia, Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, Milton’s Paradise Lost, and Keats’s Endymion—especially in regard to the poets’ uses of mirror imagery as a literary trope and a symbol of the hero’s or heroine’s psychological condition in relationship with a beloved. Critical essays are informed by students’ readings of the poems individually, and a major research paper involves comparison and conclusions about the four poems as a group.