#derek walcott

Clearing out the iCloud, I’ve posted to YouTube the remainder of my pandemic-era online lectures from my penultimate year adjuncting in a large public university’s English department. This was Introduction to Literature in Spring 2020. The first two-thirds of the class, on fiction and drama, were held in person; then the rest, mostly on poetry, were online. These were almost my first video lectures, so they should be amusingly rough. 

Above is the first video. Here is the playlist of four videos. The first three are a very basic introduction to poetry with major examples; I cover Pound, Eliot, Plath, Heaney, Walcott, Hopkins, Dickinson, Stevens, Yeats, and Keats. The third lecture, in which I explain why Yeats uses symbolism wrongly and Keats uses it rightly, might be the most fun—I like a strong opinion—but the middle one, where I trace faith, doubt, and skepticism in literary form across three poets, may also entertain.

The final video in the playlist is a q&a. I invited students to submit whatever questions they still had after the course was through. I answer such queries as: is literature superior to other media? is older literature better than contemporary literature? are Shakespeare’s borrowed plots a stain on his achievement? should we read “problematic” (racist, etc.) books? what makes a classic? what’s my favorite Jane Austen novel? and more. Please enjoy!