In Poetry in Music, we will read several poems that have attracted composers to set the words to
music. We will not study song lyrics per se but will instead read and discuss works that were originally
published as poems and then listen to their musical settings. Poets in this course include John Milton, William Blake, Alfred Tennyson, Christina Rossetti, Thomas Hardy, A. E. Housman (and more), and composers include Benjamin Britten, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Morten Lauridsen, Richard Strauss, Dan Forrest (and more). The class atmosphere will be relaxed--you should feel comfortable even if you haven’t read a poem (or listened to a piece of music!) since high school. The instructor will provide an anthology of the poems we will be discussing.

John Noffsinger earned a B.A. from Kalamazoo College and Ph.D. in English from the University of Virginia, and subsequently taught for 38 years in independent schools in the Commonwealth. In addition, for several years he taught as an adjunct at Virginia Tech and at Old Dominion University. Although his specialty in graduate school was the nineteenth-century novel, his recent teaching for LLI has focused on the study of poetry.