[acmiller]

+1 for Stephen Booth. I was fortunate enough to take his 17th century English poetry class at Cal. He's the only lecturer who could make poetry resonate with my geek brain.

It's funny how some classes stay with you over the years.

[nqureshi]

Wow, you took his class - that's incredible!

Do you have any class notes / resources you could share? I love the guy.

What was he like as a teacher / in person?

[acmiller]

He was very smart, and his lectures were a lot of fun. What made him a great poetry teacher was that he didn't care about what poems "mean"; what mattered was the effect they had on the reader.

I can't tell you how liberating this was. For years I had felt that I just didn't understand poetry, but Prof. Booth told us that poems are just candy for the mind. All the rest is just pretense. And he meant it too.

The final paper was a eight-page analysis of the last four lines of Paradise Lost. So you'd take the phrase, "The world was all before them," and you'd see that this line suggests several meaning to the reader. E.g., the world (God's creation) was complete before Adam and Eve; or that the world (the entirety of human history) was in front of Adam and Eve; etc.

More than anything, he taught poetry as a kind of game. It was so much fun.

The last class was truly great--he did a close reading of the children's book Go, Dog. Go!. So entertaining. Sadly I don't have my notes anymore, but you should search for other people's write-ups of the Go, Dog. Go! lecture online. It's honestly one of the top five lectures I've ever seen.