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The course will follow a chronological line from Homer through to American and British poets of the current war in Afghanistan. This means we will be looking at (among other things) Beowulf, poems of the English Civil War, poems of the American Civil War, poems of the First and Second World Wars, and poems about the conflicts in Iraq and Syria as well as Afghanistan. Each class will be divided into two sections of equal length. In the first half we will study poems written by our predecessors - poems by women as well as men, poems written in the front line as well as behind the lines in hospitals and 'at home', and poems written in a variety of forms - ranging from pure lyric to prose-poetry; in the second half we will discuss poems written by members of the class in response to conflict, and/or in response to the poems we are discussing in any given week.