sep 21, 1941 - W.H. Auden course at U.Mich

Description:

Acc. to Wilfrid McClay, in 1941 at the "University of Michigan, the poet W.H. Auden offered an undergraduate course of staggering intellectual scope, entitled “Fate and the Individual in European Literature....[Discovered and circulated by Alan Jacobs], Scholars were excited by the discovery, for it provided them with a list of texts that Auden himself, one of the greatest poets and critics of the twentieth century, considered central to the Western intellectual tradition. In a way, it was like a guided tour of the intellectual furniture of a great poet’s mind.The course was enormous. It was as if Auden had put together an idiosyncratic and mainly literary version of a Great Books curriculum and compressed it into a single semester.”

6000+ pages of reading for two credits!

https://www.jamesgmartin.center/2018/10/a-remarkably-hard-college-course-proves-remarkably-popular/

see http://cdn8.openculture.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/Auden-Syllabus.jpg for an image of the syllabus

it was rediscovered in 2012