From antiquity to today, philosophers and poets alike have conducted a great debate about the nature and meaning of literature, centered around a few key questions.

• What is poetry’s wellspring? God? Nature? The human self?
• Is poetry superfluous to human progress?
• Are the literary arts a vehicle to higher truths or merely a pack of lies?
• Is the author a divinely inspired rhapsode or a mere artisan, "manufacturing" meaning?

This course charts the contributions of our greatest thinkers to this controversy: Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Hegel, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley, and Schiller, as well as modern masters such as Stanley Fish and Jacques Derrida, and it gives you the tools to enter the conversation yourself.