Introducing three broad themes within canonical and contemporary poems, this “Poetry & Culture” class slants less toward historicizing texts, and instead encourages participants to critically engage in close thematic readings so as to open meaningfully onto explorations of similar themes in their own lives. Implementing as our framework numerous essays from Gadamer, Marcuse, Plato, and others, we will read a variety of poems so as to synergize and develop an enriched, personal account of our three themes, “love,’ “odes and elegies,” and “nature.” In the preface to his book, Culture and Anarchy (1869),English poet Matthew Arnold defines culture as “the best that has been thought and said” (viii) while, etymologically, the word “culture” derives from the Latin word cultura,“cultivating or tilling the land.” In this class, participants will spend the semester examining the many complex ways in which poetry (etymol. “to make”) strives toward connecting its readers to places and peoples both known and not yet encountered.