In this seminar we will read major French poets and study poetry movements in France from Romanticism to recent so-called "Littérature générale" or "post-poetry."The course is meant as a survey providing a solid grounding in French poetry history, poetic forms, intersections of poetry with cultural politics, and in the variety of exegetical approaches to poetry from Structuralism to Poetics, from cultural studies to affect and matter studies, and from prosody analysis to queer theory. Poets include Lamartine, Urbain, Hugo, Gautier, Nerval, Desbordes-Valmore, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Lautréamont, Mallarmé, Verlaine, Valéry, Apollinaire, Jacob, Reverdy, Desnos, Éluard, Cahun, Michaux, Ponge, Jabès, Sénac, Roche, Albiach, Sacré, Gleize and Doppelt. All readings of poetry are in French, but criticism and writings on poetry will be largely in English, and we will converse in either languages.