British Poetry and the Sciences of Mind
MIT OpenCourseWare offers this undergraduate seminar pairing British poetry of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with early writings in psychology and brain physiology. The course asks whether poems think, and traces how poets working in genres like the lyric and the didactic poem drew on emerging scientific accounts of cognition, memory, and perception. Readings set canonical poets alongside contemporary medical and psychological texts, treating the poem as a record of how minds were understood to work rather than as evidence of poetic irrationality. The course is aimed at students with some background in literary study who want an introduction to interdisciplinary humanities research, connecting close reading with the history of science. Materials include the syllabus, reading list, and assignment descriptions as published by MIT, free to access with no certificate offered.