Studies in Poetry: What's the Use of Beauty?
MIT OpenCourseWare offers this literature seminar built around a single question: can recognizing beauty make someone more humane? Readings range across lyric poetry and the novel to philosophical prose and essays, pairing poets against thinkers who treat beauty as a moral or intellectual problem rather than mere decoration. The course materials include a syllabus, reading lists, and writing assignments that ask students to test the course's central proposition against specific texts rather than accept it as given. It sits within MIT's literature curriculum and is aimed at students comfortable with close reading of both verse and argumentative prose. As with other MIT OCW offerings, the site provides the syllabus and assignments for self-study; there is no instructor feedback or certificate, but all materials are free to use under MIT's open license.