Cosmological epic poetry – how things are, and how they have come to be – challenges the human scale of lyric. In its origin story this course tracks recent English-language cosmological epics through Charles Olson as far back as the pre-Socratics and Gilgamesh, with stopping-off points including Milton, Blake and Shelley, while also encountering Victorian cosmic terror. (Poetry, Pre-1650, 1650-1830, 1830-1940, Theory)