SATR 3350

This course takes you on a journey spanning many centuries, languages, and cultures to study poetry, and in particular, devotional and love poetry. Professor Nair is so very passionate about the course content that often we would not get to everything assigned for one day because we spent so long dwelling on one piece of poetry. Coming into this class, I had never engaged with poetry in a formal educational setting so I was terrified that I would struggle. This did not prove to be the case because Professor Nair took time to give a background understanding before we dove into the poetry. All these weeks later, I will say that I have found a profound love and admiration for many of the poets we spent time with and will surely spend more time reading their work on my own. Most of our readings were uploaded to canvas, but we did have to buy a few books; they were relatively cheap. The class was split between some lecturing and a lot of discussion. We wrote a small 5-8 page paper around the middle of the semester. There were about 7 reading responses we had to do, on any of the weeks we wished. The final is a longer essay, 10-12 pages, on a topic of our choosing. Some weeks the readings were lengthy. The only thing I did not like was that we did not get to properly discuss everything. The class spends a lot of time first on Hindu poetry and then Islamic, but the last few weeks were especially rushed and not given the due justice they deserved. I guess an improvement would be to make two separate classes, for each of the religions, so we could dive more deeper into understanding them. Overall, I enjoyed this class and think it is worth taking. #tCFF23