For Monday: Picking a Poet

As I said in class on Friday, by Monday you'll need to have some idea of the poet you would like to do more work on in this course. Backscheider (the intro. to her book, supplemented with judicious use of the index) may give you some names to start thinking about. I also encourage you to browse on ECCO (Eighteenth-Century Collections Online).

There are many ways to get to ECCO, but they all involve starting with the UIUC Library website. If you start with the English Library site, you can simply type "ECCO" into the upper-right-hand search window and the first hit will take you to the login screen for ECCO. Alternatively, you can look at the left-hand sidebar on the English Library page, and click on "Online Resources in English and Film." If you scroll down past "Indexes" and "Resources," you'll come to "Full-Text Primary Resources," of which ECCO is one. If you are doing this from an off-campus computer, you'll need to log in.

Once you're on the ECCO site, try noodling around a little with the search engine. Keyword searches ("cooking," "beer," "pirates") can be fun. You can also do things like identify every book published in 1756 (for example) with the word "poem" in the title. Or you can try some generic titles for poetry books (a lot of people write books called "Poems on Several Occasions" or "Poems on Various Subjects."

"Some idea of the poet you would like to work on" ideally means a name of a woman poet who has not been published in the C20/C21, who published poetry between 1688 and 1799, and who interests you for a reason that you'll be able to articulate. But for purposes of class on Monday, a short-list of 3 names, or an idea of the particular cultural/aesthetic/historical issues you'd like to be able to explore through your poet are fine, if you're not able to conclusively identify "your" poet.

Feel free to post-for-credit on the blog about the research process. What frustrations have you encountered dealing with ECCO? What kinds of things have you found? What fears or anxieties do you have about approaching this project?