The programme is offered: Full-time (one year) Part-time (two years) Typically, the programme is taught one or two evenings per week. Participants who wish to obtain a Master's Award take six taught modules on this Poetry course. Single Author Module (Elizabeth Bishop) In this module, the students are taught through intensive tutorials every fortnight rather than in weekly seminars, and in it they will follow the work of a single poet. Notions of development and biography will obviously play a part, and we will query whether we can ever say if we have read any poet's work "completely", but there is also an opportunity here to explore the significance of one person's achievement in wider contexts, whether national or international, historical or sociological. Contemporary Poetries (Poetry from 2000 to present) This module explores a range of poetry published in the 21st century, and will focus on how poetry acts as a cultural barometer, manifesting the social, political and metaphysical anxieties and pressures of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Lyric: Sacred and Profane (Poetry as Song from Sappho to ACDC) This module will trace the evolution of lyric poetry from its apparent origins in Antiquity to the Present Day. A particular emphasis will be paid to the idea of poetry as song, and also the crisis in lyric that took place in lyric poetry around romanticism. Poethics: Poetry, Politics, and the Civic Space (Philosophical, Political and Cultural Contexts) Beginning from the premise that writing, reading and listening are not ethically or politically neutral activities, this module explores a variety of philosophical, theoretical and poetic texts to investigate the relationship between poets, audiences and civic spaces. Seminar and Workshop Analytical and Close Reading Skills Over the courses of 12 2-hour workshops, students will engage with every aspect of poetic form, gaining a thorough grounding in the techniques used to produce poems and the scholarly discourse which respond to them. Over the course of the academic year, students will be expected to attend 4 John Devitt Memorial Seminars (2 per semester) and to participate in a conference related to poetry studies. Verse Drama (From Ancient Greece to Modernity) This proposes to introduce students to representative examples of verse drama drawn from a wide historical perspective. Students will be made aware of the changing nature of verse drama across the centuries in Europe and factors that influenced these changes, including social, historical, political and literary contexts. Imaginaries: Poetic Geographies (Imagining Italy) This module looks at the attachment of poetry to particular geographies, and how well those "real" geographies are altered and radicalized through poeticization. The proposed focus will be on the poetic mapping of Italy from antiquity to the present.

This programme has been of particular use to teachers of English at second-level as a means of career development, and it has also acted as a springboard into doctoral study and academia. We also have graduates or current students working in law, financial services, administration and IT. For them, a qualification from the programme is a distinctive thing to have on a CV, something that makes potential employers and interviewers take notice. Graduates have also gone into working in adult education and communications.