Poetry spreads its web
“It’s funny that I’m this ‘online’ person now, when I’m so backward,” said Elisa New. In her Barker Center office, shelves of antique books — many of them first editions — sat everywhere. An early hardback issue of Poetry magazine poked from a glass case. Still, New is no novice at using digital resources to access the past. Those antique books? “Mostly from eBay,” she said. And now New, the Powell M. Cabot Professor of American Literature, is on the cusp of launching “Poetry in America,” her first digital course via HarvardX. “I wanted to do this course using all of the resources of Harvard, its libraries, archives, museums, its students on camera, experimenting with making this a course that uses what the University offers, but for a reason — and that reason is that the history of American poetry and Harvard’s history are so completely intertwined,” she said. “There are some major...