Poetry of Birth and Death

Should euthanasia be a right? Why or why not?

This week explores how poetry speaks to birth and death in ways philosophy cannot. Emily Dickinson’s death poems. Sylvia Plath’s “Morning Song” and “Edge”—motherhood and mortality entangled.

Walt Whitman’s “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” transforms loss into poetic vocation. The sea becomes a teacher about the relationship between birth and death. Timothy Morton traces death and ecology through the Romantic legacy.