Blake�s �London,� presents a totalized vision of the city in which all social classes are implicated in its suffering and its disease. Blake reveals the hidden connections that exist between man and woman, rich and poor, marriage and death. He exposes the forces of oppression within, the �mind-forged manacles� that we impose upon ourselves in the city.
 
 

      A glance at the conventions of the pastoral tradition, and then again at the Romantic�s vision of nature can help students to understand how we have constructed the country-city connections within the mind. We chose Yeats�  �Lake Isle of Innisfree� and Wordsworth�s �I wandered Lonely as a Cloud,� to introduce nature poetry and Whitman�s �Crossing Brooklyn Ferry� as an early city poem that moves away from Blake and the Romantic�s vision of the city as a place of struggle without a poetry of its own. The Brooklyn ferry becomes a way of connecting the living and the dead, as well as the natural world and the city experience. Urban planners, like Olmsted, in effect, attempted to do with landscape what Whitman did in his American poetry. While Whitman�s poetry was deliberately improvisatory, less stylized than his European predecessors, Olmsted�s Central Park was planned to set the trend for American parks. They would be less organized and close-cropped than their European counterparts -- the landscape equivalent of the free verse poem.
 
 

      Baudelaire�s poem �The Swan,� tells the story of urban renewal, of Baron Haussman�s transformation of Paris, through the objective correlative of a swan who escapes from his cage and wanders the streets of the city, far away from its natal pond. Longing for the old Paris, the displaced Parisians, like the swan, become exiles in their own city.
 
 
 

       Langston Hughes Video and Poems: The career of Langston Hughes paralleled the rise of the Harlem Renaissance. Through reading his poems and viewing this beautiful video, the students will glance at the formation of a community through art. It tracks the history of Harlem and the struggle of its poets to create an African-American identity. Hughes then moves beyond Harlem towards a Pan-African community between cities and countries by expressing the words, the suffering, the rhythms and the music of his people.