Elizabeth Harris Sagaser works with poetry and poetics in many contexts. Her original specialty is Renaissance English poetry; she teaches and has published on Shakespeare's Sonnets, Spenser, Daniel, Mary Sidney Herbert, Milton's short poems, and Renaissance literary culture, including a well-received chapter on teaching form and meter (see "Flirting with Eternity," below). She also teaches a senior seminar. Lyric Self and Other," that involves ideas from linguistics, philosophy, and psychology as well as poetics. Most recently her work involves Emily Dickinson and 19th-century American receptions of Shakespeare. She has also published poems and personal essays. The underlying concern of much of her research, teaching and writing is how people have used, and do use, literature--especially poetry-- to cope with human frailty and our knowledge of mortality.

Transatlantic Shakespeare & lyric poetry, particularly work on Dickinson's reading and poetics. Upcoming talk: "Hearing with Eyes: Reader Engagement in Dickinson and Shakespeare," Emily Dickinson International Conference: Emily Dickinson, World Citizen, College Park, MD/Washington, D.C., Aug. 8-11, 2013.

Various essays, including collection, And My Bountyabout The Olde Inn, Orleans, Cape Cod, in the early '70s

Scholarship

"The Renaissance, 1500-1660," article in "England, Poetry of." The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, Fourth ed., Roland Greene, et. al. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), 414-420, 428.

"Pursuing the Subtle Thief: Teaching Time and Meter in Milton's Short Poems," Approaches to Teaching Milton's Shorter Poetry and Prose, Peter C. Herman, ed. (New York, NY: Modern Language Association of America; 2007), 88-96.

"Elegiac Intimacy: Pembroke's 'To the Angell Spirit of the Most Excellent Sir Philip Sidney,'" The Sidney Journal 23 (2005): 111-132.

"Flirting with Eternity: Teaching Form and Meter in a Renaissance Poetry Course,"Renaissance Literature and the Questions of Form, ed. Mark Rasmussen (New York: Palgrave at St. Martin's Press, 2002), 185-206.

"'Sporting the While': Carpe Diem and the Cruel Fair in Samuel Daniel's Delia and The Complaint of Rosamond," Exemplaria 10 (1998): 145-170.

"Shakespeare's Sweet Leaves: Mourning, Pleasure, and the Triumph of Thought in the Renaissance Love Lyric," ELH 61 (1994): 1-26.

"'Gathered in Time': Form, Meter (and Parentheses) in The Shepheardes Calender," Spenser Studies 10 (1992): 95-107.

Essays

"Poetry, the First Milk," The Chronicle of Higher Education (2/11/2011, Vol. 57 Issue 23): B11-B13

"Holding Infinity in the Palm of Your Hand," Tennis, (March 2007, Miller Sports Group LLC): 90-94.

"'No Proper Sphere' for Mum, but She Made One for Me," The Chronicle of Higher Education, Sect.2, Aug.10, 2001, B5.

Reviews

Double review: Pamela S. Hammons, Poetic Resistance: English Women Writers and the Early Modern Lyric (Hampshire, England: Ashgate, 2002) and Sidney L. Sondergard, Sharpening Her Pen: Strategies of Rhetorical Violence by Early Modern English Women Writers (Selinsgrove: Susquehanna UP; London: Associated UP, 2002), Renaissance Quarterly 57.1 (2004): 339-341.
Helen Vendler, The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets (Harvard UP, 1997), Sixteenth Century Journal 29 (1998): 858-860.
Barbara Estrin, Laura: Uncovering Gender and Genre in Wyatt, Donne, and Marvell (Duke UP), Renaissance Quarterly 51 (1998): 310-311.

Poems

"Easter Bunny," The Southern Review 40 (2004): 478; "Sometimes" "I Will," The Southern Review 36 (2000): 534-536; "Eve of Conception (I)," "Eve of Conception (II)," Chicago Review 38 (1992): 65-6; "Love Without Poems,"Prairie Schooner 65 (1991): 115-116.