Leslie Brisman’s interests include Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, Blake, Wordsworth, Shelley, Tennyson, Browning, Swinburne, contemporary poetry, and the Bible. His special concerns include forms of multivocality, from the different persons represented in single texts of the Bible to different “voices” one needs to distinguish in a poet such as Wordsworth. Brisman is the author of Milton’s Poetry of Choice (1973), Romantic Origins (1978), and The Voice of Jacob (1990). His recent scholarship and publication is in biblical studies and Romantic poetry. He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, the
Sidonie Miskimin Clauss Prize for Teaching Excellence in the Humanities, and the William
Clyde DeVane Medal for Teaching and Scholarship, among other awards and fellowships.
He has been teaching at Yale since 1969, mostly English poetry and drama courses. His course The Bible as Literature is an opportunity to examine texts of the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament with an eye to the varieties of theologies, ethics, styles, and times of composition embodied in this diverse body of texts. The diversity of biblical authors is matched by the diversity of student backgrounds and interests. Though mostly an undergraduate course, it has been open to graduate students eager to pursue work individuating the voices within and among biblical texts.