The introduction explores some of the reasons that teaching Landon’s poetry has historically posed difficulties for scholars seeking to present Landon to students and shows how these very difficulties can help teachers confront myriad interesting questions in the classroom, including periodicity, the recovery of women’s writing, affect, narratives of influence, lyricism, and such topics as globalism, through five innovative approaches to her work.

This essay discusses two interlocking approaches to Landon’s poetry that help students think carefully about the poet’s strategies of repetition, each offering new avenues of interpretation beyond assumptions of her pandering to mass audiences. First, students considered Landon’s “retouching” of words and plots as a model of creative, masturbatory, feminine desire. Second, using word-frequency software, students examined keywords and lexical density to reread her poems and corpus.