Claude enables American academic to turn Auden’s 1941 syllabus into a fully resourced webpage
by Piyush Mathur
Using Claude (Anthropic’s Artificial Intelligence Assistant), an American academic, Dr. Ethan Mollick, has transcribed and annotated W. H. Auden’s legendary 1941 syllabus for a webpage he has dedicated to it.
Auden was an England-born poet and academic who became an American citizen in 1946; he taught the referred syllabus at the University of Michigan in the Fall of 1941. The syllabus was titled ‘Fate and the Individual in European Literature’.
This is a screenshot of a part of W. H. Auden’s 1941 syllabus for English 135, offered at the University of Michigan. (Credit: Public Domain)
Mollick, who teaches Management and co-directs Generative AI Labs at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania announced the website in mid-October 2025 on LinkedIn.
‘I took the surviving syllabus of W. H. Auden’s 1941 “Hardest Class in the Humanities” (6,000 pages of reading) and turned it into an annotated site with all the readings’, Mollick’s triumphant post reads.
‘Using AI, I was able to take what would have been a pretty monumental multi-hour, or day, task and do it in 4 prompts (including having each annotation cross-checked)’, the post adds.
The website can be accessed on this link: https://68f4202753e83cc5fbf8172e--tiny-tarsier-c997a9.netlify.app/
Auden’s 1941 syllabus was rediscovered in 2013
What Mollick’s website does not mention—something that might be of interest to Thoughtfox readers—is that Auden’s 1941 syllabus was rediscovered by a now defunct website called ‘more than 95 theses’, as per a 2013 report in New York Daily News (NYDN).
This is a screenshot of Dr. Ethan Mollick’s a LinkedIn post announcing how he converted W. H. SAuden's 1941 syllabus into an annotated site.
(Credit: Ethan Mollick)
Potentially interesting is also the fact that a 2015 report by the Chicago-based Poetry Foundation included Professor Lisa Goldfarb’s suggestion that the syllabus was likely meant for 2 semesters (given that it mentions ‘first semester’).
However, the 2013 NYDN report, which is otherwise the basis for the Poetry Foundation report, had an update on April 13, 2018 that Goldfarb had since found out that the syllabus was meant for just one semester. Perhaps it is time for the Poetry Foundation also to show that update.
The buzz trail
Since its rediscovery in 2013, Auden’s 1941 syllabus—and his reputation as an apparently punishing academic taskmaster—has generated some sort of a buzz trail, as the previous mentions merely hint at.
In April 2018, for an article in The Paris Review, Anthony Madrid delved into just one assignment that Auden had included in his 1956 syllabus. The assignment asked the student to write a song ‘to a twisted-up pattern’ of syllables, as Madrid put it. Ahead of going into the daunting details of this assignment, Madrid simply declared to his readership that ‘you’d have to have a screw loose to hand out the above as an assignment.’
Concluding words
Mollick’s LinkedIn post’s readership, however, seems to be positively awed by Auden’s mammoth syllabus of 1941—perhaps because Mollick’s verbiage itself predisposes it that way.
All things considered, it does seem as if Madrid was both pedagogically savvier and more realistic than the awed LinkedIn commentators on Mollick’s starry-eyed post. Commenting further on the assignment, Madrid had wittily noted the following in his article: ‘It’s not that the students wouldn’t do it; they’d try. But then you’d have to read the results.’
We can only hope that Auden was generous in his grading of the submissions.
References
Lange, Jeva (February 27, 2013) 'W. H. Auden’s syllabus will make your college courses look like a piece of cake' (Updated: April 13, 2018) New York Daily News (URL: https://www.nydailynews.com/2013/02/27/w-h-audens-syllabus-will-make-your-college-courses-look-like-a-piece-of-cake/) (pdf)
Madrid, Anthony (April18, 2018) ‘A Homework Assignment from W. H. Auden’ The Paris Review (URL: https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2018/04/11/a-homework-assignment-from-w-h-auden/)
Mollick, Ethan (LinkedIn post, October 2025): https://www.linkedin.com/posts/emollick_i-took-the-surviving-syllabus-of-w-h-audens-activity-7385457526424698880-foG3?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAACpQGZ0BKjM7HizGWx2rXnJP6nauYDI8JJA
Poetry Foundation (February 3, 2015) ‘Found: W. H. Auden Syllabus for “Fate and the Individual in European Literature”’ (URL: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetry-news/72048/found-w-h-auden-syllabus-for-fate-and-the-individual-in-european-literature)
W. H. Auden’s Legendary Reading List (Ethan Mollick’s website): https://68f4202753e83cc5fbf8172e--tiny-tarsier-c997a9.netlify.app/
Piyush Mathur, Ph.D., is the author of Technological Forms and Ecological Communication: A Theoretical Heuristic (Lexington Books, 2017).