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21L.704

Studies in Poetry

3-0-9 units. HASS-H · Undergraduate

Intensive study of a body of poetry, raising questions of form, authorship, poetic influence, social context, and literary tradition. Instruction and practice in oral and written communication. Previously taught topics include: Does poetry Matter?, Poetry and the Science of Mind; Songs, Sonnets and the Story of English; Virgil, Spenser, Milton; and The Image: Poetry, Photography, and Technologies of Vision. Approved for credit in Women's and Gender Studies when content meets the requirements for subjects in that program. May be repeated for credit with permission of instructor if content differs. Limited to 12.

Spring 2008 · Studies in Poetry: 20th Century Irish Poetry: The Shadow of W. B. Yeats

William Butler Yeats occupies a dominant position in the lives and work of the Irish poets who followed him. We will explore some of that poetry, and consider how later poets, especially female poets, tried to come to grips with, or escape from, that dominance. As a seminar, the subject will place special emphasis on student involvement and control. I will ask you to submit one ten-twelve page essay, two shorter (five page) essays, and to accept the role of "leadoff person," perhaps more than once, That role will demand that you choose from among the assigned readings for that session the poem we should focus upon, and to offer either a provocative articulation of what the poem is about, or a provocative question which the poem confronts, and which we should grapple with, as well.

Readings

  • Finneran, Richard J., ed. The Yeats Reader . New York, NY: Scribner, 1997. ISBN: 9780684831886.
    Required
  • Crotty, Patrick, ed. Modern Irish Poetry . Belfast, IR: Blackstaff Press, 1995. ISBN: 9780856405617.
    Required
  • Higgins, Rita Ann. Throw in the Vowels . Tarset, UK: Bloodaxe Books, 2005. ISBN: 9781852247003.
    Required
  • Boland, Eavan. An Origin Like Water . New York, NY: W.W. Norton, 1996. ISBN: 9780393038521.
    Required
  • Ni Dhomhnaill, Nuala. Selected Poems . Dublin, New Island Books, 1989. ISBN: 9781851860272.
    Required
  • First, the man himself. Browse freely and widely in the poems in The Yeats Reader . The Autobiographical selections are worth a glance, as well. Be sure to pay some attention to the following poems:
    Required
  • 5 · “Easter 1916”
    Required
Spring 2006 · Studies in Poetry: From the Sonneteers to the Metaphysicals

Topics

  • Introduction
  • Petrarch and Ovid
  • Petrarch
  • Sidney’s Precursors: Wyatt and Surrey
  • Constructing the Poetic Self
  • Sidney
  • Screening of Man for All Seasons
  • The English Court under Elizabeth I
  • The English Court under Elizabeth I (cont.)
  • Edmund Spenser
  • Edmund Spenser (cont.)
  • Shakespeare’s Sonnets (Selections)
  • Shakespeare’s Sonnets (Selections) (cont.)
  • John Donne, Songs and Sonnets (Selections)
  • Money, Colonialism and Gender
  • Cartography and Poetry: Maps and Bodies
  • Renaissance Neo-Platonism
  • Andrew Marvel
  • John Donne
  • John Donne (cont.)
  • George Herbert
  • George Herbert, Mary Wroth, Amelia Lanyer
  • Amelia Lanyer, Ben Johnson, Andrew Marvell
  • The Civil War
  • Student Meetings to Discuss Final Essay Draft
  • The Civil War (cont.)
  • Student Meetings to Discuss Final Essay Draft (If necessary) (cont.)

Readings

Fall 2005 · Studies in Poetry: "What's the Use of Beauty?"

This course explores variations on the proposition that an adequate recognition of beauty could, however indirectly, make you a more humane person. Readings extend widely across literary and non-literary genres, including lyric poetry and the novel, philosophical prose and essays.

Readings

  • Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Other Poems . New York, NY: Dover, 1992. ISBN: 0486272664.
    Required
  • Dickens, Charles. Hard Times . New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1998. ISBN: 0192833677.
    Required
  • Keats, John. Complete Poems . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982. ISBN: 5553068290.
    Required
  • Scarry, Elaine. On Beauty and Being Just . Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001. ISBN: 0691089590.
    Required
  • Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein . New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1998. ISBN: 0192834878.
    Required
  • Wordsworth, William and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Lyrical Ballads . New York, NY: Routledge, 2005. ISBN: 041535529X.
    Required
  • LEC #: 2 · TOPICS: Elaine Scarry · READINGS: Scarry, Elaine. On Beauty and Being Just .
    Reading assignment
  • LEC #: 3 · TOPICS: Elaine Scarry (cont.) · READINGS: Scarry, Elaine. On Beauty and Being Just .
    Reading assignment
  • Hamilton, Edith, and Huntington Cairns, eds. “Ion (complete).” The Collected Dialogues of Plato . New York, NY: Pantheon Books, Bollingen series, 1961, pp. 216-228.
    Listed reading
  • ———. “The Republic, Book VII and X.” The Collected Dialogues of Plato . New York, NY: Pantheon Books, Bollingen series, 1961, pp. 747-753 and 822-833.
    Listed reading
  • ———. “Phaedrus.” The Collected Dialogues of Plato . New York, NY: Pantheon Books, Bollingen series, 1961, pp. 747-753 and 491-503.
    Listed reading
  • ———. “Symposium.” The Collected Dialogues of Plato . New York, NY: Pantheon Books, Bollingen series, 1961, pp. 747-753 and 553-563.
    Listed reading
  • Hume, David. “Of the Standard of Taste.” In Selected Essays . Edited by Stephen Copley and Andrew Edgar. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1996, pp. 133-154. ISBN: 0192836218.
    Listed reading
  • ———. “Of Refinement in the Arts.” In Selected Essays . Edited by Stephen Copley and Andrew Edgar. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1996, pp. 167-77. ISBN: 0192836218.
    Listed reading
  • LEC #: 6 · TOPICS: Immanuel Kant · READINGS: Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Judgment . Translated by J. H. Bernard. New York, NY: Hafner, 1951, pp. 25-29, 37-39, 45-51, 62-65, and 196-200 (Introduction, section vii; Book 1, sections 1-2, 6-8, 15, 59). ISBN: 0028475003.
    Reading assignment
  • LEC #: 7 · TOPICS: Friedrich Schiller · READINGS: Schiller, Friedrich. Essays . Edited by Walter Hinderer and Daniel O. Dahlstrom. New York, NY: Continuum, 1993, pp. 86-90, 92-95, 127-139, and 144-165 (Letters 1-2, 4, 15-18, 20-25). ISBN: 0826407137.
    Reading assignment
  • LEC #: 8 · TOPICS: William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge · READINGS: Wordsworth, William, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. “Preface.” In Lyrical Ballads .
    Reading assignment
  • LEC #: 9 · TOPICS: William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge (cont.) · READINGS: Wordsworth, William, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. “Simon Lee,” “The Thorn,” “Goody Blake and Harry Gill,” “We are Seven,” “The Idiot Boy,” and “The Old Cumberland Beggar.” In Lyrical Ballads .
    Reading assignment
  • Wordsworth, William, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. “Michael,” and “Hart-Leap Well.” In Lyrical Ballads .
    Listed reading
  • Wordsworth, William, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. “Expostulation and Reply,” “The Tables Turned,” “Tintern Abbey,” and “Lines Written in Early Spring.” In Lyrical Ballads .
    Listed reading
  • Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. “Frost at Midnight.” In The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Other Poems .
    Listed reading
  • LEC #: 12 · TOPICS: Samuel Taylor Coleridge (cont.) · READINGS: Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. “Dejection: An Ode,” and “Kubla Khan.” In The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Other Poems .
    Reading assignment
  • LEC #: 13 · TOPICS: John Keats · READINGS: Keats, John. “To one who has been too long in city pent,” “To my brother George,” “How many bards gild the lapses of time,” “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer,” “Addressed to Haydon,” “Addressed to the Same,” “On Seeing the Elgin Marbles,” “On Sitting Down to Read King Lear Once Again,” and “When I have fears that I may cease to be.” In Complete Poems .
    Reading assignment
  • LEC #: 14 · TOPICS: John Keats (cont.) · READINGS: Keats, John. “Sleep and Poetry,” and “To My Brother George.” In Complete Poems .
    Reading assignment
  • Keats, John. “Lamia.” In Complete Poems .
    Listed reading
  • Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” In Illuminations . Edited by Hannah Arendt. Translated by Harry Zohn. New York, NY: Schocken, 1968, pp. 217-243. ISBN: 0805202412.
    Listed reading
  • Keats, John. “Ode to Psyche,” “Ode to a Nightingale,” and “Ode to Indolence.” In Complete Poems .
    Listed reading
  • Adorno, Theodor, and Walter Benajmin. “Lyric Poetry and Society.” In The Complete Correspondence, 1928-1940 . Edited by Henri Lonitz. Translated by Nicholas Walker. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999, pp. 127-133. ISBN: 0674154274.
    Listed reading
  • Adorno, Theodor. Notes to Literature . Vol. 1. Edited by Rolf Tiedemann. Translated by Shierry Weber Nicolson. New York, NY: Columbia, 1991, pp. 37-54. ISBN: 0231063326.
    Listed reading
  • Peacock, Thomas Love. “The Four Ages of Poetry.” In Prose of the British Romantic Movement . Edited by John R. Nabholtz. New York, NY: Macmillan, 1974, pp. 655-661. ISBN: 0023858400.
    Listed reading
  • LEC #: 18 · TOPICS: Mary Shelley · READINGS: Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein. Vols. 1-2.
    Reading assignment
  • LEC #: 19 · TOPICS: Mary Shelley (cont.) · READINGS: Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein . Vol. 3.
    Reading assignment
  • LEC #: 20 · TOPICS: Lord Byron and George Gordon · READINGS: Byron, Lord, and George Gordon. “Cantos 1-2.” In The Complete Poetical Works, vol. V: Don Juan . Edited by Jerome McGann. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1986, pp. 3-157. ISBN: 019812757X.
    Reading assignment
  • LEC #: 21 · TOPICS: Lord Byron and George Gordon (cont.) · READINGS: Byron, Lord, and George Gordon. “Cantos 10-11.” In The Complete Poetical Works, vol. V: Don Juan . Edited by Jerome McGann. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1986, pp. 437-492. ISBN: 019812757X.
    Reading assignment
  • LEC #: 22 · TOPICS: Charles Dickens · READINGS: Dickens, Charles. “Book 1.” In Hard Times .
    Reading assignment
  • Dickens, Charles. “Books 2-3.” In Hard Times .
    Listed reading
  • Nussbaum, Martha. Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life . Boston, MA: Beacon, 1995, pp. 1-52. ISBN: 0807041084.
    Listed reading
  • Arnold, Matthew. Culture and Anarchy . Edited by Samuel Lipman. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994, pp. 28-66. ISBN: 0300058675.
    Listed reading
  • Pater, Walter. Studies in the History of the Renaissance . Edited by Adam Phillips. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1986, pp. xxix-xxxiii, and 150-3. ISBN: 019281737X.
    Listed reading
  • LEC #: 25 · TOPICS: Oscar Wilde · READINGS: Wilde, Oscar. The Soul of Man Under Socialism and Selected Critical Prose . Edited by Linda Dowling. New York, NY: Penguin, 2001, pp. 105-6, 122-3, and 127-160. ISBN: 0140433872.
    Reading assignment
Fall 2004 · Studies in Poetry - British Poetry and the Sciences of the Mind

Topics

  • Plato. From Ion, Republic, and Phaedrus.
  • Pope, Alexander. Essay on Man. Books 1-2, and 4.
  • Akenside, Mark. The Pleasures of Imagination. Books 2-3.
  • Smart, Christopher. Jubilate Agno.
  • Blake, William. The Book of Urizen.
  • Student Presentations and Evaluations
  • Lucretius. De Rerum Natura. Books 1, and 4.
  • Thomson, James. The Seasons, Summer.
  • Student Presentations

Readings

  • Blake, William. The Book of Urizen . Mineola, NY: Dover, 1997. ISBN: 0486298019.
    Listed reading
  • Keats, John. Complete Poems . Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1982. ISBN: 0674154304.
    Listed reading
  • Wordsworth, William, and S. T. Coleridge. Lyrical Ballads . 2nd ed. London, NY: Routledge, 1991. ISBN: 0415063884.
    Listed reading
  • 1 · Graham, Jorie. “Thinking.” In Materialism . New York, NY: Ecco, 1993. ISBN: 0880013427.
    Listed reading
  • 2 · Plato. The Collected Dialogues of Plato . Edited by Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns. Princeton, NJ: Bollingen, 1961.
    Listed reading
  • Locke, John. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding . Edited by Alexander Campbell Fraser. 2 vols. New York, NY: Dover, 1959. ISBN: 0486205304 and 0486205312.
    Listed reading
  • Fox, Christopher. “Defining Eighteenth-Century Psychology: Some Problems and Perspectives.” In Psychology and Literature in the Eighteenth Century . New York, NY: AMS Press, 1987. pp. 1-22. ISBN: 0404614744.
    Listed reading
  • Newton, Isaac. Opticks . New York, NY: Dover, 1952. ISBN: 0486602052.
    Listed reading
  • Voltaire. Letters Concerning the English Nation . Edited by Nicholas Cronk. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1994. ISBN: 0192826018.
    Listed reading
  • Bowden, Samuel. “A Poem Sacred to the Memory of Sir Isaac Newton.” In Poetical essays on Several Occasions (1733-1735) . (Available Online)
    Listed reading
  • 5 · Pope, Alexander. “Essay on Man.” In Poems . Edited by John Butt. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1963, bk. 1-2, 4. ISBN: 0300003404.
    Listed reading
  • Addison, Joseph. “The Spectator.” In Selected Essays from the Tatler, the Spectator and the Guardian . New York, NY: Macmillan, 1973. ISBN: 0672609908.
    Listed reading
  • Akenside, Mark. The Poetical Works of Mark Akenside . Edited by Robin Dix. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1996, bk. 1. ISBN: 0838635350.
    Listed reading
  • 7 · Akenside, Mark. The Poetical Works of Mark Akenside . Edited by Robin Dix. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1996, bk. 2-3. ISBN: 0838635350.
    Listed reading
  • Hartley, David. Observations on Man, His Frame, His Duty, and His Expectations. 2 vols. London, UK: J. Johnson, 1791.
    Listed reading
  • Young, Edward. Night Thoughts. Edited by Stephen Cornford . Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1993. ISBN: 052134185X.
    Listed reading
  • Wilmot, John, Earl of Rochester. The Debt to Pleasure . Edited by John Adlard. New York, NY: Routledge, 2002. ISBN: 0415940842.
    Listed reading
  • La Mettrie, Julien Offray de. Man a Machine . Translated by Gertrude Carman Bussey. La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1987.
    Listed reading
  • Cheyne, George. The English malady: or, a treatise of nervous diseases of all kinds. London, UK: G. Strahan and J. Leake, 1733.
    Listed reading
  • Gray, Thomas. “Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College.” In Poems. London, UK: Everyman’s Library, 1912. (Available Online)
    Listed reading
  • -–. “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard.” In Poems . London, UK: Everyman’s Library, 1912. (Available Online)
    Listed reading
  • Warton, Thomas. “The Pleasures of Melancholy.” In Eighteenth-Century Poetry: An Annotated Anthology . Edited by David Fairer and Christine Gerrard. Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishers, 1999.
    Listed reading
  • Collins, William. Odes on Several Descriptive and Allegoric Subjects . New York, NY: Payson & Clarke, 1927.
    Listed reading
  • 12 · Smart, Christopher. “Jubilate Agno.” In The Poetical Works . vol 1. Edited by Karina Williamson. Oxford, UK: Clarendon, 1980. (Available Online)
    Listed reading
  • Blake, William. “An Island in the Moon.” In The Poetry and Prose of William Blake . Edited by David V. Erdman. New York, NY: Doubleday, 1970. ISBN: 0385031971.
    Listed reading
  • -–. “Mock on, Mock on…” In The Poetry and Prose of William Blake . Edited by David V. Erdman. New York, NY: Doubleday, 1970. ISBN: 0385031971. (Available Online)
    Listed reading
  • -–. “You Don’t Believe I Won’t Attempt to Make Ye.” In The Poetry and Prose of William Blake . Edited by David V. Erdman. New York, NY: Doubleday, 1970. ISBN: 0385031971.
    Listed reading
  • 14 · Blake, William. “The Book of Urizen.” In The Poetry and Prose of William Blake. Edited by David V. Erdman. New York, NY: Doubleday, 1970. ISBN: 0385031971. (Available Online)
    Listed reading
  • 16 · Lucretius. On the Nature of the Universe . Translated by R.E. Latham. New York, NY: Penguin, 1994, bk. 1, 4. ISBN: 0140446109.
    Listed reading
  • 17 · Thomson, James. “Summer.” In The Seasons and The Castle of Indolence . Edited by James Sambrook. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1987. ISBN: 0198710704.
    Listed reading
  • 18 · Armstrong, John. The Art of Preserving Health , bk. 1, lines 1-63; bk. 4. (Available Online)
    Listed reading
  • Darwin, Erasmus. The Botanic Garden: A Poem in Two Parts . London, UK: J. Johnson, 1791. (Available Online).
    Listed reading
  • Canning, George and John Hookham Frere. “The Loves of the Triangles.” In Poetry of the Anti-Jacobin . New York, NY: Woodstock Books, 1991. ISBN: 1854770675.
    Listed reading
  • 20 · Darwin, Erasmus. The Temple of Nature; or, The origin of society: a poem, with philosophical notes . London, UK: J. Johnson, 1803, cantos 1, 3. (Available Online)
    Listed reading
  • Wordsworth. Lyrical Ballads.
    Listed reading
  • Wordsworth. Lyrical Ballads. (cont.)
    Listed reading
  • Keats, John. John Keats’s Anatomical and physiological note book . Edited by Maurice Buxton Forman. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1934.
    Listed reading
  • Bell, Charles. “Idea of a New Anatomy of the Brain.” In The Way in and the way out: Francois Magendie, Charles Bell, and the roots of the spinal nerves . Edited by Paul F. Cranefeld. Mt. Kisco, NY: Futura, 1974. ISBN: 0879930357.
    Listed reading
  • Keats. In drear-nighted December.
    Listed reading
Spring 2003 · Studies in Poetry: Gender and Lyric -- Renaissance Men and Women Writing about Love

The core of this seminar will be the great sequences of English love sonnets written by William Shakespeare, Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, and Mary Wroth. These poems cover an enormous amount of aesthetic and psychological ground: ranging from the utterly subjective to the entirely public or conventional, from licit to forbidden desires, they might also serve as a manual of experimentation with the resources of sound, rhythm, and figuration in poetry. Around these sequences, we will develop several other contexts, using both Renaissance texts and modern accounts: the Petrarchan literary tradition (poems by Francis Petrarch and Sir Thomas Wyatt); the social, political, and ethical uses of love poetry (seduction, getting famous, influencing policy, elevating morals, compensating for failure); other accounts of ideal masculinity and femininity (conduct manuals, theories of gender and anatomy); and the other limits of the late sixteenth century vogue for love poetry: narrative poems, pornographic poems, poems that don't work.

Readings

  • Alighieri, Dante. La Vita Nuova . Edited and translated by Barbara Reynolds. New York: Penguin, 1969.
    Listed reading
  • Gascoigne, George. A Hundredth Sundrie Flowers. Edited by C. T. Prouty. Volume XVII No. 2. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1964.
    Listed reading
  • Petrarch. “Letters.” In Petrarch and His World . Edited and translated by Morris Bishop. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1963.
    Listed reading
  • Petrarch. Petrarch’s Lyric Poems . Edited and translated by Robert L. Durling. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990.
    Listed reading
  • Puttenham, George. The Arte of English Poesie . [Kent, Ohio]: Kent State University Press, 1971.
    Listed reading
  • Shakespeare, William. Shakespeare’s Sonnets . Edited by Stephen Booth. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000.
    Listed reading
  • Sidney, Philip. Sir Philip Sidney . Edited by Katherine Duncan-Jones. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.
    Listed reading
  • Spenser, Edmund. Edmund Spenser’s Poetry . Edited by Hugh Maclean and Anne Lake Prescott. 3rd ed. New York: W. W. Norton, 1993.
    Listed reading
  • Barnfield, Richard. Sonnet 11 in Cynthia, aka “Sighing, and sadly sitting by my love.” In January 1595, Barnfield published his second volume, Cynthia , with certain Sonnets, and this time signed the preface, which was dedicated to William Stanley, the new earl of Derby.
    Listed reading
  • Castiglione, Baldessar. The Book of the Courtier . Edited by George Bull. New York: Penguin, 1976. (Reprint edition)
    Listed reading
  • Donne, John. “A Valediction Forbidding Mourning”; “The Sunne Rising.” In The Metaphysical Poets. New York: Penguin, 1972.
    Listed reading
  • Goreau, Angeline. The Whole Duty of a Woman: Female Writers in Seventeenth-Century England. Edited by Angeline Goreau. Garden City, N.Y.: Dial Press, 1985.
    Listed reading
  • Herbert, Lady Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke. Translations of Psalms 52, 89, 142. Psalm 52 is published in The New Oxford Book of Sixteenth Century Verse. Edited by Emrys Jones. New York: Oxford Univ Press, 1992, pp. 468-469.
    Listed reading
  • Howard, Henry, Earl of Surrey_._ “The Soote Season”; “Loue that Liueth, and Reigneth in my thought”; “From Tuskane came my Ladies worthy race”; “Wyatt Resteth Here”; “My Ratclif.” In Tottel’s Miscellany. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1965.
    Listed reading
  • Norbrook, David. The Penguin Book of Renaissance Verse 1509-1659. Edited by H. R. Woudhuysen. New York: Penguin, 1993.
    Listed reading
  • Ralegh, Sir Walter. “Praised be Diana’s Fair and Harmless Light”; “Fortune hath taken thee away my love”; “The 21th and Last Booke of the Ocean to Scinthia”; “A Vision upon this Conceit of the Faery Queen. 1590.” In The Poems of Sir Walter Raleigh . Edited by J. Hannah. London: George Bell and Sons, 1891.
    Listed reading
  • Sidney, Sir Philip. Astrophil and Stella. Edited by Max Putzel. 1st edition. Garden City, N.Y: Anchor Books, 1967.
    Listed reading
  • Sidney, Sir Philip. The Defense of Poesy. Edited by Lewis Soens. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, July 1970.
    Listed reading
  • Sidney, Sir Philip. The Lady of May. Edited by Albert Feuillerat. Cambridge: The University press, 1968.
    Listed reading
  • Tottel, Richard. “The Printer to the Reader.” Introduction to the section “Other Songs and Sonnets Written by the Earl of Surrey”. In Tottel’s Miscellany. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1965.
    Listed reading
  • Wroth, Lady Mary Sidney. The Poems of Lady Mary Wroth . Edited by Josephine A. Roberts. 2nd ed. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992.
    Listed reading
  • Wroth, Lady Mary Sidney. Pamphilia to Amphilanthus . Edited by G. F. Waller. Salzburg: University of Salzburg, 1977.
    Listed reading
  • Wyatt, Sir Thomas. Poetical Works of Sir Thomas Wyatt. Freeport, N.Y.: Books for Libraries Press, 1970.
    Listed reading
Fall 2002 · Studies in Poetry: "Does Poetry Matter"

Topics

  • Introductions and such as that.
  • Lowell. Read the poems from Life Studies and History .
  • A video encounter with Lowell.
  • Lowell. The poems from For Lizzie and Harriett and The Dolphin .
  • Levertov. Poems 1968-72 . Some specific advice will be forthcoming, but fare boldly forth on your own.
  • Levertov reads on video.
  • Levertov. This Great Becoming .
  • Rich. We’ll focus on her earlier poems.
  • Rich on video.
  • Rich, the later poems. Specific advice to follow.
  • Heaney. Read the poems from Death of a Naturalist and Field Work .
  • Heaney on video.
  • Heaney. Poems from Station Island and Seeing Things .
  • Pinsky. Pay close attention to An Explanation of America .
  • I hope Pinsky will visit our class today.
  • Pinsky. Sadness and Happiness .
  • Collins. Follow your eys, and ears, and heart.
  • First Essay due.
  • I hope to have MIT’s own Erica Funkhouser visit with us, not so much to talk about Collins as to discuss the nature of her own work, which is not readily available in affordable editions, alas.
  • Collins
  • Monahan
  • Jean Monahan will join us.
  • Hodgen. I will expect at least a full account of your costume. Better yet, wear it so we can all applaud.
  • John Hodgen will visit us.
  • Hodgen
  • Schwartz
  • A visit from Lloyd Scwartz.
  • Second Essay due.
  • Rita Dove. Specific poems TBA.
  • Dove on video.
  • Dove
  • Tapscott
  • Tapscott will meet with us.
  • We’ll meander. I’ll advise you about some decent poetry websites, you can look back at some poems we slighted on our syllabus, or find poems in the Astley anthology. Come each session ready to read aloud a poem that strikes you, for whatever reason, and to define why that poem “matters” in your judgment.
  • Final presentations.

Readings

  • Astley, Neil ed. Staying Alive: Real Poems for Unreal Times. Newcastle: Bloodaxe, 2002.
    Listed reading
  • Collins, Billy. Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poems. New York: Random House, 2001.
    Listed reading
  • Dove, Rita. Selected Poems. New York: Vintage Books, 1993.
    Listed reading
  • Heaney, Seamus. Opened Ground. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1998.
    Listed reading
  • Hodgen, John. Bread Without Sorrow: Poems. Spokane, Wash.: Lynx House Press, 2001.
    Listed reading
  • Levertov, Denise. Poems: 1968-1972. New York: New Directions Publ. Corp.,1987.
    Listed reading
  • ___. This Great Unknowing. New York: New Directions Publ. Corp., 2000.
    Listed reading
  • Lowell, Robert. Selected Poems. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1977.
    Listed reading
  • Monahan, Jean. Believe It Or Not. Alexandria, VA: Orchises Press, 1999.
    Listed reading
  • Pinsky, Robert. The Figured Wheel: New and Collected Poems, 1966-1996. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1996.
    Listed reading
  • Rich, Adrienne. The Fact of a Doorframe: Poems Selected and New 1950-1984. New York: WW Norton & Company, 1994.
    Listed reading
  • Schwartz, Lloyd. Cairo Traffic. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2000.
    Listed reading
  • Tapscott, Steve. From the Book of Changes. Pittsburgh: Carnegie Mellon, 2002.
    Listed reading
  • in Poetry 180 (NY, Random House, 2003)
    Listed reading
  • Billy Collins, in After Confession (edited by Kate Sontag and David Graham; St. Paul MN, Graywolf Press, 2001)
    Listed reading
  • Dana Goia, Can Poetry Matter? (St. Paul MN, Graywolf Press, 1992)
    Listed reading
  • Seamus Heaney, The Redress of Poetry (NY, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1995)
    Listed reading
  • Opened Ground (NY, Farrar Straus, and Giroux, 1998)
    Listed reading
  • Denise Levertov, New and Selected Essays (New Directions pb, 1992)
    Listed reading
  • Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider (Freedom CA, The Crossing Press, 1996)
    Listed reading
  • Robert Lowell, Collected Prose (New York, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1887)
    Listed reading
  • Czeslaw Milosz, The Witness of Poetry (Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press, 1983).
    Listed reading
  • Robert Pinsky, Democracy, Culture, and the Voice of Poetry (Princeton NY, Princeton University Press, 2002)
    Listed reading
  • Adrienne Rich, What Is Found There (NY, W. W. Norton, 1993)
    Listed reading

Prerequisites & course information

Prereq: Two subjects in Literature U (Fall, Spring) 3-0-9 units. HASS-H Can be repeated for credit.

Sources