English 202A: Introduction to Poetry
Fall 2015
English 202A:
Introduction to Poetry
Fall 2015
Stephen C. Behrendt
319 Andrews; 472-1806
Office: 1030-1120 MWF
and by appointment
Email Dr. Behrendt
Kazimir Malevich, Still Life (1913)
The Broadview Anthology of Poetry. eds. Herbert Rosengarten and Amanda Goldrick-Jones (Broadview P)
Shira Wolosky. The Art of Poetry (Oxford UP)
Page numbers indicate pages in the Broadview Anthology; “BB” indicates poems to be posted in the “Course Documents” folder on Blackboard
Aug 24 M Introductory matters. Why Poetry? Reading and thinking about poetry.
26 W What is Poetry? How do we know what is a poem? DO we?
Moore, “Poetry” (461, 462); Williams, “This Is Just To Say” (433); MacLeish, “Ars Poetica” (493); Shakespeare, Sonnet 73 (32)
28 F How do poems work? What do poems do?
Wolosky, Chapter 1: “Individual Words”
Wordsworth, “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” (BB)_____
31 M Looking at sample poems
Wolosky, Chapter 2: “Syntax and the Poetic Line”
cummings and Williams, sample poems (BB)
Sep 2 W More sample poems to get us going
examples of concrete poetry (BB)
Frost, “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” (412); Frost, “Desert Places” (413); Roethke, “My Papa’s Waltz” (565)
4 F And still more samples -- and some student favorites
Frost, The Road Not Taken” (409); Williams, “The Red Wheelbarrow” (432); Stevens, “Anecdote of the Jar” (420)
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7 M – Labor Day holiday
9 W Poetry and Language
Wolosky, Chapter 8: “Personification”
Wordsworth, “Composed Upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802” (172); Young, “Photograph, 1958” (888)
11 F Different worlds, different ways of seeing
Williams, “At the Ball Game” (433); MacDiarmid, “In the Children’s Hospital” (489); Parker, “A Pig’s-Eye View of Literature” (501)
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14 M Poetry and Figurative Language
Wolosky, Chapter 3: “Images: Simile and Metaphor”
Shakespeare, Sonnet 18 (31); Campion, “There is a Garden in her face” (38); Burns, “A Red, Red Rose” (165)
16 W Poetry and figurative language 2
Williams, “Queen-Anne’s-Lace” (432); Souster, “Queen Anne’s Lace” (676)
18 F Poetry and figurative language 3
Souster, “Young Girls” (675); Angelou, “Caged Bird” (738)
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21 M Poetry and Figurative Language, continued
Wolosky, Chapter 6: “Poetic Conventions”
Pound: “In a Station of the Metro” (446); Donne, “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning” (42); Rich, “A Valediction Forbidding Mourning” (746); Whitman, “A Noiseless Patient Spider” (301); Frost, “Birches” (410); Keats, “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” (220)
23 W Working with figurative language
Rich, “Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers” (743); Keats, “When I have fears that I may cease to be” (220)
Imagist poetry (BB)
25 F Figuaruive language and implication
Donne, “The Flea” (41); Herrick, “To the Virgins, to make much of Time” (55); Marvell, “To his Coy Mistress” (81)
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Poetry and Imagery
Wolosky, Chapter 9: “Poetic Voice”
Tennyson, “Ulysses” (264); Robert Browning, “Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister” (275); Robert Browning, “My Last Duchess” (278); Dickinson, “The Soul selects her own Society” (319); Dickinson, “Because I could not stop for Death” (321)30 W
Keats, “To Autumn” (228); Adcock, “Unexpected Visit” (802); Heaney, “Poor Women in a City Church” (822); Heaney, “Docker” (823)
Oct 2 F
Walcott, “A Letter from Brooklyn” (756); Bowering, “Grandfather” (808)
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5 M Poems relating to animals
Wolosky, Chapter 9: “Poetic Voice”
Barbauld, “The Mouse’s Petition to Dr. Priestley” (150); Clare, “Badger” (BB); Moore, “The Fish” (462); Bishop, “The Fish” (595); The Bull Moose” (785)
7 W More poems relating to animals
Gray, “Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat, Drowned in a Tub of Gold Fishes” (130); “The Prize Cat” (427); Shelley, “To a Skylark” (217); Keats, “Ode to a Nightingale” (223); Dickinson, “A narrow Fellow in the Grass” (322); Hardy, “The Darkling Thrush” (343); Crawford, “The Dark Stag” (355)
9 F
Pratt, “The Shark” (426); Layton, “The Bull Calf” (607); Stafford, “Traveling through the Dark” (622); Wilbur, “Beasts” (673)
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Poetry and Narrative
Behn, “The Disappointment” (102); Roberts, “The Solitary Woodsman” (367); Sexton, “Cinderella” (734)
14 W Poetry and narrative 2
Lampman, “The Frogs” (376); Scott, “On The Way To The Mission” (384); Service, “The Shooting of Dan McGrew” (415); Auden, “Song” (560)
16 F Poetry and how narratives are made
cummings, “anyone lived in a pretty how town” (506); Carroll, “Jabberwocky” (337); Page, “Stories of Snow” (644); Wright, “At Cooloola” (638); Cohen, “Suzanne Takes You Down” (792)
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21 W Poetry and Poetic Form: Sonnets
Wolosky, Chapter 4: “Verse Forms: The Sonnet”
Shakespeare, Sonnet 130 (34); Herrick, “Delight in Disorder” (54); Donne, “Holy Sonnets” X and XIV(45-46); Gray, “Sonnet on the Death of Richard West” (135)
23 F Poetry and sonnet form 2
Scott, “The Onondaga Madonna” (383); Livesay, “The Difference” (584)
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26 M Other Forms
Wolosky, Chapter 7: “More Verse Forms”
Jonson, “On my first Sonne” (48); Ransom, “Bells for Johns Whiteside’s Daughter” (471); Roethke, “Elegy for Jane” (566); Heaney, “Mid-Term Break” (BB)
28 W Other forms 2
Millay, “Dirge Without Music” (485); Millay, “Elegy Before Death” (486); Livesay, “Lament” (586)
30 F Other forms 3
Atwood, “Death of a Young Son by Drowning” (833)
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Nov 2 M Poems about Relationships
Milton, “Methought I Saw My Late Espoused Saint” (69); Bradstreet, “To My Dear and Loving Husband” (76); Bradstreet, “A Letter to Her Husband, Absent Upon Public Employment” (76)
4 W Poems about relationships 2
Blake, “How sweet I roam’d from field to field” (155); E. B. Browning, Sonnets from the Portuguese, XXII and XLIII (234); Millay, “Love Is Not All” (487); Parker, “On Being a Woman” (503)
6 F Poems about relationships 3
Slessor, “Wild Grapes” (523); Smith, “The River God” (534); Roethke, “I Knew A Woman” (566); Wilbur, “The Pardon” (670)
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Poems about Art and Life
Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn” (226); Yeats, “Lapis Lazuli” (405); Williams, “The Dance” (435); Ondaatje, “Henri Rousseau and Friends” (862)
11 W Poems about art and life 2
Blake “The Chimney Sweeper” (2 versions: 156, 158); Wordsworth, “Strange fits of passion have I known” (169); Wordsworth, “A slumber did my spirit seal” (172); Hughes, “Weary Blues” (528); Auden, Musée des Beaux Arts” (553)
13 F Poems about arts an dlife 3
Pound, “Commission” (446); Bunting, “What the Chairman Told Tom” (520)
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16 M Poems about War and Nation
Milton, “On the Late Massacre in Piemont” (68); Shelley, “Sonnet: England in 1819” (212); Owen, “Anthem for Doomed Youth” (499) Yeats, “Easter 1916” (396)
18 W Poems about war and natuon 2
Sassoon, “A Night Attack” (451); Owen, “Arms and the Boy” (496); Owen, Dulce et Decorum Est” (498); Owen, “Strange Meeting: (499); Slessor, “Beach Burial” (526); Jarrell, “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner” (620)
20 F Poems about war and nation 3
Graves, “Recalling War” (510); Scott, “W. L. M. K.” (518); Stafford, “At the Un-National Monument along the Canadian Border” (623); Levertov, “The Day the Audience Walked Out on Me, and Why” (697)
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23 M Other longer, complex forms
Wolosky, Chapter 14 “Incomplete Figures and the Art of Reading”
Wordsworth, “Lines Composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey” (166); Roberts, “Tantramar Revisited” (364); Thomas, “Fern Hill” (632)
30 M Other longer, complex forms, continued
Shelley, “Ode to the West Wind” (212); Longfellow, “My Lost Youth” (242)
Dec 2 W Longer forms 3
Yeats, “Among School Children” (402); Wright, “Song” (636)
4 F Longer forms 4
Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (474)
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7 M Final considerations about poery. art. life and sociial responsibility
9 W Final considerations 2
11 F Course conclusion(s)
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