Reading Poetry

Catalog description

English 263 will take up the questions, problems, and delights involved in reading poetry in British, American, and other English-language traditions. Examining the fundamental tools of reading poetry (meter, rhyme, image, diction, poetic forms, figurative language, and other rhetorical devices), students in English 263 will pay special attention to the critical issues and problems raised by reading poetry, as opposed to reading fiction, drama, non-fiction, or social texts. Authors under consideration will vary from class to class, but may include writers such as Chaucer, Shakespeare, Marvell, Herbert, Donne, Jonson, Milton, Pope, Blake, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Tennyson, Clare, Browning, Hopkins, Rossetti, Wheatley, Melville, Whitman, Dickinson, Poe, Dunbar, Justice, Frost, Stevens, Williams, Pound, Eliot, Moore, Loy, H.D., Cummings, Crane, Robinson, Yeats, Hughes, Cullen, Olson, O'Hara, Creeley, Duncan, Auden, Lowell, Plath, Ginsberg, Lorde, Atwood, Brooks, Baraka, GlOck, Doty, and many others. The course may be taught in a number of different ways, for instance, simply by breaking the course down into relatively equally weighted units on particular formal aspects of poetry (rhyme, meter, genre-epic, dramatic, lyric, and various sub-genres-fixed forms, and the like) and then moving on to units designed to explore how poetry addresses specific social, cultural, and historical contexts.