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English and American Poetry
A Reader's Guide to the Poems by 32 Major English and American Poets
Created byHong Zeng
Last updated 12/2020
English
English [Auto],
What you'll learn
- Learn English and American poetry on graduate level. It provides a guide reading to 32 major English and American poets.
- Learn elements of poetry: voice, sound, image, diction, structure, figure of speech, etc.
- Learn about English poets, including Chaucer and Elizabethan poets Spenser and Shakespeare, Metaphysical poets such as Donne, Herbert, Marlow, Romanti
- Learn about American poets, including 19th century poets Whitman and Dickinson, early 20th century modernist poets Ezra Pound, Marianna Moore, Elizabet
- On the study of poets, there are usually three to four sections: the first section includes discussion questions on the poet; the second section provides a gene
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Course content
3 sections • 34 lectures • 16h 15m total length
Requirements
- Know English language
- Interested in literature and poetry
Description
This course is based on a graduate course I taught in America and in China. It provides a guide reading to 32 major English and American poets. It can be used by both advanced undergraduate and graduate students, and poetry-lovers for learning English and American poetry at great depth and with considerable breadth. It meets the 11-week graduate course schedule, with a unit of about three poets taught in one week. The first part of the book is introduction to the elements of poetry: voice, rhyme and meter, image, choice of words, sentence diction, structure, figure of speech, etc. The second part is on English poets, including Chaucer and Elizabethan poets Spenser and Shakespeare, Metaphysical poets such as Donne, Herbert, Marlowe, Romantic poets such as Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley and Keats, late Victorian poets Tennyson and Hardy, modernist British poets such as Yeats, Eliot, and Dylan Thomas. The third part is on American poets, including 19th century poets Whitman and Dickinson, early 20th century modernist poets Ezra Pound, Marianna Moore, William Carlos Williams, Elizabeth Bishop, Wallace Stevens, the traditionalist Robert Frost and underground imagery poet Robert Bly, Beat generation poet Allen Ginsberg, Confessional Poets Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath, and the recently deceased poet laureate W.S. Merwin. On the study of poets, there are usually three sections: the first section provides preliminary discussion questions on the poets, so the learners can have these questions on mind when watching the lecture, and this part is also the practice part of the lecture. The second section provides a general introduction and analysis of the poet’s life and work, the third section includes selective reading of their representative poems and detailed guide reading of each poem.
In the study of each poet, besides the general introduction and analysis, there is usually a highlighted motif about that poet, as indexed below:
Section I
Introduction of the Course
Elements of Poetry
Section II
English Poets
Chaucer, Spenser and Shakespeare
1. Geoffrey Chaucer: Implicit Ironist and Gullible Appreciator of All Vitality
2. Edmund Spenser: Theoretical Asceticism and Sensuous Garden
3. William Shakespeare: Tragedy, Divided Mind and Negative Capability
Metaphysical Poets and John Milton
4. John Donne: The Inventor of Metaphysical Conceit
5. Andrew Marvell: The Mower as Death and Lover
6. Herbert: The Banquet of Sacred Devotion
7. John Milton: Satan as the Tragic Hero
Early Romantic Poets
8. William Blake: The Visionary Marriage of Heaven and Hell
9. Coleridge: Christian Redemption and Diabolical Poetics
10. William Wordsworth: Divinized and Fallen Nature
Later Romantic Poets
11. Percy Shelly: Rhapsody of Destructive-Creative Energy and Disillusionment with Rousseaurian Nature
12. John Keats: Priesthood of the Mortal World
13. George Gordon Byron: The Ingenious Ironist and the Postmodern Text of Don Juan
Late Victorian Poets: Tennyson, Browning and Hardy
14. Alfred Lord Tennyson: The Melancholy of Solipsistic Artist
15. Robert Browning: Dramatic Monologue and Atomized Self
16. Thomas Hardy: The Tragedy of Will-to-Live
Early 20th Century Modernists: Yeats, Eliot and Dylan Thomas
17. W.B. Yeats: From the Romantic Lyricist to the Occult Visionary
18. T.S. Eliot: Making Past Fragments into Modern Myth
19. Dylan Thomas: The Cosmic Significance of Human Anatomy
Section III
American Poets:
Whitman and Dickinson
1. Walt Whitman: The Great Unifier and Cosmic Self
2. Emily Dickinson: Anxiety, Nothingness and Being
Early 20th Century Modernists
3. Ezra Pound: Translator as Inventor of Modern Poetics
4. Marianna Moore: "Real Toad in an Imaginary Garden"
5. William Carlos Williams: From European Modernist Art to a New American Poetics
6. Elizabeth Bishop: The Juxtaposition of the Quotidian and the Catastrophic, the Precise and the Fantastic
Stevens, Robert Frost and Robert Bly
7. Wallace Stevens: The Necessary Angel of Imagination vs Zen Poetics
8. Robert Frost: Traditional Folklore and Hidden Vision of Darkness
9. Robert Bly: The Underground Imagery and Taoist Poetics
The Beat Generation, Confessional Poets and Merwin
10. Allen Ginsberg: Manifesto of the Beat Generation
11. Robert Lowell: Confessional Life study and Calvinist Outlook
12. Sylvia Plath: Affinity with Edward Munch's Symbolist Painting
13. W.S. Merwin: Taoist and Zen Buddhist Influence and “The Third Body” Sensibility
Who this course is for:
- General readers of literature
- undergraduate or graduate students, literature scholars