A Provisional Course Outline
I. Introduction of Poetry: The Experience of Poetry and The Definition of Poetry “Introduction to Poetry” Billy Collins
“Poetry” Pablo Neruda, as read by Miranda Richardson
“Ars Poetica” Archibald McLeish
“The Definition of Poetry” Bijan Kant Dubey
“The Poets are Mad Men and Poetry a Mad Man’s Babbling” Bijan Kant Dubey
“A Private Affair” Heather Burn
II. The Persona and the Poet, and the Context “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus” William Carlos Williams
“Musee des Beaux Arts” W.H. Auden
“To his Coy Mistress” Andrew Marvell
The Poet as Speaker
“On my First Son” Ben Jonson
III. Narrative Poetry
“Sir Patrick Spence” Anonymous
An excerpt from the Odyssey by Homer, as translated by Robert
Fritzgerald*
“The Raven” Edgar Allan Poe
IV. Lyric Poetry
“He Wishes for Cloths of Heaven” William Butler Yeats “Pied Beauty” Gerard Manley Hopkins “For the Spartan Dead at Plataia” Simonides; and “This Dust was Once the Man” Walt Whitman
“Ode on a Grecian Urn” John Keats “One day I wrote her name upon the strand” Edmund Spenser V. How is a Poem Read and Analyzed?
The Basic Approach: The Formalist Criticism
VI. Writing about Poetry
VII. Collection of Poems: (Provisional List) “Ulysses” Lord Alfred Tennyson
“My Last Duchess” Robert Browning
“I wandered lonely as a cloud” William Wordsworth
“The Lamb” and “The Tyger” William Blake
“A Poison Tree” William Blake
“The Passionate Shepherd to his Love” Christopher Marlowe; and
“ The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd” Sir Walter Raleigh
“Dover Beach” Matthew Arnold; and
“The Dover Bitch; A Criticism of Life”
“Ozymandias” Percy Bysshe Shelley
“Thanatopsis” William Cullen Bryant
“Death, be Not Proud” John Donne
“Pity Me Not Because the Light of Day” Edna St. Vincent Millay
“When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes” William Shakespeare
“Invictus” William Ernest Henley
“The Road not Taken” Robert Frost
“Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening” Robert