English 230 (001)
English 230 (041)
Winter 2021
T Th 1:00-1:50 pm
Online (via LEARN and Bongo/Teams
Instructor: Dr. F. Easton
TA: Ms. M. Shafqat Ali
English Department
University of Waterloo
The Pleasure of Poetry
Syllabus
Notes: (1) all course readings (except for links to webpages embedded below) are from Joseph Kelly, ed., The Seagull Book of Poems, 4th ed. (Norton, 2018); (2) along with the poems listed here we will also enjoy some student-selected ones through class presentations; (3) some of the poems below deal with mature themes, sexual content, and racial and sexual epithets; if you wish to request an accommodation with respect to such material, please email the instructor before the end of the first full week of classes (September 17th); finally, (4) not all poems on the syllabus will be discussed in detail in class meetings, but discussed or not, they are there for you to enjoy, to use in your discussion posts and assignments, and to enrich the range of your poetic experiences.
In addition to the poems listed below, we will consult relevant parts of Kelly’s “Introduction,” especially the section entitled “How Do You Read Poems?” (pp. xxi-xlvi) at opportune points over the course of the semester.
January 12 & 14: Introduction
Atwood, “You Fit into Me”
Experiencing Poetry Merwin, “Separation”
Hughes, “Theme for English B”
Collins, “Introduction to Poetry” Das, “An Introduction”
I. Poetic Energies
January 21 & 23: Sounds and Images
Anon, “Sing, Sing” (handout)
Carroll, “Jabberwocky”
Plath, “Daddy” Blake, “The Tyger” (compare the poem in Kelly with Blake’s original “Tyger”) Kaur, “i don’t need more friends”
January 28 & 30: Experiences
Wheatley, “On Being Brought from Africa to America”
Smith, “not an elegy for Mike Brown”
Wroth, “My pain, still smother’d in my grieved breast” Wordsworth, “A slumber did my spirit seal”
Whitman, “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer”
February 5 & 7: Feelings
Roethke, “Root Cellar”
Pound, “In a Station at the Metro”
Espada, “Latin Night at the Pawnshop”
Hopkins, “God’s Grandeur”
Cullen, “Yet Do I Marvel”
Dickinson, “After great pain, a formal feeling comes--”
E. Browning, “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways”
February 12 & 14: Reading Week--no classes
II. Poetic Crafts
February 19 & 21: Metaphors
Plath, “Metaphors”
Shakespeare, “My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun” Blake, “The Sick Rose” (compare the poem in Kelly with Blake’s original) Dickinson, “My Life had Stood—A Loaded Gun--”
February 26 & 28: Rhythms
Ginsberg, “A Supermarket in California”
Forche, “The Colonel”
Hughes, “Harlem”
Dylan, “The Times They Are A-Changin’”
Brooks, “We Real Cool”
Shakespeare, “That time of year thou mayst in me behold”
March 2 & 4: Audiences
Lowell, “For the Union Dead”
Hayes, “Talk”
Houseman, “To an Athlete Dying Young”
Donne, “Batter my heart, three-personed God; for you”
Stevenson, “The Victory”
March 9 & 11: Forms
Spencer, “One day I wrote her name upon the strand”
Bishop, “Sonnet”
Collins, “Sonnet”
Williams, “The Red Wheelbarrow”
cummings, “Buffalo Bill’s”
III. Poetic Gifts
March 16 & 18: Stories
Keats, “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer”
R. Browning, “My Last Duchess”
Hardy, “Channel Firing”
Frost, “The Road Not Taken”
Dickinson, “I heard a Fly buzz—when I died--”
Bishop, “The Fish”
March 23 & 25: Judgements
Ellis, “Or,”
Wordsworth, “The World is Too Much with Us”
Auden, “Musee des Beaux Arts” Wheatley, “To Maecenas”
March 30 and April 2: Surprises
cummings, “anyone lived in a pretty how town” Plath, “Morning Song”
Stevens, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”
Frost, “Design”
Olds, “Sex without Love”