Reading list for ENGL20382 Forms of Poetry

Forms of Poetry, 2013-14 (Semester 2)

Preliminary Reading List

 

 

 

The primary texts for this course will be made available on Blackboard, but it is a good idea to read as many as you can in advance of the course. There is also a brief list of introductory secondary reading below to get your started. This year the course will be divided into sections covering the sonnet, the ode, the elegy and the dramatic monologue. The primary texts for lectures will be as follows.

 

The Sonnet

 

The Renaissance Sonnet

The poets studied in this section of the course will include some or all of the following: Henry Howard, Sir Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, John Milton. It would be a good idea to read all of Shakespeare’s sonnets over the summer.

The Romantic Sonnet

The poets studied in this section of the course will include some or all of the following: Charlotte Smith, William Wordsworth, S. T. Coleridge, John Keats, P. B. Shelley, John Clare.

The Victorian Sonnet Sequence

Texts studied in this section of the course will include: Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Sonnets from the Portuguese, and Christina Rossetti, Mona Innominata.

 

The Ode

 

Set texts will include: John Dryden, ‘Anne Killigrew’; Anne Finch, ‘The Spleen’; Ben Jonson, ‘Ode to Himself’; Thomas Gray, ‘Progress of Poesy’; William Wordsworth, ‘Ode to Duty’; John Keats, ‘Ode to Psyche’; S. T. Coleridge, ‘Dejection: An Ode’.

 

The Elegy

 

Set texts will include: John Milton, ‘Lycidas’; Thomas Gray, ‘Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard’; P. B. Shelley, ‘Adonais’; Matthew Arnold, ‘Thyrsis’.

 

The Dramatic Monologue

 

Set texts will include: Alexander Pope, ‘Eloisa to Abelard’; Robert Browning, ‘My Last Duchess’, ‘Fra Lippo Lippi’ and ‘Andrea del Sarto’; Lord Tennyson, ‘Ulysses and Tithonus’; Amy Levy, ‘A Minor Poet’.

 

Some Recommended Secondary Reading

 

Stephen Burt and David Mikics (eds), The Art of the Sonnet (Harvard University Press, 2010)

A. D. Cousins and Peter Howarth (eds), The Cambridge Companion to the Sonnet (Cambridge University Press, 2011)

Paul Fry, The Poet’s Calling in the English Ode (Yale, 1980)

John Fuller, The Sonnet (Methuen, 1972)

John Jump, The Ode (Methuen, 1974)

David Kennedy, Elegy (Routledge, 2008)

Cornelia D. J. Pearsall, ‘The dramatic monologue’, in Joseph Bristow (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Victorian Poetry (Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 67-88

Peter M. Sacks, The English Elegy (Johns Hopkins, 1985)

Alan Sinfield, Dramatic Monologue (Methuen, 1977)