Preparatory Reading List for ENGL 20381: Forms of Poetry
Semester 1, 2014-15
Course Description
The course aims to enable students to read poetry with confidence, pleasure and understanding. Lectures will introduce students to a range of important poetic texts representing a broad spectrum of poetic genres from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Seminars will focus on developing close reading skills and understanding the relationship between theme and form. This year the course will be divided into units dealing with sonnets, odes, elegies, and dramatic monologues.
The set text for this course is a handbook which includes all the primary texts. This handbook will be available on Blackboard.
However, we strongly encourage you to start reading the key primary texts before the beginning of term. Most of the poems listed below are available in a wide range of anthologies as well as collections of works by individual poets. They are also available online, and on the Literature Online database which you can access by way of the university library web page: from the main page, go to ‘Electronic Resources’ and thence to ‘Databases’.
Sonnets
Sir Thomas Wyatt, ‘Whoso list to hunt, I know where is an hind’
Edmund Spenser, from Amoretti, no. 30 (‘My love is lyke to yse, and I to fyre’) and no. 75 (‘One day I wrote her name upon the strand’)
Sir Philip Sidney, from Astrophil and Stella, no. 1 (‘Loving in truth, and fain in verse my love to show’)
William Shakespeare, from Sonnets, no. 29 (‘When, in disgrace with Fortune and men’s eyes’), 129 (‘Th’expense of spirit in a world of shame’), 130 (‘My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun’), 138 (‘When my love swears that she is made of truth’), and 147 (‘My love is as a fever, longing still’)
John Donne, from Holy Sonnets, no. 5 (‘I am a little world made cunningly’), 10 (‘Death, be not proud’), 14 (‘Batter my heart, three-personed God’), and 19 (‘Oh, to vex me, contraries meet in one’)
George Herbert, ‘Prayer (I)’
John Milton, ‘Methought I saw my late espoused saint’ and ‘When I consider how my light is spent’
Charlotte Smith, Elegiac Sonnets
William Wordsworth, ‘Scorn not the Sonnet’
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ‘Dear native brook! Wild streamlet of the West!’
John Keats, ‘If by dull rhymes our English must be chain’d’
Percy Bysshe Shelley, ‘Ozymandias’
John Clare, ‘Ere I had known the world and understood’
Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Sonnets from the Portuguese
Christina Rossetti, Monna Innominata
Odes
John Dryden, ‘Alexander’s Feast’
William Collins, ‘Ode on the Poetical Character’
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ‘Dejection: an Ode’
Lord Byron, ‘Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte’
Elegies
John Milton, ‘Lycidas’
Thomas Gray, ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’
Percy Shelley, ‘Adonais’
Matthew Arnold, ‘Thyrsis’
Dramatic Monologues
Alexander Pope, ‘Eloisa to Abelard’
Robert Browning, ‘My Last Duchess’, ‘Fra Lippo Lippi’, ‘Andrea del Sarto’
Alfred Lord Tennyson, ‘Tithonus’, ‘Ulysses’
Amy Levy, ‘A Minor Poet’
T. S. Eliot, ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’
Sylvia Plath, ‘Daddy’, ‘Lady Lazarus’
Sam Jones l English Literature, American Studies and Creative Writing Programmes Administrator|
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