CRITICAL ESSAYS: APPROVED POEMS
LIT 2030 -- Dr. Blanchard -- Fall Semester, 2010
Guidelines to Planning Your Three Critical Essays
Use the guidelines below to help you plan the subjects of your essays early in the semester,
before you write your first essay. The purpose of this planning is to encourage you to get a
broad view of the canon of poetry in English. Failure to adhere to these guidelines will
result in a three-point penalty applied to a student's final essay average.
1) At least one of your three essays must be from 1900 or earlier (groups A, C and E).
2) At least one of your three essays must be from after 1900 (groups B, D, and F).
3) Your first essay will be on a British poem (groups A and B) and your second will be on
an American poem (groups C and D).
4) Your fourth essay will be on a long poem (groups E and F)..
5) You must write your essays on the work of three different poets.
6) You cannot write your research paper on the work of a poet whose work has been the
subject of one of your critical essays.
A) British Masterworks - to 1900 (14)
 "Let Me Not to the Marriage of True Minds" by William Shakespeare (266)
 "The Canonization" by John Donne (296)
 "The Pulley" by George Herbert (379)
 "To His Coy Mistress" by Andrew Marvell (478)
 "The Garden of Love" by William Blake (744)
 "Ozymandias" by Percy Bysshe Shelley (870)
 "Ode on a Grecian Urn" by John Keats (938)
 "How Do I Love Thee?" by Elizabeth Barrett Browning (947)
 "In Memoriam #54" by Alfred, Lord Tennyson (999)
 "Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister" by Robert Browning (1010)
 "Dover Beach" by Matthew Arnold (1101)
 "The Darkling Thrush" by Thomas Hardy (1155)
 "Carrion Comfort" by Gerard Manley Hopkins (1169)
 "To an Athlete Dying Young" by A. E. Housman (1174)
Approved Poems (2)
B) British Masterworks - after 1900 (8)
 "Among School Children" by William Butler Yeats (1200)
 "Snake" by D. H. Lawrence (1286)
 "I Think Continually of Those Who Were Truly Great" by Stephen Spender (1505)
 "The Force That through the Green Fuse" by Dylan Thomas (1566)
 "Fern Hill" by Dylan Thomas (1571)
 "Church Going" by Philip Larkin (1649)
 "Pike" by Ted Hughes (1812)
 "Digging" by Seamus Heaney (1899)
C) American Masterworks - to 1900 (4)
 "Song of Myself #11" by Walt Whitman (1062)
 "A Narrow Fellow in the Grass" by Emily Dickinson (1125)
 "Richard Cory" by Edwin Arlington Robinson (1212)
 "Sympathy" by Paul Lawrence Dunbar (1224)
D) American Masterworks - after 1900 (23)
 "Birches" by Robert Frost (1233)
 "Chicago" by Carl Sandburg (1253)
 "Hurt Hawks" by Robinson Jeffers (1321)
 "Bells for John Whiteside's Daughter" by John Crowe Ransom (1367)
 "Euclid Alone" by Edna St. Vincent Millay (1383)
 "anyone lived in a pretty how town" by E. E. Cummings (1396)
 "Song for the Last Act" by Louise Bogan (1408)
 "The Weary Blues" by Langston Hughes (1429)
 "Yet Do I Marvel" by Countee Cullen (1446)
 "Theme for English B" by Langston Hughes (1434)
 "The Fury of Aerial Bombardment" by Richard Eberhart (1450)
 "September 1, 1939" by W. H. Auden
 "Elegy for Jane" by Theodore Roethke (1499)
 "One Art" by Elizabeth Bishop (1527)
 "Those Winter Sundays" by Robert Hayden (1533)
 "Love Calls Us to the Things of This World" by Richard Wilbur (1633)
 "To Aunt Rose" by Allen Ginsberg (1714)
 "The Day Lady Died" by Frank O'Hara (1728)
Approved Poems (3)
D) American Masterworks - after 1900 (cont.)
 "And One for My Dame" by Anne Sexton (1764)
 "Aunt Jennifer's Tigers" by Adrienne Rich (1791)
 "The Garden" by Louise Gluck (1931)
 "The Butcher's Wife" by Louise Erdrich (2005)
 "Persimmons" by Li-Young Lee (2011)
E) The Long Poem - to 1900 (6)
 "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" by Thomas Gray (669)
 "Ode: Intimations of Immortality" by William Wordsworth (796)
 "Dejection: An Ode" by Samuel Taylor Coleridge (828)
 "To a Skylark" by Percy Bysshe Shelley (876)
 "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" by Walt Whitman (1066)
 "Terence, This Is Stupid Stuff" by A. E. Housman (1177)
F) The Long Poem - after 1900 (4)
 "Home Burial" by Robert Frost (1228)
 "The Hollow Men" by T. S. Eliot (1356)
 "Ode to the Confederate Dead" by Allan Tate (1417)
 "Letters from a Father" by Mona Van Duyn (1629)