Poetry and Poetics
Autumn 2014
Claire Jarvis
cjarvis@stanford.edu
Margaret Jacks Hall, Room 309
MW 1:30-3:00
This course is meant to be a broad introduction to poems written in English. You
will learn how to identify elements of versification, such as rhythm and meter, and
certain common poetic forms. The course is also designed to give you a broad
historical introduction to poetry in modern English.
The readings for this course are organized into paired authors. The readings are not
meant to offer you a perfect whole of the kinds of poems written in English, but to
give you a window into a number of important poetic modes.
Students with documented disabilities: Students who have a disability that may
necessitate an academic accommodation or the use of auxiliary aids and services in a
class must initiate the request with the Disability Resource Center (DRC). The DRC will
evaluate the request with required documentation, recommend appropriate
accommodations, and prepare a verification letter dated in the current academic term in
which the request is being made. Please contact the DRC as soon as possible; timely
notice is needed to arrange for appropriate accommodations. The DRC is located at 563
Salvatierra Walk (723-1066; TDD 723-1067).
All students must observe the Honor Code:
http://www.stanford.edu/dept/vpsa/judicialaffairs/guiding/honorcode.htm
Class rules:
1) Laptops and mobile phones must be stowed during class.
2) Bring your text to each class.
3) Contribute to a civil classroom. When someone else is speaking, it is not a time
for you to formulate your response; instead, it is a time for you to listen carefully
and engage with the speaker.
Course Requirements:
Required: The Norton Anthology of Poetry, Eds. Ferguson, et al.
Recommended: The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics
Resource: http://www.oed.com.ezproxy.stanford.edu/
Evaluation:
 Participation and attendance (no unexcused absences) (20%)
 Any weekly short form assignments on meter (recitation, metrical worksheets,
imitations, etc.)
 Two short (5-6 page) paper assignments (20% each), the first due in Week 5, the
second in Week 9. Papers are due at the beginning of class on Wednesday.
 Final Exam (20%)
Schedule:
Week One: Origins of Modern English Poetry, Sonnets:
Monday: Brief lecture introduction. Comparison of Wyatt and Surrey, Petrarchan sonnets,
“The Long Love, that in My Thought Doth Harbor,” and “Love, that Doth Reign and
Live within My Thought,” p. 126 and 137.
Wednesday: Please read the section on versification, lxi-lxxx in your Norton, practice
of meter and scansion; William Shakespeare, from Sonnets, 257-269. Sir Thomas
Wyatt, “The Long Love, That in My Thought Doth Harbor,” “Whoso List to Hunt,” “My
Galley,” “They Flee from Me;” the case of Southwell’s “The Burning Babe.”
Week Two: The Sonnet, The metaphysicals
Monday: Wyatt and Shakespeare, contd., Sir Philip Sidney, all the poems from
Astrophil and Stella, 213-220; Edmund Spenser, from Amoretti, 190-193.
Wednesday: John Donne, 293-322, and Andrew Marvell, “To His Coy Mistress,” “The
Mower against Gardens,” “The Mower to the Glowworms,” “The Garden,” “An Horatian
Ode.”
Week Three: The Cavaliers and the Graveyard Poets
Monday: Ben Johnson, 323-333, and Robert Herrick, 354-363.
Wednesday: Thomas Gray, “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” 669, and
William Cowper, “The Castaway.”
Week Four: Romantic Poetry
Monday: William Blake, from Songs of Innocence and from Songs of Experience; John
Keats, “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer,” “When I have Fears,” “To Homer,”
“The Eve of St. Agnes,” La Belle Dame sans Merci,” “Ode to Psyche,” “Ode to a
Nightingale,” “Ode on Melancholy,” Ode on a Grecian Urn,” “To Autumn,” “Bright Star,”
“This Living Hand.”
(Christopher Smart)
Wednesday: William Wordsworth, “Lines,” “The Ruined Cottage,” “She Dwelt among
the Untrodden Ways,” “Three Years She Grew,” “It Is a Beauteous Evening,” “London,
1802,” “Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802,” “My Heart Leaps Up,”
“Ode,” “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud,” “She was a Phantom of Delight,” “The World is
Too Much with Us,” “The Solitary Reaper,” “Surprised by Joy,” “Mutability,” “Scorn not
the Sonnet;” Samuel Taylor Coleridge “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison,” “Kubla
Khan,” “Frost at Midnight,” “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” “Dejection.”
Week Five: Victorian Poetry
FIRST PAPER DUE ON WEDNESDAY
Monday: Alfred, Lord Tennyson “Mariana,” “The Kraken,” “The Lady of Shalott,”
“The Lotos-Eaters,” “Ulysses,” “Break, Break, Break,” from In Memoriam A.H.H., “The
Charge of the Light Brigade,” “Tithonus,” “‘Frater Ave atque Vale,’” “Crossing the Bar;”
Robert Browning “Porphyria’s Lover,” “My Last Duchess,” ““Childe Roland to the
Dark Tower Came,”” “Fra Lippo Lippi,” “Andrea del Sarto.”
(E. Brontë)
Wednesday: Christina Rossetti “Song,” “Remember,” “In an Artist’s Studio,” “Goblin
Market” (on courseworks); Matthew Arnold “Shakespeare,” “To Marguerite,” “The
Scholar-Gypsy,” “Thrysis,” “Dover Beach.”
Week Six: The American Renaissance
Monday: Edgar Allan Poe, “Sonnet—To Science,” “To Helen,” “The Raven,” “Eldorado,”
“Annabel Lee;” and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, from Evangeline, “The Jewish
Cemetery at Newport,” from The Song of Hiawatha.
(Emerson)
Wednesday: Emily Dickinson, 1110-1127 and Walt Whitman, 1060-1086.
Week Seven: The Great War and British Modernism
Monday: Edward Thomas “Adlestrop,” “The Owl,” “In Memoriam [Easter 1915],”
“The Rain,” “As the team’s head brass;” Wilfred Owen, “Anthem for Doomed Youth,”
“Dulce Et Decorum Est,” “Insensibility,” “Strange Meeting,” “Futility.” (T. S. Eliot)
Wednesday: William Butler Yeats, “The Lake Isle of Innisfree,” “When You Are Old,”
“The Wild Swans at Coole,” “Easter, 1916,” “The Second Coming,” “Sailing to
Byzantium,” “Leda and the Swan,” “Among School Children,” “Lapis Lazuli,” “The
Circus Animals’ Desertion,” “Under Ben Bulben;” W. H. Auden “Lullaby,” “Spain,
1937,” “As I walked Out One Evening,” “Musée des Beaux Arts,” “In Memory of W. B.
Yeats,” “September 1, 1939,” “In Praise of Limestone,” “The Shield of Achilles.”
Week Eight: American Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance
Monday: Wallace Stevens 1256-1268 and Robert Frost 1227-1244
Wednesday: Jean Toomer 1398-1400 (and courseworks) and Langston Hughes 14291435 (H. Crane)
Week Nine: Late Modernism SECOND PAPER DUE WEDNESDAY
Monday: Elizabeth Bishop 1515-1527 and Robert Lowell 1592-1605
Wednesday: Philip Larkin 1648-1658 and Frank O’Hara 1728-1730
Week Ten: Poetry Today
Rich, Braithwaite, Hill, Komunyakaa, Gluck, Ammons, Carson, Greenlaw
(Berryman)