SYLLABUS FOR E252 INTRODUCTION TO POETRY
CHAPMAN UNIVERSITY, FALL 2004
*2023 Note. Links have been removed from this archival version of the syllabus.
COURSE INFORMATION. English 252 Introduction to Poetry. Fall 2004 at Chapman University in Orange, California. Beckman Hall 205. Instructor: Alfred J. Drake, Ph.D. Office hours: Cyber Café in Beckman Hall, M/W 10:00 – 11:00 a.m. Email: e252_at_ajdrake.com.
REQUIRED TEXTS AT CHAPMAN UNIVERSITY BOOKSTORE
Ferguson, Margaret et al. The Norton Anthology of Poetry. 4th ed. New York: Norton, 1996. ISBN 0393968200.
Ginsberg, Allen. Howl and Other Poems. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1991. ISBN 0872860175.
Hollander, John. Rhyme’s Reason. 3rd ed. New Haven: Yale UP, 2001. ISBN 0300088329.
Shakespeare. Macbeth. New York: Penguin, 2000. ISBN 0140714782.
COURSE RATIONALE AND ACTIVITIES
FOCUS AND OBJECTIVES. We will study a variety of poetic forms from the Renaissance through the twentieth century, with reference as needed to poetic theory and prosody. The course features both British and American poets. Poetry, we might say, is where language goes to be most fully itself, and least referential with respect to the world beyond it. As Hannah Arendt observes in The Human Condition, “Poetry, whose material is language, is perhaps the most human and least worldly of the arts, the one in which the end product remains closest to the thought that inspired it.” This genre, then, demands a certain kind of attentiveness to its status as highly compressed language and to its multiplicity of forms, both simple and complex.
ACTIVITIES. In class, there will be a mix of lectures, whole-class and smaller-group discussion, occasional quizzes, an essay, and a final exam. I encourage questions and comments—class sessions improve when students take an active part. Outside class, do the assigned readings before the relevant discussion dates, and start planning and drafting your essay early. In literary studies, the aim is to read and discuss actively and thereby to develop your own voice in response to the texts you read. Insightful interpretation and the ability to make compelling connections are central goals. The essay, discussions, and journal-keeping should combine to help you work towards these goals.
HOW YOUR PERFORMANCE WILL BE EVALUATED
COURSE POLICIES. Please review the course policies page early in the semester since it addresses matters such as attendance, incompletes and withdrawal, late or missing work, and academic integrity.
ESSAY REQUIREMENT. Please view instructions. Also see advance draft comments available on this site. Paper 1 due Friday of Week 4 (09/24). 15% of course grade. Paper 2 due Monday of Week 10 (11/01). 25% of course grade. Paper 3 due on day of final exam. 35% of course grade.
FINAL EXAM REQUIREMENT. 25% of course grade; view suggestions on how to prepare.
SCHEDULE: WORKS DISCUSSED ON DATES INDICATED
WEEK 01
M. 08/30. Course Introduction.
W. 09/01. Thomas Wyatt. (113 ff.) “The Long Love”; “Whoso List to Hunt”; “Madam, Withouten Many Words”; “They Flee from Me”; “Mine Own John Poins.”
F. 09/03. Shakespeare. (234 ff) Sonnets 18, 30, 55, 73, 94, 116, 129, 130, 138, 146.
WEEK 02
M. 09/06. Labor Day Holiday.
W. 09/08. Shakespeare. Macbeth. Director Polanski, 50 of 139 mins.
F. 09/10. Shakespeare. Macbeth. Discussion of first two acts. *Separate Text.
WEEK 03
M. 09/13. Shakespeare. Macbeth. Director Polanski, 50 of 139 mins.
W. 09/15. Shakespeare. Macbeth. Director Polanski, 50 of 139 mins.
F. 09/17. Shakespeare. Macbeth. Discussion of last three acts.
WEEK 04
M. 09/20. John Donne. (263 ff) “The Good Morrow”; “Song — Go and Catch a Falling Star”; “The Canonization”; “A Nocturnal upon St. Lucy’s Day.”
W. 09/22. John Donne. (263 ff) “A Valediction Forbidding Mourning”; “The Ecstasy”; “The Flea”; “Satire III”; “Good Friday, 1613”; Holy Sonnets.
F. 09/24. John Milton. (354 ff) Lycidas; “L’Allegro”/”Il Penseroso”; “Methought I Saw…” Paper 1.
WEEK 05
M. 09/27. John Milton. (380 ff) Paradise Lost, Book 1 Invocation and Book 9.
W. 09/29. John Dryden and Alexander Pope. Dryden (456 ff): “A Song for St. Cecilia’s Day.” Pope (539 ff): The Rape of the Lock.
F. 10/01. Alexander Pope. (539 ff) The Rape of the Lock.
WEEK 06
M. 10/04. William Blake. (670 ff) Songs of Innocence.
W. 10/06. William Blake. (678 ff) Songs of Experience.
F. 10/08. William Wordsworth. (699 ff) “She Dwelt Among the Untrodden Ways”; “Three Years She Grew”; “A Slumber did My Spirit Seal”; “I Wandered Lonely As a Cloud”; “The Solitary Reaper.”
WEEK 07
M. 10/11. William Wordsworth. (699 ff) “Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey.”
W. 10/13. S. T. Coleridge. (744 ff) “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.”
F. 10/15. P. B. Shelley. (801 ff) “Ode to the West Wind”; “To a Skylark.”
WEEK 08
M. 10/18. John Keats. (842 ff) “La Belle Dame Sans Merci”; “Ode on a Grecian Urn.”
W. 10/20. Alfred Tennyson. (888 ff) “The Lady of Shalott”; “The Lotos-Eaters”; “Ulysses.”
F. 10/22. No class — I’ll be in Tacoma, Washington for a conference.
WEEK 09
M. 10/25. D. G. Rossetti, Lewis Carroll, and A. C. Swinburne. Rossetti: (1000 ff) “The Blessed Damozel.” Carroll (1032 ff): “Jabberwocky.” Swinburne (1045 ff): “The Garden of Proserpine.”
W. 10/27. G. M. Hopkins. (1062 ff) “God’s Grandeur”; “The Windhover”; “Pied Beauty”; “Felix Randal”; “Spring and Fall”; “As Kingfishers Catch Fire”; “Carrion Comfort”; “No Worst, There is None”; “I Wake and Feel the Fell of Dark, Not Day”; “My Own Heart…”; “That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire…”; “Thou Art Indeed Just, Lord….”
F. 10/29. Walt Whitman. (961 ff) Song of Myself 1, 6, 11, 24, 52, “Out of the Cradle…”; “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d”; “To a Locomotive in Winter.”
WEEK 10
M. 11/01. Emily Dickinson and Edgar Allen Poe. Dickinson (1012 ff): 254, 258, 280, 435, 465, 505, 712, 754, 1129. Poe (881 ff): “The Raven.” Paper 2 due.
W. 11/03. A. E. Housman. (1068 ff) “Loveliest of Trees, the Cherry Now”; “To an Athlete Dying Young”; “On Wenlock Edge”; “Terence, This Is Stupid Stuff”; “Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries.”
F. 11/05. W. B. Yeats. (1084 ff) “The Lake Isle of Innisfree”; “The Second Coming”; “Sailing to Byzantium”; “Leda and the Swan”; “Byzantium”; “Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop”; “Among School Children”; “Circus Animals’ Desertion”; “Under Ben Bulben.”
WEEK 11
M. 11/08. Robert Frost. (1121 ff) “Mending Wall”; “The Road Not Taken”; “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”; “Acquainted with the Night”; “West-Running Brook, “Design”; “Never Again Would Birds’ Song Be the Same”; “The Gift Outright.”
W. 11/10. Carl Sandburg, Amy Lowell, and Wallace Stevens. Sandburg (1146 ff): “Chicago”; “Grass.” Lowell (1140 ff): “Patterns.” Stevens (1150 ff): “The Snow Man”; “The Emperor of Ice-Cream”; “Anecdote of the Jar”; “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”; “The Idea of Order at Key West.”
F. 11/12. William Carlos Williams and Ezra Pound. Williams (1167 ff): “This is Just to Say”; “Poem”; “The Yachts”; “A Sort of a Song”; from “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower.” Pound (1187 ff): “The Seafarer”; “In a Station of the Metro”; “The River-Merchant’s Wife: a Letter”; from Cantos, 1.
WEEK 12
M. 11/15. Hilda Doolittle (“H.D.”) and Marianne Moore. Doolittle (1202 ff): “Sea Rose”; “Sea Violet”; “Helen”; “Wine Bowl.” Moore (1218 ff): “Poetry”; “The Steeple-Jack”; “The Fish, “A Grave.”
W. 11/17. T. S. Eliot. (1230 ff) “J. Alfred Prufrock”; The Waste Land.
F. 11/19. T. S. Eliot. (1236 ff) The Waste Land.
WEEK 13
M. 11/22. Archibald MacLeish and E. E. Cummings. MacLeish (1270 ff): “Ars Poetica”; “You, Andrew Marvell”; “The Snowflake….” Cummings (1282 ff): “in Just-”; “the Cambridge ladies…”; “Spring is like a perhaps hand”; “next to of course god america i”; “i sing of Olaf glad and big”; “somewhere I have never travelled,gladly beyond”; “anyone lived in a pretty how town”; “my father moved through dooms of love.”
W. 11/24. W. H. Auden. (1360 ff) “As I Walked Out One Evening”; “Spain 1937”; “Musée des Beaux Arts”; “The Shield of Achilles.”
F. 11/26. Thanksgiving holiday.
WEEK 14
M. 11/29. Visiting poet one meeting this week or next.
W. 12/01. Allen Ginsberg. Howl. *Separate Text.
F. 12/03. Allen Ginsberg. Howl.
WEEK 15
M. 12/06. Theodore Roethke. (1385 ff) “Root Cellar”; “My Papa’s Waltz”; “The Lost Son”; “Elegy for Jane”; “The Waking”; “I Knew a Woman”; “Wish for a Young Wife.”
W. 12/08. Dylan Thomas. (1460 ff) “The Force That Through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower”; “After the Funeral”; “A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London”; “The Conversation of Prayer”; “Fern Hill”; “In My Craft or Sullen Art”; “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night.”
F. 12/10. Sylvia Plath. (1728 ff) “The Colossus”; “Morning Song”; “Tulips”; “Elm”; “Daddy”; “Ariel”; “Lady Lazarus”; “Black Rook in Rainy Weather.”
FINALS WEEK
Exam date Monday 12/13. Paper 3 due.