English and American Poetry

English and American Poetry

    This course is based on a graduate course I taught in America and in China. It provides a guide reading to 32 major English and American poets. It can be used by both advanced undergraduate and graduate students, and poetry-lovers for learning English and American poetry at great depth and with considerable breadth. It meets the 11-week graduate course schedule, with a unit of about three poets taught in one week. The first part of the book is introduction to the elements of poetry: voice, rhyme and meter, image, choice of words, sentence diction, structure, figure of speech, etc. The second part is on English poets, including Chaucer and Elizabethan poets Spenser and Shakespeare, Metaphysical poets such as Donne, Herbert, Marlowe, Romantic poets such as Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley and Keats, late Victorian poets Tennyson and Hardy, modernist British poets such as Yeats, Eliot, and Dylan Thomas. The third part is on American poets, including 19th century poets Whitman and Dickinson, early 20th century modernist poets Ezra Pound, Marianna Moore, William Carlos Williams, Elizabeth Bishop, Wallace Stevens, the traditionalist Robert Frost and underground imagery poet Robert Bly, Beat generation poet Allen Ginsberg, Confessional Poets Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath, and the recently deceased poet laureate W.S. Merwin. On the study of poets, there are usually three sections: the first section provides preliminary discussion questions on the poets, so the learners can have these questions on mind when watching the lecture, and this part is also the practice part of the lecture. The second section provides a general introduction and analysis of the poet’s life and work, the third section includes selective reading of their representative poems and detailed guide reading of each poem.

    In the study of each poet, besides the general introduction and analysis, there is usually a highlighted motif about that poet, as indexed below:

Section I

Introduction of the Course

Elements of Poetry

Section II

English Poets

Chaucer, Spenser and Shakespeare

1. Geoffrey Chaucer: Implicit Ironist and Gullible Appreciator of All Vitality

2. Edmund Spenser: Theoretical Asceticism and Sensuous Garden

3. William Shakespeare: Tragedy, Divided Mind and Negative Capability

Metaphysical Poets and John Milton

4. John Donne: The Inventor of Metaphysical Conceit

5. Andrew Marvell: The Mower as Death and Lover

6. Herbert: The Banquet of Sacred Devotion

7. John Milton: Satan as the Tragic Hero

Early Romantic Poets

8. William Blake: The Visionary Marriage of Heaven and Hell

9. Coleridge: Christian Redemption and Diabolical Poetics

10. William Wordsworth: Divinized and Fallen Nature

Later Romantic Poets

11. Percy Shelly: Rhapsody of Destructive-Creative Energy and Disillusionment with Rousseaurian Nature

12. John Keats: Priesthood of the Mortal World

13. George Gordon Byron: The Ingenious Ironist and the Postmodern Text of Don Juan

Late Victorian Poets: Tennyson, Browning and Hardy

14. Alfred Lord Tennyson: The Melancholy of Solipsistic Artist

15. Robert Browning: Dramatic Monologue and Atomized Self

16. Thomas Hardy: The Tragedy of Will-to-Live

Early 20th Century Modernists: Yeats, Eliot and Dylan Thomas

17. W.B. Yeats: From the Romantic Lyricist to the Occult Visionary

18. T.S. Eliot: Making Past Fragments into Modern Myth

19. Dylan Thomas: The Cosmic Significance of Human Anatomy

Section III

American Poets:

Whitman and Dickinson

1. Walt Whitman: The Great Unifier and Cosmic Self

2. Emily Dickinson: Anxiety, Nothingness and Being

Early 20th Century Modernists

3. Ezra Pound: Translator as Inventor of Modern Poetics

4. Marianna Moore: "Real Toad in an Imaginary Garden"

5. William Carlos Williams: From European Modernist Art to a New American Poetics

6. Elizabeth Bishop: The Juxtaposition of the Quotidian and the Catastrophic, the Precise and the Fantastic

Stevens, Robert Frost and Robert Bly

7. Wallace Stevens: The Necessary Angel of Imagination vs Zen Poetics

8. Robert Frost: Traditional Folklore and Hidden Vision of Darkness

9. Robert Bly: The Underground Imagery and Taoist Poetics

The Beat Generation, Confessional Poets and Merwin

10. Allen Ginsberg: Manifesto of the Beat Generation

11. Robert Lowell: Confessional Life study and Calvinist Outlook

12. Sylvia Plath: Affinity with Edward Munch's Symbolist Painting

13. W.S. Merwin: Taoist and Zen Buddhist Influence and “The Third Body” Sensibility

A Reader's Guide to the Poems by 32 Major English and American Poets

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What you will learn

• Learn English and American poetry on graduate level. It provides a guide reading to 32 major English and American poets.
• Learn elements of poetry: voice, sound, image, diction, structure, figure of speech, etc.
• Learn about English poets, including Chaucer and Elizabethan poets Spenser and Shakespeare, Metaphysical poets such as Donne, Herbert, Marlow, Romanti

Rating: 4.1

Level: All Levels

Duration: 16.5 hours

Instructor: Hong Zeng