Poetry: A Basic Course P. Morrison
Tentative Syllabus X62147
Rabb 233
Office Hours M,W 11-12:30
Course Objective: To introduce students to the close and careful reading of poetry.
January 12 Introduction
14 Donne, “The Canonization “
15 “The Canonization,” “A Valediction Forbidding Mourning”
21 as above
22 Pope, “An Essay on Criticism,” Part II
26 as above
28 MacLeish, “Ars Poetica”
29 MacLeish and Pope
February 2 Daniel, Sonnet 6 (“Fair is my love”), Shakespeare, Sonnet 130 (“My
mistress’ eyes”)
4 Browning, “My Last Duchess”
5 Tennyson, “Ulysses”
9 as above
11 Wordsworth, “Ode: Intimations of Immortality”
12 as above
23 Coleridge, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”
first paper due
25 Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn”
26 Stevens, “Anecdote of the Jar”
March 2 as above
4 Yeats, “The Second Coming,” “Leda and the Swan”
Millay, “I Dreamed I Moved among the Elysian Fields”
5 as above
9 William Carlos Williams, “This Is Just to Say,” “The Red
Wheelbarrow,” Pound, “In a Station of the Metro”
11 as above
12 Frost, “The Road Not Taken”
16 Roethke, “My Papa’s Waltz”
18 Frost and Roethke
19 Langston Hughes, “Theme for English B”
23 Ishmael Reed, “Beware: Do Not Read This Poem”
25 Blake, “The Tyger”
26 cummings, “next to of course god america i”
30 Auden, “Musee des Beaux Arts”
April 1 in-class test
2 Moore, “Poetry”
13 Yeats, “Sailing to Byzantium”
15 as above (Auden, Moore, Yeats)
16 Stevens, “Of Modern Poetry”
20 Yeats, “Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop,” “The Circus Animals’
Desertion”
22 Plath, “Daddy”
23 as above
27 review; second paper due
If you are a student with a documented disability on record here at Brandeis and wish to have a reasonable accommodation made for you, please speak to me as soon as possible.
There is no text for this course. All poems will be photographed and distributed in class.
Course requirements:
Short paper (5-7 pages) 25%
Longer paper (10-12 pages) 40%
In-class test 20 %
Attendance and participation 15%