107 Morrison Hall office phone: Office hours: WF 9-10, F 2-3 and by appointment. Literary Form and History: Poetry

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1 English Professor Mark C. Long Spring Semester 2009 Department of English W 12-1: Parker Hall 107 Morrison Hall office phone: mlong@keene.edu Office hours: W 9-10, 2-3 and by appointment Literary orm and History: Poetry I've been writing a sentence, with all the art I can muster. Here it is: a work of art is important only as evidence, in its structure, of a new world which it has been created to affirm. William Carlos Williams, Against the Weather Course Description and Objectives English 300 the second course in the introductory sequence required for English majors is designed to help students come to terms with literary history as an ongoing practice and to develop an awareness of the historical conditions for literary production. The course continues developing the intellectual habits and interpretive skills, as well as the critical awareness and confidence of mind students need to get the most out of upper-level courses in the major. In addition to becoming familiar with the tradition of poems written in English from the thirteenth-century to the present, students in this section of English 300 will read and discuss statements about poetry by poets. Reading these statements from Sappho to Sir Phillip Sydney, William Wordsworth to Walt Whitman, Theodore Roethke to Adrienne Rich will illuminate how changes in literary form (as well as ideas about literary form) offer insight into the history of literary genres. Required Texts ergeson, Salter and Stallworthy, eds. Norton Anthology of Poetry. Shorter ifth ed. Norton; Brown, inch, and Kumin, eds. Lofty Designs: Poets and Poetics. U Arkansas P; Pinsky. The Sounds of Poetry. arrar. Recommended Reference Sources When you have questions about citation please consult Joseph Gibaldi, ed., MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers. (A useful book for all English majors to have; there are also copies on the shelf of the Mason library.) Specific questions about using the MLA Style can be answered at If you need the definitions or the etymology of a particular word, or you would like to cite a definition or particular usage, consult The Oxford English Dictionary. This multi-volume edition is available in the reference section at the Mason Library; or, you can access the dictionary through the Mason Library online databases. Whenever you are introduced to a new author or literary movement, and you are inclined to do some background reading, I recommend the concise and readable entries in the multi-volume (over 350 volumes to date) Dictionary of Literary Biography available in the reference section of the Mason Library. The call number is PN451.D52 for hard copies; or you can access the DLB at Literary Criticism Online.

2 Recommended Electronic Resources Whenever you are introduced to an unfamiliar text, author or literary movement and you are interested in gathering more information about the text, context and criticism you should consult a reliable critical overview. There are thousands of monographs, scholarly journals and reference texts in the library. There are also a range of e-sources some more authoritative than others. Remember to make sure you know exactly where the information is coming from: for e-sources include peer-reviewed journals, web sites on particular literary sources, blogs and wikis, class notes, and so on. The Mason Library Databases system is subdivided into disciplinespecific databases and includes portals to the ongoing scholarly conversation about literature. You ll find the following sources at Cambridge History of English and American Literature Overview essays ranging from poetry, fiction, drama and essays to history, theology and political writing. 303 chapters and 11,000 pages on a wide selection of writing on orators, humorists, poets, newspaper columnists, religious leaders, economists, Native Americans, song writers, and even non-english writing, such as Yiddish and Creole. Twayne's US Authors Series Online Twayne's United States Authors Series Online provides concise book-length overviews of an author s life and work. Each work includes a preface to the online edition, a chronology, a list of primary works by the author, a bibliography and citation information. or example, if you are interested in the life and work of the American poet William Carlos Williams, you will find the online version of Thomas R. Whitaker s excellent overview William Carlos Williams first published in print in 1968 by Twayne. Literary Criticism Online Includes The Dictionary of Literary Biography where you will find useful and reliable overviews ( ,000 word) of the life, work and critical reception of literary authors. The Dictionary series offers over three hundred volumes organized by topic and period. The hardbound volumes are available in the reference section of the Mason Library (as explained in the Recommended Resources list above) or you can read entries on your desktop. Course Expectations and Requirements 1) Regular attendance is expected and required. Absences have a devastating effect on the quality of your thinking and writing as well as on the educational experience of other students in the course. If you must miss a class, please let me know in advance. Two unexcused absences will lower your final grade. If you miss four or more classes you will be asked to withdraw from the course. 2) Pre-class preparation and in-class participation is expected and required. You are expected to read carefully and thoughtfully and to be prepared to discuss what you have read in class. I encourage you to speak with me if you are having difficulties preparing for class, or if you would like to work more closely with me to become a more active participant in our work together.

3 3) Required written work will include a sequence of shorter essays and a longer end-of-thesemester writing project. You can expect to be writing during every week of the semester. All written work must be typed, appropriately documented and submitted at the beginning of class on the due date. The MLA Handbook will serve as a common reference source. Student Learning Outcomes As we proceed through the semester, you will be expected to demonstrate that you can: understand genre as an historical phenomenon; understand literary production and reception in the context of historical, social, religious, economic, biographical and/or textual contexts; gain some sense of the history of poetry from the Classical period to the present; understand the textual and rhetorical strategies of lyric, narrative and dramatic forms; improve your critical vocabulary; formulate and refine critical questions in discussion; better understand how poetics can help us understand forms of literature and how hermeneutics can help us understand the significance of literature; write evidence-based essays that effectively and honestly incorporate sources; write with an ability to use titles, epigraphs, introductions, transitions, paragraph development, and conclusions; write with correctness and style; use MLA in-text citation and a works cited page. Evaluation and Grading There are 400 possible points in the course. The final course grade will be determined by attendance and participation, including group work (100); reading the required material; (100); the sequence of shorter essays (100); and the final writing project (100). If you are a student with a disability The Office of Disability Services (ODS), Elliot Hall, , is available to discuss eligibility requirements and appropriate academic accommodations that you may require as a student with a disability. So all arrangements can be made, requests for academic accommodations need to be completed during the first two weeks of the semester. You are responsible for making an appointment with ODS for disability verification and determination of reasonable academic accommodations. Emergency Operations In the event the College closes for a major disaster, students are responsible for regularly checking their , voice mails, and Blackboard for information on alternative course delivery procedures and course work submission. Students will be responsible for completing their assignments and ensuring that they have completed all of the core requirements for their courses before they will receive a final grade for the course.

4 English : Provisional Course Schedule The course schedule lists the readings for each class meeting. Please read the poems with an eye (and ear) for how each poem engages other poems in the tradition we are studying. Bear in mind that our anthology (any anthology) is be definition selective; therefore I encourage you to read beyond the representative poems in the anthology, or to talk with me when you find a poet whose poems you are inclined to keep reading. As a supplement to your reading in the anthology, a sequence of writing assignments and writing workshops will deepen your understanding of the tradition we are studying as well as enhance your experiences as a reader. Week 1 Traditions and Literary orm W Jan 21 Matthew Arnold, Dover Beach (999) and Anthony Hecht, The Dover Bitch (handout); Sherman Alexie, Defending Walt Whitman (handout); Billy Collins, Introduction to Poetry (handout); Emily Dickinson, Publication is the Auction (#709, pg. 1020); Wallace Stevens, A High-toned Old Christian Woman (handout); Walcott, A ar Cry from Africa (1132); Heaney, Digging (1179); Hacker, Untoward Occurrence at Embassy Poetry Reading (handout) Jan 23 John Milton, from Paradise Lost, ; William Wordsworth, The Prelude, ; William Blake, To the Evening Star, 440; Wallace Stevens, Sunday Morning, Robert rost, Directive, Essay #1 Due Week 2 Listening and Making W Jan 28 Robert Pinsky, The Sounds of Poetry: A Brief Guide Jan 30 Ezra Pound, A ew Don t By an Imagiste (1913), , and In a Station of the Metro (1913), 876; William Carlos Williams, from A Poem as a ield of Action (1948), , and The Sound of Waves (handout); Robert rost, from Conversations on the Craft of Poetry with Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren (1961), , and The Wood-Pile ; Theodore Roethke, from Some Remarks on Rhythm (1965), , and I Knew a Woman, ; Charles Olson, from Projective Verse (1966), ; Robert Hass, from Listening and Making (1984) and Meditation at Lagunitas, Essay #2 Due Week 3 Categories and Contexts W eb 4 Epic poems: Edmund Spenser, from The aerie Queen, ; John Milton, from Paradise Lost, ; Dramatic poems: Geoffrey Chaucer, from The Canterbury Tales, 15 63; Alfred Lord Tennyson, Ulysses, ; Robert Browning, My Last Duchess, ; John Berryman, Homage to Mistress Bradstreet, ; Judith Wright, Eve to Her Daughters, Revised essay on sound due. eb 6 Lyric poems: Anonymous Lyrics of the Thirteenth and ourteenth Centuries, 14 15; Anonymous Lyrics of the ifteenth Century, 72 73; John Donne, The Good Morrow, 191, and The Sun Rising, 193; Andrew Marvell, To His Coy Mistress, ; Walt Whitman, When I heard the Learn d Astronomer, 689; Emily Dickinson, aith is a fine invention, 721, and Tell all the truth but tell it slant 731; Gerard Manley Hopkins, As Kingfisher s Catch ire, Dragonflies Draw lame, 756; William Butler Yeats, Leda and the Swan, 776

5 Week 4 Categories and Contexts (continued) W eb 11 Lyric poems (continued): Robert rost, The Oven Bird, ; Wallace Stevens, The Snow Man and The Emperor of Ice Cream, 816; William Carlos Williams, The Red Wheelbarrow, , and This is Just to Say, 830; D. H. Lawrence, Snake, ; Robinson Jeffers, Shine, Perishing Republic, 854; E. E. Cummings, next to of course god america I, 894, and somewhere I have never travelled,gladly beyond, 895; Louise Bogan, Night, 903; Langston Hughes, Harlem, 915; Elizabeth Bishop, The ish, ; ; Robert Lowell, Mr. Edwards and the Spider, , or the Union Dead, ; Amy Clampitt, Beach Glass, ; Richard Wilbur, Love Calls Us to the Things of This World, ; Denise Levertov, O Taste and See, ; A. R. Ammons, Corson s Inlet, ; W. S. Merwin, Losing a Language, 1087 eb 13 Louise Bogan, from The Pleasures of ormal Poetry (1953), ; Marilyn Nelson, from Owning the Masters (1999), ; John Hollander, Rhyme s Reason (handout) 1-13; Heather McHugh, from Moving Means, Meaning Moves (1993), ; Alexander Pope, Sound and Sense (handout) and The Rape of the Lock (Canto 1), ; Coleridge, Metrical eet (handout); John Dryden, To the Memory of Mr. Oldham, 309; William Blake, The Tyger, , and London, 448; William Wordsworth, Surprised by Joy, 485; Thomas Hardy, The Darkling Thrush, 746; Robert rost, Mending Wall, ; Amy Clampitt, Syrinx, ; Gwendolyn Brooks, We Real Cool, 999; William Butler Yeats, The Lake Isle of Innisfree ; Dylan Thomas, ern Hill, ; Marianne Moore, The ish, , and Poetry, Due Essay #2 Week 5 The Sonnet W eb 18 Michael Drayton, To the Reader of these Sonnets, 166; William Wordsworth, Scorn not the Sonnet, 486; John Keats, On the Sonnet, 579; Read the sonnets by Edmund Spenser, from Amoretti, ; the sonnets by Sir Philip Sidney, from Astrophil and Stella, ; and the sonnets by William Shakespeare, eb 20 John Milton When I Consider How My Light Is Spent, 274; William Wordsworth, The World is Too Much with Us, 484; John Keats, On irst Looking into Chapman's Homer, 567; Elizabeth Barrett Browning, from Sonnets from the Portuguese, ; Walt Whitman, A Noiseless Patient spider, 702; selected sonnets by E. E. Cummings next to of course god america i 894 and selected Cummings sonnets (handout); William Carlos Williams, The Sound of Waves (handout); Robert rost, Design, 805; Robert Hayden, Those Winter Sundays, 969. Due: Essay #3 Week 6 A Brief Chronology: Anglo-Saxon and Medieval Poetry: W eb 25 No class eb 27 Caedmon s Hymn, 1Geoffrey Chaucer, The General Prologue to The Canterbury Tales, 15 35; William Langland, Piers Plowman, 65 68

6 Week 7 A Brief Chronology: Poetry in the Renaissance W Mar 4 Christopher Marlowe, The Passionate Shepherd to His Love, 168; Ben Jonson, On My irst Daughter and On My irst Son ; Metaphysical Poetry: John Donne, The Canonization, 194, A Valediction orbidding Mourning, 198, and The lea, 202; Robert Herrick, Delight in Disorder, 226; George Herbert, The Altar, 235, Easter Wings, 236, The lower, ; Mar 6 Poetry in the Seventeenth Century: Anne Bradstreet, The Prologue, 282, To my Dear and Loving husband, 285, The Author to Her Book, 285, and Here ollow Some Verses upon the Burning of Our House July 10 th, 1666, 287; Edward Taylor, Meditation 8 ( I keeneing through astronomy divine, 315, and Upon a Spider Catching a ly, ; Phyllis Wheatley, On Being Brought from Africa to America, 438; Richard Lovelace, The Grasshopper, ; Andrew Marvell, To His Coy Mistress, , The Definition of Love, , The Mower against Gardens, ; The Garden, Due: Essay #4 Week 8 A Brief Chronology: Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Poetry W Mar 11 Jonathan Swift, A Description of a City Shower, ; Alexander Pope, The Rape of the Lock, ; Samuel Johnson, The Vanity of Human wishes, ; Thomas Gray, Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, ; Oliver Goldsmith, The Deserted Village, ; The Romantic Poem: William Blake, read all selections from Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience, ; William Wordsworth, Lines Composed a ew Miles above Tintern Abbey, ; Resolution and Independence, , I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud, 483; Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Kubla Khan, , rost at Midnight, ; George Gordon, Lord Byron, She Walks in Beauty, , and When we Two Parted, ; Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Cloud, , To a Skylark, ; John Clare, arewell, 565, I Am, 566; John Keats, La Belle Dame sans Merci, , To Autumn, 587; Mar 13 Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Snow-Storm, ; Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Cross of Snow, ; Oliver Wendell Holmes, The Chambered Nautilus, ; Edgar Allen Poe, Annabel Lee, ; Walt Whitman, Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking, ; Emily Dickinson, I m nobody! Who are You? 722, The Soul selects her own Society, 725, and A narrow ellow in the Grass, 730. Due: Essay #5 Week 9 Mar 16 20: No classes, spring break Week 10 Elegies and Odes W Mar 25 The Elegiac Tradition: John Milton, L'Allegro, , Il Penseroso, , and Lycidas, ; W. H. Dryden, To the Memory of Mr. Oldham, 309; Thomas Gray, Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, ; William Wordsworth, Three Years She Grew, 471; Percy Bysshe Shelley, Adonis, ; Walt Whitman, When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed, ; W. H. Auden, In Memory of W. B. Yeats, ; John Berryman, Dream Song 324: En Elegy for W. C. W., The Lovely Man, 979; Theodore Roethke, Elegy for Jane, 955

7 Week 10 Elegies and Odes (continued) Mar 27 The Ode: Thomas Gray, Ode (On the Death of a avorite Cat, Drown in a Tub of Goldfishes, 409; William Wordsworth, Ode: Intimations of Immortality, ; Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Dejection: An Ode, ;Percy Byssshe Shelley, Ode to the West Wind, ; John Keats, Ode to a Nightingale, , Ode to Melancholy, , Ode on a Grecian Urn, ; Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ode, Week 11 Hymns, Ballads, Spirituals W Apr 1 Hymns: Caedmon s Hymn, 1; William Cowper, from Olney Hymns, 431; from The Massachusetts Bay Psalm Book, Psalm 58, 250; Issac Watts, Our God, Our Help, 353; William Blake, And Did Those eet, 450; Percy Bysshe Shelley, Hymn to Intellectual Beauty, ; Ralph Waldo Emerson, Concord Hymn, ; Julia Warde Howe, Battle Hymn of the Republic, 673; Spirituals: God Down, Moses, 676, Ezekiel Saw the Wheel, 677; Emily Dickinson, There s a certain Slant of Light, 723, Tell all the Truth but tell it slant, 731. Due: a 1-page, single-spaced essay proposal Mar 3 The Ballad: Anne Askew, The Ballad Which Anne Askewe Made and Sand When She Was in Newgate, 110; read all the Early Modern Ballads, 86 98; Alfred Lord Tennyson, Mariana, ; William Wordsworth, I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud, 483; Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, ; Emily Dickinson, Because I Could not stop for Death, 726; A. E. Housman, Is My Team Ploughing, ; William Butler Yeats, Under Ben Bullben, ; Robert rost, Provide, Provide, 805; W. H. Auden, As I Walked Out One Evening, 937; Popular Ballads of the Twentieth Century, Pete Seeger, Where Have All the lowers Gone, 1152, Bob Dylan, Boots of Spanish Leather, 1153 Week 12 Epics, Long poems, The Poetic Sequence, The Book-Length Poem W Apr 8 The Seafarer, 11 14; Ezra Pound, from The Cantos, ; Spencer The airy Queen, ; John Milton, Paradise Lost, ; William Wordsworth, The Prelude, ; Walt Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, from The Song of Hiawatha and Evangeline, ; Whitman, Song of Myself, Apr 10 T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land, ; Hart Crane, The Bridge (handout); John Berryman, Homage to Mistress Bradstreet and The Dream Songs, ; William Carlos Williams, Paterson (handout); Allen Ginsberg, from Howl, ; A.R. Ammons, Tape for the Turn of the Year and Garbage (handouts), Adrienne Rich, Atlas for a Difficult World (handout); Derek Walcott, from Omeros, ; Gary Snyder, Mountains and Rivers Without End (handout) Week 13 A Miscellany of Inherited orms W Apr 15 Edmund Spenser, Epithalamion, ; Katherine Philips, Epitaph, 312; Epigrams, Samuel Johnson, The Vanity of Human Wishes, ; Emerson, Intellect, 593; Emily Dickinson, ame is a bee, 732; N. Scott Momaday, The Gift and Two igures, Due: a 1-page research installment with a description of what you have accomplished in the secondary readings and what you plan to do in the coming weeks, and an annotated list of secondary sources

8 Week 13 A Miscellany of Inherited orms (continued) Apr 17 The Villanelle, Theodore Roethke, The Waking, 956; Elizabeth Bishop, One Art, 966; Dylan Thams, Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night, 991; Paul Muldoon, Milkweed and Monarch, 1226; Rita Dove Parsley, 1231 ; The Sestina, Sir Phillip Sydney, Ye Goatherd Gods, ; Elizabeth Bishop, Sestina, 963; Anthony Hecht, The Book of Yolek, 1042; John Ashbery, The Painter, 1080 Week 14 Continuities and Discontinuities W Apr 22 Presentations on Literary orm and History: selected poetry to be announced Apr 24 Presentations on Literary orm and History: selected poetry to be announced Week 15 Continuities and Discontinuities W Apr 29: Presentations on Literary orm and History: selected poetry to be announced. Due: a revised proposal. Please include a working title, a one-sentence summary of your argument, and a one-paragraph précis of your essay May 1 Presentations on Literary orm and History: selected poetry to be announced Week 16 M May 4 Reading Day: I will be in my office May 8 Due: inal 10-page essay, Parker 101 between 1 3

9 Class Assignments English 300 Spring Semester, 2009 The following class assignments involve reading on your own, taking an active role in our class discussions, reading aloud and memorizing lines of poetry, a sequence of shorter essays and a final longer writing project. These activities are designed to help you develop a working understanding of the distinctive forms and rhetorical moves of poetry and some of the reasons why literary structures change over time. The reading and writing assignments emphasize a particular way of thinking about poems, poets and poetry. The emphasis is on thinking about poems and other poems, poets and their ways of thinking about the means and ends of poetry, and the relationship between poems and poetry. So as we think together about the particular concern of a poem the resources of language it makes available to itself we will at the same time be concerned with how the poem is made within a broader field of language and poetry. Perceiving the particular qualities of a poem learning to move through its linguistic drama will involve thinking the poem back into the linguistic and literary contexts that contributed to the making of the poem. Preparing for Class or each class you will choose three poems from the readings on the syllabus. Once you have read the assigned poems you will choose three for more careful study. irst, read each of poems aloud more than once, if necessary to get a feel for the poem. Embodied rhythms are wonderful and can awaken new forms of appreciation and insight. Second, write a sentence about each of the three poems you have chosen for the day. Each sentence should concisely describe what you consider to be significant about the poem. Please type or neatly write out these sentences. I will collect your sentences at the end of each class. When you are drawn to a poem please read all the poems by the same poet. Some of you will surely follow this step with a trip to library to pick up a book of poems of Herbert or Blake or Keats or Stevens or Rich. That is, the readings on the syllabus are a minimum. In addition, I have listed on the syllabus a few of the statements about poetry by poets in Lofty Designs. These brief excerpts are drawn from the ongoing conversation among poets (and readers of poetry) about poems and the purposes of poetry. If you find a congenial perspective, or a productive provocation, do seek out the full text. I can help you with this should you be interested. I recommend that you read all of Lofty Designs before you embark on the final writing project. In-Class Discussion You will be assigned to be a discussion partner at least twice this semester. This role will require you to help actively facilitate the class discussion. On the days you are assigned to be a discussion partner I will need you to 1) send me an summary of your focus for the discussion no later the twenty-four hours before the class meeting and 2) help to frame the discussion around the form, tradition or topic for the day; and 3) guide the class discussion of the poems you have chosen. I encourage you to build your focus around the poems you have chosen as part of your regular preparation for the class. We will use your three poems and sentences about those poems as the ground for our discussion.

10 Recitation and Memorization In his essay in the Norton Anthology Jon Stallworthy says that a poem is a composition written for performance by the human voice (1251). In the spirit of this comment you will be reading poems aloud before class. We will also recite poems in every class. In addition to recitation you will memorize a poem this semester. Our work will be enhanced as you each of you commit a poem to memory. We will do a class reading some time after Spring break. Please let me know when you have chosen a poem so I may add it to the list of poems for our class readings. Short Essays The short writing exercises focus on poetic forms, rhetorical choices, and subjects. Most of the essays are five pages in length. Some of the essays may be a bit shorter or a bit longer. If you are finding it unusually difficult to write five pages of analysis, let s talk about how to do more with less. (If you haven t already, I recommend that you study the examples of close analysis in Margaret ergeson s essay in the back of the Norton Anthology, The Game of Interpretation, ) We will spend class time in the first few weeks going over any questions about manuscript format, MLA citation protocols and the specific conventions for embedding lines of poetry in your critical prose. These discussions will review what you have learned in English 200 as well as give you an opportunity to resolve any remaining questions about preparing a manuscript. My goal is for you to take full responsibility for presenting your work in a professional manner. Your attention to these details will then allow us to focus attention on developing your critical thinking and writing. Essay #1: Due riday, 30 January Write a five-page essay concerned with the sound of poetry. Your descriptive analysis should teach you how to pay closer attention to the vocal realities of a poem. Writing this essay will give you the chance to perceive the qualities of a poem and to describe literary forms and effects. Robert Pinsky s The Sounds of Poetry offers an approach that acknowledges our linguistic expertise and abilities to explain what we admire in a poem. His book also offers an introduction to the specialized vocabulary people have developed to talk about poems. Essay #2: Due riday, 13 ebruary Write a five-page essay on no fewer than two poems from the readings from week 4 that discusses how a poem uses the line. You may choose lines that have a regular number of beats, or you may choose lines that have an irregular number of beats. Whether you are counting syllables, feet or stresses, or attending to the phrasing and line breaks (and syntax) in what people call free verse, your essay will demonstrate how the two poems tell us something worth saying about the use of the line in poetry. It would be helpful to review Jon Stallworthy s essay Versification ( ) in Norton Anthology as you are thinking and writing.

11 Essay #3: Due riday, 20 ebruary Write a five-page essay on no fewer than two poems from week 4 or 5 that discusses how a poem uses syntax. Reading Margaret erguson Poetic Syntax ( ) in the Norton Anthology will help you think about how to make a case for the use of syntax in the poems (or group of poems) you choose. More specifically, you will want to think about her comment that because the significant ambiguities in a poem s syntax may be historically motivated, they often send us to other poems by the same author, other poems by authors we know or suspect that our poet read, and even to the larger texts of history, which includes ongoing political, theological, and literary debates (1288). Essay #4: Due riday, 6 March This five-page essay will argue for the significance of a cluster of poems concerned with a common theme or rhetorical strategy. or instance, you might write about pastoral poems; lyric poems and voice; love, solitude, or nature; poems concerned with work; poems concerned with faith, religion, belief, or uncertainty. You can write about titles, epigraphs, modes of address, occasional poems; openings or closings (first and last lines), turning points and non-narrative (lyric) development; meditative poems, abstract poems, descriptive poems. The choices are endless. However your choice should illustrate something significant about the poems you discuss across the tradition we are studying. Essay #5: Due riday, 13 March Write a five-page essay on no fewer than two poems that were written in a single historical Period. You may work within the broad historical rubrics of Anglo-Saxon and Medieval, the Renaissance, or the Eighteenth-Century. The essay should make an argument, using selected poems for evidence, for the significance / interest of the poems written in the chosen period for students of literary history and form. I strongly encourage you to contextualize your discussion in the secondary materials. In addition to the numerous book-length studies and reference sources in the Mason Library I have listed recommended electronic sources on the syllabus.

12 Essay #6: Due riday, 8 May Due Dates: Wednesday, 1 April: a 1-page, single-spaced proposal Wednesday, 15 April: a 1-page research installment with a description of what you have accomplished in the secondary readings and what you plan to do in the coming weeks, and an annotated list of secondary sources Wednesday, 29 April: a revised proposal. Please include a working title, a onesentence summary of your argument, and a one-paragraph précis of your essay Assignment Write a ten-page essay that elaborates on the significance of one of the poets in the anthology born after The essay will focus on a single book or publication by the author and will be organized around your argument why the book of poems is significant in a particular literary history you define. Your argument must be embedded in the ongoing commentary (by poets and critics) on the book of poems. That is, you will need to read all the commentary you can find on the book and then draw on these assessments to contextualize your own argument. You will be reading short book notices, prefaces and introductions to editions of the book, book reviews, journal essays, book chapters and, when necessary, monographs. (or example, there are some book-length studies of single poems or books of poems.) Here are a few general questions to get you started. What have other poets and critics said about the contribution of the book of poems to the tradition of poetry? What are the contemporary assessments and then how does the significance of the book of poems draw subsequent generations of commentary? How does the book of poems fit in the tradition of poetry we are studying? How does the sequence of poems (or book-length poem) elaborate a context for subsequent innovations in poetry?