Professor David Blake

Bliss Hall, 226

OH: M: 3:30-4:30, Th: 3:30-5

Spring 2002

Ferguson et al, The Norton Anthology of Poetry with CD-rom (Norton)

Hollander, Rhyme’s Reason (Yale)

Optional Texts: (you will need to purchase one of the Dickinson, Frost, Hardy, or Hughes books)

Corn, The Poem’s Heartbeat (StoryLine)

Dickinson, The Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson (Little Brown)

Frost, The Poetry of Robert Frost (Henry Holt)

Hardy, The Collected Poems of Thomas Hardy (Palgrave)

Hughes, The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes (Knopf)

21 January: Poets and Poetry: Collins, "Introduction to Poetry" (HO); Roethke, "My Papa’s Waltz" (1386); Dickinson, "Publication -- is the Auction" (#709, pg. 1020); Stevens, "Anecdote of the Jar" (1154) and "A High-toned Old Christian Woman" (HO); Walcott, "A Far Cry from Africa" (1709); Heaney, "Digging" (1788); Hacker, "Untoward Occurrence at Embassy Poetry Reading" (HO)

28 January: Figurative Language: Keats, "To Autumn" (849); Dickinson, "My Life Had Stood" (# 754, pg. 1021); Lowell, "For the Union Dead" (1496); Stevens, "The Snow Man" (1150); Eliot, "Preludes" (1233); Brown, "Remembering Nat Turner" (HO); Rolfe, "First Love" (HO); Hugo, "Degrees of Gray in Philipsburg" (HO); Heaney, "From the Frontier of Writing" (HO); Morris, "For Julia, In the Deep Water" (HO).

4 February: Figurative Language: Shakespeare, Sonnet 130 (240); Donne, "A Valediction Forbidding Morning" (275); Bradstreet, "The Author To Her Book" (419); Blake, "And Did Those Feet" (683); Traditional, "Steal Away to Jesus" (958); Yeats, "The Second Coming" (1091); Williams, "The Yachts" (1168); Rich, "Living in Sin" (1679); Lorde, "Coal" (1752); Raine, "The Onion, Memory" (1822); Balakian, "Granny Making Soup" (HO); Komunyakaa, "Facing It" (H0)

Paper #1 due

11 February: Meter and Line: Pope, "Sound and Sense" (337-384); Coleridge, "Metrical Feet" (HO); Dryden, "To the Memory of Mr. Oldham" (479); Blake, "The Tyger" (680) and "London" (681); Milton, selections from Book 9 Paradise Lost (381); Frost, "Mending Wall" (1121), "Provide Provide" (1136); Clampitt, "Syrinx" (1508); Brooks, We Real Cool" (1481); Hardy, "The Darkling Thrush" (1052); Yeats, "The Lake Isle of Innisfree" (1084); Fenton, "God, A Poem" (1841); Rhyme’s Reason, 1-13; Norton Anthology, lxii-lxix.

18 February: Music and Line: Donne, "Batter my heart" (289); Whitman, "Out of the Cradle" (973); Hopkins, "The Windhover" (1062) and "God’s Grandeur" (1062); Stevens, "The Emperor of Ice Cream" (1151); Bishop, "A Visit to St. Elizabeth’s" (HO); Wilbur, "First Snow in Alsace" (1526); Plath, "Daddy" (1732); Berryman, "Dream Songs 1, 4, 29" (1441-3); O’Hara, "The Day Lady Died" (1617); Harper, "Bird Lives," and "Nightmare Begins Responsibility" (HO); Walcott, from The Schooner Flight (1714). Norton Anthology, lxix-lxxi, lxxviii-lxxix; Rhyme’s Reason, 13-16

25 February: The Sonnet: Wyatt, "The Long Love . ." and "Whoso List . ." (113); Spenser, from Amoretti, sonnet #1 (169); Sidney, from Astrophil and Stella, sonnets #1 and 31 (192-94); Shakespeare, sonnets #29, 129, 130 (236-40); Milton, "When I Consider . . ." and "On the Late Massacre in Piedmont" (378); Wordsworth, "London, 1802" (726); Keats "On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer" (831), "On the Sonnet" (842); Browning, "Sonnets from the Portuguese, #s 1, 43 (856); Justice, "Henry James by the Pacific" (HO); Hayden, "Frederick Douglass" (HO); Plumly, "Sonnet" (HO); Hacker, "Elektra on Third Avenue"; Gilbert, "Ladies Home Journal" (HO); Dove, "The Bistro Styx" (1861); Noguere, "The Scribes" (HO); Rhyme’s Reason, 18-21; Norton Anthology, lxxiii-lxxv.

4 March: Internal Form: Hardy, "The Convergence of the Twain" (1053); Yeats, "An Irish Airman Foresees His Death" (1088) and "Easter 1916" (1089); Stevens, "The Idea of Order at Key West" (1158); Williams, "The Descent" (HO); Rich, "Diving into the Wreck" (1685); Psalm 29 (HO); Hughes, "Negro" (HO); Harper, "Dear John, Dear Coltrane," (HO); Olds, "The Victims" (HO); McGrath, ""Night Travelers" (HO)

Paper #3 due

**Spring Break**

18 March: Genre and Form: Keats, "Ode on Melancholy" (847); Shelley, "Ode to the West Wind" (801); Milton, "Lycidas" (354); Crane, "At Melville’s Tomb" (1302); Thomas, "A Refusal to Mourn the Death . . " and "Do Not Go Gentle. . ." (1463, 1465); Hacker, "Elegy" (HO); Roethke, "The Waking" (1391); Bishop, "One Art" (1419) and "Sestina" (1412); Alvarez, "Bilingual Sestina’ (HO); Balaban, "Palindrome for Clyde Correil in Saigon" (HO); Rhyme’s Reason, 33-46; Norton Anthology, lxxv-lxxvi.

25 March: History: Anglo-Saxon and Medieval Poetry: Caedmon’s Hymn (1); Anonymous Lyrics (13-16); Chaucer, "The General Prologue" to The Canterbury Tales, lns. 1-42 (17); Langland, "Piers Plowman" (58-61)

Paper #4 due (written in-class)

1 April: History: Renaissance Poetry: Marlowe, "The Passionate Shepherd to His Love" (233); Raleigh, "The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd" (140); Elizabeth, "When I Was Fair and Young" (130); Shakespeare, remaining sonnets (234-41); Jonson, "On My First Daughter" and "On My First Son" (291); Metaphysical Poetry: Donne, "A Valediction Forbidding Mourning" (275-76); "The Flea" (279); Holy Sonnets #1 and 7 (287-8); Herbert, "The Altar" (329) and "Easter Wings" (331); Taylor, "Houswifery" (496).

8 April: History: Eighteenth-Century Poetry: Swift, "A Description of the Morning" (526); Pope, "The Rape of the Lock" (547); Gray, "Elegy in a Country Churchyard" (609); Romanticism: Blake, "Holy Thursday" (both poems 672, 679), "The Lamb" (672) and "The Tyger" (680); Wordsworth, "Lines above Tintern Abbey" (699); Coleridge, "Kubla Khan" (741) and "Frost at Midnight" (742); Keats, "Ode on a Grecian Urn" (848); Poe, "The City in the Sea" (880); Emerson, "The Rhodora" (851); Whitman, "A Noiseless, Patient Spider" (984).

15 April: History: Modern Poetry: Yeats, "Leda and the Swan" (1095); Frost, "The Oven Bird" (1128); Stevens, "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" (1155); Pound, "In a Station of the Metro" (1190); HD, "Helen" (1203); Williams, "Danse Russe" (1166), "The Red Wheelbarrow," (1167) and "The Descent" (HO); Eliot, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" (1230); Moore, "No Swan So Fine" and "The Fish" (1221); Owen, "Anthem for Doomed Youth" and "Dulce Et Decorum Est" (1276); cummings, "In Just-" and "since feeling is first" (1282-84); Crane, "Proem: To Brooklyn Bridge" (1307); Hughes, "The Weary Blues" (1320); Brown, "Southern Road" (HO)

Paper #5 due (written in-class)

22 April: Thinking about tradition: Wilbur, "Junk" (1532); Pound, "Canto 45," (HO); Donne, "Death Be Not Proud" (288) and Hopkins, "Carrion Comfort" (1064); Browning, "My Last Duchess" (911) and Ai, "The Testimony of J. Robert Oppenheimer" (HO); Auden, "In Memory of W.B. Yeats" (1368); Arnold, "Dover Beach" (999) and Hecht, "The Dover Bitch" (HO); Hughes, "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" and Phillips, "The Hustler Speaks of Rivers" (HO)

29 April: Thinking about tradition:: Keats "To Autumn" and Stevens, "Sunday Morning" (1151); Whitman, "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry (965), Rich, "Dedications" (HO) and Ginsberg, "Death and Fame" (HO); Marvell, "To His Coy Mistress" (435), de Vries, "To His Importunate Mistress" (HO), and Finch, "A Reply from His Coy Mistress" (HO)

Evaluation Paper Due

6 May: Final Exam

1. Reading: The first objective of this course is to immerse you in the world of Anglo-American poetry. I’d like you to consider our assignments as simply the poems everyone in our class has agreed to learn and share. I encourage you to read widely and independently in your Norton Anthology, subscribe to Poetry Daily (a link to the web site is available on my home page), and spend time browsing through contemporary poetry books and journals. (An excellent anthology is A. Poulin, Jr.’s Contemporary American Poetry.) You might also attend one of the many poetry readings available in our area. Princeton, for example, runs an excellent afternoon reading series throughout the academic year; TCNJ will host its annual Writer’s Conference on April 18^th; and Trenton’s Urban Word Café sponsors open-mike poetry slams every Thursday evening (609-989-7777). All of these activities should deepen your appreciation for this oldest of art-forms.
   
2. Writing: The second objective of this course is to help you prepare for the poetry question on the M.A. comprehensive examination. This question requires degree-candidates to perform a formal analysis of a previously unannounced poem in a timed, supervised setting. The writing assignments in this course will emphasize the skills necessary to perform a formal analysis of poetry: the ability to read a poem closely; to observe and convey its principal patterns (metrical, stanzaic, thematic, etc); to place it in the context of literary history; and finally, to construct a coherent argument out of the knowledge these skills will produce.
   
   a). This course requires five short papers (<1000 words) in which you undertake a formal analysis of poetry. You will have the opportunity, in two of these papers, to read the poem and write your analysis outside of class. The other three papers will take place during class in the kind of timed, supervised setting you would experience for the M.A. exam. Out-of-class essays must be typed or printed legibly on 8.5 x 11 white paper. They must be turned in during class on the date that they are due. I do not expect nor want you to do research for any of these short analyses.
   
   b). The course requires a final evaluation essay. Here’s the assignment: You have been asked by the editors of Oxbridge University Press to edit a section of their forthcoming volume, The Oxbridge Anthology of Poetry. You can chose up to twelve poems from the collected works of Emily Dickinson, Thomas Hardy, Robert Frost, or Langston Hughes to be included in the anthology. In a well-written and coherent essay, name the poems you have selected and explain your selections, offering some critical rationale for why you have chosen these poems to represent your poet in the volume. What, in effect, has been your principle of inclusion? Did you choose poems commonly thought to be that poet's "best" or most influential work? Did you try to achieve a representative sampling of the poet’s major themes, periods, and stylistic innovations? Do your poems show a radically different vision of the poet than previous anthologies have given? Has you selection been influenced by contemporary aesthetic, scholarly, or theoretical concerns? The essay will take the form of a letter and should be about 3000 words. It should strive to be as coherent and well-organized as possible. Don’t simply list the poems along with justifications for each. Think carefully about how to organize your discussion so it seems elegant and seamless.
   
   c.) Scheduled for May 6, the final exam will offer another opportunity to show off your skills in writing a formal analysis of a poem.
   
3. Attendance and Participation: You are graduate students, so I am sure everyone will attend and participate in our weekly discussions. If you miss any of our in-class papers, however, you will need to make them up directly following the final exam.
   
4. The breakdown in grading percentages is:

5% Paper 1

5% Paper 2

15% Paper 3

15% Paper 4

15% Paper 5

20% Evaluation Essay

15% Final Exam

10% Participation

100% Total


5. Please feel free to come by my office if you have questions you’d like to ask about the class. The best way to contact me is by e-mail – blake@tcnj.edu. I will check my mail regularly.