• Texts
• Course Description and Goals
• Requirements and Grading
• Summary of Grading
• Calendar of Assignments

• Boland, Eavan.  Object Lessons: The Life of the Woman and the Poet in Our Time.  New York: Norton, 1995. 
• Boland, Eavan.  Outside History: Selected Poems 1980-1990.  New York: Norton, 1991.
• Gioia, Dana, ed.  100 Great Poets of the English Language.  New York: Pearson, 2005.

Catalogue description: An intensive study of the short poem, including theoretical statements on the genre …. 

The aims of this course are:

• To provide a historical survey of the lyric in English,
• To generate a theoretical understanding of the lyric as a literary genre, 
• To develop a critical appreciation of the genre, including a vocabulary of terms and the analytical and interpretive skills appropriate to the study.

We'll accomplish these aims through the study of representative poems spanning five centuries.  Along the way we'll read critical statements by Samuel Johnson, William Wordsworth, Robert Frost, Ezra Pound, and T. S. Eliot.  We'll also read the contemporary Irish poet Eavan Boland's autobiographical reflections on the "historic vocation of the poet" in Object Lessons--and examine her own contribution to the lyric as a genre in Outside History.  As a complement to our in-class discussions, you'll produce a series of brief critical commentaries (due regularly throughout the semester) and a comprehensive essay (due late in the term).  Finally, you'll take two tests, which will include passages for identification and analysis. 

Active participation (10%).  You'll be participating actively in this course if you attend class regularly (missing only for official, College-sponsored activities or for emergencies), meet all deadlines, and demonstrate your engagement in the course by contributing valuably to in-class discussions and by scoring consistently well on reading quizzes.  It is unlikely that you will receive full credit for participation if you miss more than two weeks of class.  It is the Department's policy that anyone missing more than three weeks of class (six classes) for any reason will fail the course.  Understand that the Department does not distinguish between excused and unexcused absences.

Critical Commentaries (30%).  A critical commentary of at least 350 words is due each Friday, beginning January 19, unless otherwise noted on the calendar.  There will be 10 altogether, with the last one due Wednesday, April 4.  Poems assigned but not discussed in class must be the subject of at least half of these commentaries. 

Comprehensive Paper (30%).  A paper of 2000-2500 words is due Friday, April 13.

Midterm Test (10%).  There will be a midterm test with passages for identification Friday, March 2. 

Final Exam (20%).  TBA

• Active participation (10%)
• Critical Commentaries (30%)
• Comprehensive Essay (30%)
• Midterm Test (10%)
• Final Exam (20%)

Note: Reading assignments in 100 Great Poets include the biographical headnotes.  For poets whose names appear by themselves, you are to read entire selections (unless otherwise instructed).  Those are the poets whom we'll be studying in class.  Time permitting, we'll discuss additional poems on Fridays.  In any case, you should learn these poems too--and make at least some of them the subjects of commentaries.

Week 1 (January 8-12)
Thomas Wyatt
Edmund Spenser
No meeting Friday, January 12

Week 2 (January 15-19)
No meeting Monday, January 15
William Shakespeare
Christopher Marlowe, "The Passionate Shepherd"
Commentary #1 due Friday

Week 3 (January 22-26)
John Donne
Samuel Johnson, from "The Life of Cowley"
George Herbert
T. S. Eliot, "The Metaphysical Poets"
Robert Herrick, "Delight in Disorder," "Upon Julia's Clothes," "To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time"
Commentary #2 due Friday

Week 4 (January 29-February 2)
John Milton
Andrew Marvell
Henry Vaughan, "The Retreat," "They Are All Gone into the World of Light!"
Commentary #3 due Friday

Week 5 (February 5-9)
Thomas Gray
William Blake
Robert Burns, "A Red, Red Rose," "Bonnie Doon"
Commentary #4 due Friday

Week 6 (February 12-16)
William Wordsworth
William Wordsworth, "Preface to Lyrical Ballads"
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Commentary #5 due Friday

Mardi Gras Break (February 19-23)

Week 7 (February 26-March 2)
John Keats
Lord Byron, "She Walks in Beauty"
Percy Bysshe Shelley, "Ozymandias," "Ode to the West Wind"
Midterm Test Friday

Week 8 (March 5-9)
Alfred Tennyson
Walt Whitman
Emily Dickinson
Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Concord Hymn"
Elizabeth Barrett Browning, "How Do I Love Thee?"
Edgar Allan Poe, "The Raven," "Annabel Lee"
Robert Browning, "My Last Duchess"
Matthew Arnold, "Dover Beach"
Lewis Carroll, "Jabberwocky"
Algernon Charles Swinburne, "The Garden of Proserpine"
Commentary #6 due Friday

Week 9 (March 12-16)
William Butler Yeats
Robert Frost
Robert Frost, "The Figure a Poem Makes"
Thomas Hardy, "The Darkling Thrush"
Gerard Manley Hopkins, "God's Grandeur," "The Windhover"
A. E. Housman, "To an Athlete Dying Young," "With Rue My Heart Is Laden"
Edwin Arlington Robinson, "Richard Cory"
Paul Laurence Dunbar, "Sympathy"
Commentary #7 due Friday

Week 10 (March 19-23)
Wallace Stevens 
T. S. Eliot
William Carlos Williams, "Spring and All," "The Red Wheelbarrow"
D. H. Lawrence, "Snake"
Ezra Pound, "In a Station of the Metro," "The River-Merchant's Wife: a Letter"
Ezra Pound, "A Retrospect"--Including "A Few Dont's"
H. D. [Hilda Doolittle], "Oread"
Robinson Jeffers, "Shine, Perishing Republic," "Hurt Hawks"
Edna St. Vincent Millay, "First Fig"
Wilfred Owen, "Dulce et Decorum Est"
E. E. Cummings, "next to of course god america i"
Commentary #8 due Friday

Week 11 (March 26-30)
W. H. Auden
Elizabeth Bishop
Robert Lowell
Langston Hughes, "A Negro Speaks of Rivers," "Harlem"
Dylan Thomas, "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night"
Gwendolyn Brooks, "We Real Cool"
Philip Larkin, "This Be the Verse"
Allen Ginsberg, from Howl
Commentary #9 due Friday

Week 12 (April 2-6)
Eavan Boland, from Outside History and Object Lessons--TBA
Adrienne Rich, "Rape"
Sylvia Plath, "Daddy"
Commentary #10 due Wednesday
No meeting Friday (Easter Break)

Week 13 (April 9-13)
No meeting Monday (Easter Break)
Boland, from Object Lessons
Paper due Friday

Week 14 (April 16-20)
Boland continued

Week 15 (April 23-27)
Review
Evaluations

Final Exam TBA