English and American Poetry | Humanities Online Course by Udemy

Teaching & Academics Online Course by Udemy, On Sale Here

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

An excellent training about Humanities

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 poets 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 IIntroduction of the CourseElements of PoetrySection IIEnglish PoetsChaucer, Spenser and Shakespeare1. Geoffrey Chaucer: Implicit Ironist and Gullible Appreciator of All Vitality2. Edmund Spenser: Theoretical Asceticism and Sensuous Garden3. William Shakespeare: Tragedy, Divided Mind and Negative CapabilityMetaphysical Poets and John Milton4. John Donne: The Inventor of Metaphysical Conceit5. Andrew Marvell: The Mower as Death and Lover6. Herbert: The Banquet of Sacred Devotion7. John Milton: Satan as the Tragic HeroEarly Romantic Poets8. William Blake: The Visionary Marriage of Heaven and Hell9. Coleridge: Christian Redemption and Diabolical Poetics10. William Wordsworth: Divinized and Fallen NatureLater Romantic Poets11. Percy Shelly: Rhapsody of Destructive-Creative Energy and Disillusionment with Rousseaurian Nature12. John Keats: Priesthood of the Mortal World13. George Gordon Byron: The Ingenious Ironist and the Postmodern Text of Don JuanLate Victorian Poets: Tennyson, Browning and Hardy14. Alfred Lord Tennyson: The Melancholy of Solipsistic Artist15. Robert Browning: Dramatic Monologue and Atomized Self16. Thomas Hardy: The Tragedy of Will-to-LiveEarly 20th Century Modernists: Yeats, Eliot and Dylan Thomas17. W.B. Yeats: From the Romantic Lyricist to the Occult Visionary18. T.S. Eliot: Making Past Fragments into Modern Myth19. Dylan Thomas: The Cosmic Significance of Human AnatomySection IIIAmerican Poets: Whitman and Dickinson1. Walt Whitman: The Great Unifier and Cosmic Self2. Emily Dickinson: Anxiety, Nothingness and BeingEarly 20th Century Modernists3. Ezra Pound: Translator as Inventor of Modern Poetics4. Marianna Moore: “Real Toad in an Imaginary Garden”5. William Carlos Williams: From European Modernist Art to a New American Poetics6. Elizabeth Bishop: The Juxtaposition of the Quotidian and the Catastrophic, the Precise and the FantasticStevens, Robert Frost and Robert Bly7. Wallace Stevens: The Necessary Angel of Imagination vs Zen Poetics8. Robert Frost: Traditional Folklore and Hidden Vision of Darkness9. Robert Bly: The Underground Imagery and Taoist PoeticsThe Beat Generation, Confessional Poets and Merwin10. Allen Ginsberg: Manifesto of the Beat Generation11. Robert Lowell: Confessional Life study and Calvinist Outlook12. Sylvia Plath: Affinity with Edward Munch’s Symbolist Painting13. W.S. Merwin: Taoist and Zen Buddhist Influence and The Third Body Sensibility

Udemy is the leading global marketplace for learning and instruction

By connecting students all over the world to the best instructors, Udemy is helping individuals reach their goals and pursue their dreams.

Study anytime, anywhere.

START HERE