STUDIES IN POETRY: POETRY SURVEY

ENGLISH 342A (11:25-12:20, MWF, Franz 018) Fall 2008 U. of Portland Dr. Herman Asarnow

Office: BC 235A TELEPHONES: Office 503-943-7244; Home: 503-244-5854

Office Hours: MWF—1:15-2:15; also by appointment.

E-mail: asarnow@up.edu WEB SITE: http://faculty.up.edu/asarnow

TEXTS

The Norton Anthology of Poetry (Shorter Fifth Edition), Margaret Ferguson, Mary Jo Salter, Jon Stallworthy, (Eds.), ISBN: 0393979210, 2004, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

Poems, Poets, Poetry (2nd Edition), Helen Vendler, ISBN: 0312257066, January 2002, Bedford/St. Martin's Press.

On Electronic Reserve: Vendler, Helen. “Introduction” to The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (Harvard, 1997)

Gardner, Helen. “Introduction” to The Metaphysical Poets (Penguin, 1957).

Bate, W.J. “The Classic and Neo-Classic Premises,” from From Classic to Romantic (Harvard, 1946; Harper, 1961)

Bate, W.J. “The English Romantic Compromise,” in Romanticism and Consciousness, ed. H. Bloom (Norton, 1970).

Day, Aidan. “Introduction” to Romanticism (Routledge, 1996).

Gelpi, Albert. “’What Is Found There’: The Form of Open Form Poetry.” Manuscript. First presented at NUCL 2004.

Additional reference texts to help understand the various “literary periods” are on hard-copy reserve. Ask for them at the main desk of the library. Additional short readings will be distributed in class during the semester.

COURSE GUIDELINES

This course has two parts. The first will be an overview and review of the elements of poetry and practice in close reading poems. As with any art, poetry’s richness of features and richness in response to life require and reward special attentiveness and extensive familiarity and practice. However, since this is not an introductory course, we will move rapidly during this initial part. The remainder of the course is built on the useful oversimplification that one may talk of distinct literary-historical "periods" defined by specific, identifying common characteristics, and talk about poetic movements within each such period. In this part of the course, we will read selected poets from broadly defined historical “periods” and “movements” of poetry in English. Reality (poetic and otherwise) is, of course, much more complicated than such a categorical approach would suggest. However, prospective teachers, educated individuals of all kinds, and anyone interested in the arts can do worse than build his or her deeper future knowledge of poetry on the skeleton of such a literary-historical overview. Putting the complicating flesh of reality on the bones of this theoretical skeleton will be your life’s work and joy as a reader.

Course Objectives: In English 342, you will be offered the opportunity to

· learn and appreciate what differentiates a poem from other forms of writing

· learn and appreciate how poetry offers us emotional insight, aesthetic pleasure, and acute discrimination—and acts as a repository of our culture

· learn to recognize the various formal elements of poetry—diction, sound devices, rhythm, meters, imagery, figures of speech, tone—the poet’s overlapping schemes of artistic strategies and imagination that enable a fine poem to blow the top of your head off

· come to recognize and understand the development of a poem’s idea structure

· understand and gain familiarity with various closed and open forms, and several traditional genres, or kinds, of poetry, including the epic, the sonnet, the pastoral elegy, the villanelle, the sestina, and the dramatic monologue

· increase your skill at the close-reading of poetry in English

· become familiar with an overview of the history of poetry in English so as to provide you with a sense of the evolution of poetry in English in terms of styles and subject matter (new and recurring)

By the end of the course, if you study hard you will be able to identify the century and/or poetic movement of poems presented to you without title or the poet's name. (Have confidence! Probably, you already can identify the approximate dates of unfamiliar pop music since the 1940s.) You will also be able to explain what elements in the poems led you to ascertain their probable authors, period and/or movement.

This course has two less formal goals, as well: to help you to enjoy reading poetry and to help you build the confidence to face an unfamiliar poem with pleasure and seek out new poems to read. As William Carlos Williams wrote in his long love poem “Of Asphodel, That Greeny Flower”:

It is difficult

to get the news from poems

yet men die miserably every day

for lack

of what is found there.

May we always remember what the Roman poet Horace insisted in his Ars Poetica nearly 2000 years ago, that poetry and poets—utile dulci—should both instruct and delight.

WRITTEN WORK AND OTHER SPECIAL ASSIGNMENTS

First, a requirement for the two formal papers and the teaching-assistant project for this course:

Both formal papers written for this course must be submitted by the due date to Turnitin.com, as well as be submitted to me in the form I will request ahead of time. This site checks papers for signs of plagiarism. (See UP’s statement on plagiarism, below.)  If you do not have a Turnitin “user profile” yet, please go to www.up.edu/turnitin and click on the link to directions for students for using Turnitin. (There are links to this page on the English Department website, on the Writing Center website, as well as on our class’s own webpage.) Here is the information you will need to login at www.turnitin.com and then be able to submit papers for each of our assignments: English 342 Studies in Poetry Class ID: see printed Guidelines Enrollment Password: see printed Guidelines.

Written Work and Assignments

1. Three sentences for nearly every class, one (and only one) sentence each on the poems in our reading that I will single out ahead of time for careful study. Type them. Label them clearly: your name, the date, the poet, the poem. I will collect them, read them, and return them the next class, often with a comment or two. (Graded High Pass, Pass, No Pass.) Keep the returned sentences well-organized by date in a notebook.

2. Paper #1, a 5-7 page paper that will present a close-reading/analysis of one poem selected from our textbook Poems, Poets, Poetry. This paper will apply the techniques of close-reading and what you have learned about the formal elements of poetry and prosody to a poem (approved by me) from this text that we have not studied in class, nor which is heavily analyzed by Helen Vendler in the text.

3. Paper #2, a roughly 10 page paper that presents reasonably close readings of two-to-three poems by a single poet and which also addresses how these poems by the poet are, and/or are not, illustrative of the trends—stylistic, thematic, and tonal—in the poetry of their era. (Stylistic refers to matters of form, line, diction, imagery, sound, and rhythm—the poet’s artistic strategies. Thematic refers to the emotional/intellectual ‘problem’ at their core. Tonal refers to the poem’s register[s] of emotion and attitudes.) Choose these poems from the Norton Anthology. They must be approved by me. I suggest choosing poems from the literary/poetic period that you report on for the class for your teaching assistant responsibilities. (See below.)

4. Two Tests, one about 2/3 the way through the semester, one in the final exam period. These tests will focus on the literary periods, the poems you have read and the information about the poets and the poetry presented in student reports and by me. You will be expected to recognize snippets of poems, their author, their period, and the attributes in the snippet that reflecting the poetic styles and themes of the period.

5. One Teaching Assistant Responsibility (in groups of two, or three): I’ll pass around a sign up sheet in the 2^nd week of class, and each student will sign up (in groups of two) to be T.A. for a particular literary period (or literary movement) in the 2^nd , survey section of the course. The T.A.s will be expected to put together a helpful, 2-page (single spaced) handout summarizing the most important and basic characteristics of the poetry of the literary period (or movement) to which they have been assigned, plus a brief bibliography of sources on the period (one-half to one page). See the class handout: Skeleton Guide to …Literary Periods….) The literary periods or movements will include: The Renaissance Sonnet and Petrarchanism (Shakespeare, Sidney, Spenser, Drayton, Wroth, etc.), English Metaphysical Poetry (Donne, Herbert), Renaissance epic poetry (Spenser, Milton), Neo-classic poetry (Dryden, Pope), Romantic poetry (Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, Byron), 19^th-Century American Romantics (Whitman, Dickinson, Emerson, Melville), Victorian poetry (Tennyson, Browning, Arnold, Hardy), and Modernism (Yeats, Eliot, W.C. Williams, Stevens, etc.). I will provide the materials for the Renaissance epic, and perhaps one more of these areas, given the small size of our class.

CLASS PARTICIPATION

You will be expected to have read with care the assigned poems for each day, and be an active class participant by asking questions, offering ideas, suggesting interpretations, etc. Poetry is large and broadly referential, both emotionally and culturally: two heads are almost always better than one when reading poetry. If you prepare the reading for each day, you will also do well on the tests. If you do not, pray that some power intercede on your behalf!

You must attend the two 7:30 p.m. readings by our visiting poets B.T. Shaw and Floyd Skloot (Sept. 23, Nov. 13) unless you have another class or other University commitment (about which I must be notified in advance).

GRADING

Paper #1---------------------------------------------------------20%

Paper #2---------------------------------------------------------30%

Two Tests, 15% each-----------------------------------------30%

One “T.A. for the Day” responsibility-------------------10%

Sentences & Class Participation --------------------------10%

100%

University of Portland Plagiarism & Academic Cheating Statement (By taking this class you implicitly acknowledge and agree to its premises.)

The University Bulletin clearly states that any instance of cheating “must be reported to the dean of the college or school in which the student is currently enrolled.” Academic cheating ranges from unintentional plagiarism to copying someone’s work on an exam to obtaining material from the web without attributing the source when including it in your

paper. Students caught cheating will at the minimum receive no credit for the assignment and being referred to the Dean’s office, but further penalties such as failing the class or being expelled from the University are also possibilities.

Relevant statement from the University of Portland’s Code of Academic Integrity:

Academic integrity is openness and honesty in all scholarly endeavors. The University of Portland is a scholarly community dedicated to the discovery, investigation, and dissemination of truth, and to the development of the whole person. Membership in this community is a privilege, requiring each person to practice academic integrity at its highest level, while expecting and promoting the same in others. Breaches of academic integrity will not be tolerated and will be addressed by the community with all due gravity

(The complete Code may be found in the University of Portland Student Handbook and as well the Guidelines for Implementation.  It is each student’s responsibility to inform himself or herself of the Code and Guidelines.)

DISABILITIES STATEMENT: If you have a disability and require an accommodation to fully participate in this class, contact the Office for Students with Disabilities (OSWD), located in the University Health Center (503-943-7134), as soon as possible. If you have an OSWD Accommodation Plan, you should make an appointment to meet with me to discuss your accommodations.  Also, you should meet with me if you wish to discuss emergency medical information or special arrangements in case the building must be evacuated.