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 poet's 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.