课程概况
The purpose of this course is to enable students to read various kinds of English poetry with understanding and appreciation. The course is not primarily historical, though poems from the 16th into the 20th century will be sampled. We shall do a lot of close readings of poetry in the lectures with emphasis on both the poetic language and poetic forms. Representative British and American poets like William Shakespeare, John Milton, John Donne, William Wordsworth, John Keats, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and Robert Frost will be focused respectively in each lecture. Such poetic forms as lyric, epic, and dramatic poetry will be discussed, while such poetic elements as rhythm and meter, figurative language, stanzaic forms will be carefully explored in poetry analysis in the lectures. Students are encouraged to practice reading aloud or even to learn by heart all the poems discussed in the course.
Poetry may be difficult, but it can also be intensely rewarding. The pleasure of reading poetry derives from the beauty of the language—the delight of the sounds and the images—as well as the power of the emotion and the depth of the insight of the poems. Poems are written to bring us a sense of life, while widening and sharpening our contact with human existence. Poets create significant new experiences for the reader, producing a greater awareness and understanding of the world. Poetry broadens our experience by acquainting us with a wide range of experiences we don’t often have in our ordinary life. It also deepens our experience by making us feel more intensely and with better understanding of our everyday experiences. Poetry, therefore,delights and instructs at the same time
课程大纲
Week 1 Poetry Delights and Instructs
Poetry Recitation: Robert Browning’s “Meeting at Night”& Robert Frost’s “The Pasture”
Lecture 1: Poetry Delights and Instructs
Lecture 2: Poetry Communicates Experience
Lecture 3: Poetry Says Much in Little
Lecture 4: A Course Description with a Syllabus
Lecture 5: Why Do We Read All These Masterpieces?
Textbook & Reference Books
Assignments
Week 2 William Shakespeare: “Shall I Compare Thee to A Summer’s Day”
Poetry Recitation: William Shakespeare’s Sonnets (18 & 73)
Lecture 1: Poetry Reading-aloud Exercise
Lecture 2: Sonnet 18: An Explanation
Lecture 3: Devices and Techniques
Lecture 4: Immortality through Literature
Lecture 5: Structure of English Sonnets
Lecture 6: Why Should We Read Shakespeare?
Week 3 John Milton: “Doth God Exact Day-labor, Light Denied?”
Poetry Recitation: Milton’s Sonnet 19 & Paradise Lost (Invocation, lines 1-16)
Lecture 1: Poetry Reading-aloud Exercise
Lecture 2: Reading Aloud of Milton’s Poems
Lecture 3: John Milton’s Life and Works
Lecture 4: Miltonic Sonnet
Lecture 5: Milton’s Sonnet 19
Lecture 6: Commentary on Milton’s Sonnet 19
Lecture 7: The Invocation of Paradise Lost
Assignments
Week 4 John Donne: “But We by a Love So Much Refined”
Poetry Recitation: John Donne’s “A Valediction Forbidding Mourning”
Lecture 1: Poetry Reading-aloud Exercise
Lecture 2: Life of John Donne
Lecture 3: Metaphysical Poetry
Lecture 4: Donne’s “A Valediction Forbidding Mourning”
Lecture 5: Themes: Death, Love, Faith, and Science
Lecture 6: Assignments
Week 5 William Wordsworth: “Emotion Recollected in Tranquility”
Poetry Recitation: Wordsworth’s “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud”
Lecture 1: Poetry Reading-aloud Exercise
Lecture 2: Life of William Wordsworth
Lecture 3: Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1800)
Lecture 4: Wordsworth’s Definition of Poetry
Lecture 5: Characteristics of Romanticism
Lecture 6: “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud”
Lecture 7: Assignments
Week 6 John Keats: “Much Have I Traveled in the Realms of Gold”
Poetry Recitation: John Keats’s Poems
Lecture 1: Poetry Reading-aloud Exercise
Lecture 2: Life of John Keats
Lecture 3: On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer
Lecture 4: Negative Capability
Lecture 5: Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty
Lecture 6: Assignments
Week 7 Walt Whitman: “I Celebrate Myself”
Poetry Recitation: Walt Whitman’s Poems
Lecture 1: Poetry Reading-aloud Exercise
Lecture 2: “I am Large, I Contain Multitudes”
Lecture 3: “Walt Whitman, an American”
Lecture 4: “One’s Self I Sing”
Lecture 5: “Song of Myself” (Sections I & II)
Lecture 6: Assignments
Week 8 Emily Dickinson: “I’m Nobody, Who are You?”
Poetry Recitation: Emily Dickinson’s Poems
Lecture 1: Poetry Reading-aloud Exercise
Lecture 2: “The Mother of Modern American Poetry”
Lecture 3: Life of Emily Dickinson
Lecture 4: “I’m Nobody, Who Are You?”
Lecture 5: “The Soul Selects Her Own Society”
Lecture 6: “This Is My Letter to the World”
Lecture 7: “I Heard a Fly Buzz-When I Died”
Lecture 8: “Tell All the Truth Bu Tell It Slant-”
Assignments
Week 9 Robert Frost: “A Road Less Traveled By”
Poetry Recitation: Robert Frost’s Poems
Lecture 1: Poetry Reading-aloud Exercise
Lecture 2: Life of Robert Frost
Lecture 3: “The Sound of Sense”
Lecture 4: “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”
Lecture 5: “The Road Not Taken”
Lecture 6: “Mowing”
Lecture 7: “Mending Wall”
Video Poetry Reading Aloud Competition (9th Week)
预备知识
本课程可以作为英语专业选修课、非英美文学方向研究生选修课和大学英语高年级选修课程。
Designed to meet the demands of
general education in English among colleges and universities around the world, this
course can be taken both as an elective course for English majors and
non-English majors. It can also be regarded as an elective for graduate
students whose research fields are not British and American literature.
证书或学分
Certificate Requirements & Grading:
60-84 Pass; 85-100 Excellence
Video Poetry Reading-aloud Competition: 10%
Quiz: 60%
On-line Discussion: 10%
Term Paper: 20%
参考资料
Huang Zongying. Selected Readings in British and American Poetry. Beijing: Higher Education Press, 2007/2014.
黄宗英编著：《英美诗歌名篇选读》， 北京：高等教育出版社，2007年（第一版），2014年（第二版）。
Abrams, M. H. General Ed. The Norton Anthology of English Literature.Vol.2. New York & London: W. W. Norton & Company, 1986.
Fussell, Paul. Poetic Meter and Poetic Form.New York: Random House, 1979.
Gross, Harvey. Sound and Form in Modern Poetry. The University of Michigan Press/Ann Arbor, 1968.
Huang, Zongying. A Road Less Traveled By—On the Deceptive Simplicity in the Poetry of Robert Frost. Beijing:Peking University, 2000.
Perrine, Laurence. Sound and Sense: An Introduction to Poetry. 6th ed. New York: HBJ,1982.
Preminger, Alex and T. V. F. Brogan. Eds. The New PrincetonEncyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. Princeton: Princeton UniversityPress, 1993.
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