The Nature of Poetry (English 640)

Fall 2000
Seamus Cooney

This is the home page for our class. It will link to pages containing course information, schedules, policies, etc. as well as student papers, texts of poems for discussion, tips on writing papers and anything else we can think of publishing here to help along the work of the group.

My intention is that these pages will form a source of material for you to refer to and will include texts that you will be asked to comment in on the class Confer on the WMU VMScluster. Thus you can simultaneously have a Netscape window open containing a text and a Telnet window open in which you are writing your comments.

Class administration

• Syllabus, including writing assignments, with rationale and full details.

• Some fine close readings of Wordsworth and Browning by F. R. Leavis.

What to read

Index of poem texts, etc. Contains links to texts of poems for reading, working on, and also to other materials relevant to the work of the course (as well as some stuff just there for amusement).

Donne poems in the original old spelling Go to the above-linked index to find them.
• A self-administered quiz on meter and scansion

• Non-canonical authors and texts put up by Stuart Curran at the Univ. of Pennsylvania. There's a lot here by women authors, especially.
• Another page with links to sites of literary interest
• List of poems to know by the final exam. [1995]
• List of poems to know by the final exam. [1997]
• A Poet Laureate's advice to a young writer, together with her reply.

How to read

• A bit-by-bit commentary on Shakespeare's Sonnet 138.
• Some notes on imagery
• A sort of stream-of-consciousness reading by me of a Shakespeare sonnet, "Since brass nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless sea . . ." (no. 65). This might prove helpful to some readers.

• Advice on writing papers. This is lengthy; don't try to absorb it in one go.
• What is a paraphrase? -- and how to write one.
• Sample paraphrase
• Mark Richardson on Stevens's "The Emperor of Ice Cream"
• Default genders in English: a brief discussion or query about avoiding offensively gender-specific language.

"Help" pages

• I've found a link to a potentially useful page on documentation, at the Univ. of Toronto. Use it cautiously.

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  Updated 7 January 1997; 5 September 2000; internal links fixed 22 April 2002
  Since 21 August 1996, this page has been visited times.