UNIVERSITY OF BRISTOL
DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH
ENGL 10003: Approaches to Poetry
Tom Duggett
Approaches to Poetry is a twelve-week course designed to provide an introduction to
some of the general principles of poetry, and to lay the groundwork for advanced study
of English. The course will introduce you to a range of critical notions and a variety of
technical terms, together with a selection of poems from different historical periods. At
the end of the course, you will have gained many of the skills of the literary critic.
General Reading
The Norton Anthology of English Literature contains satisfactory texts of most of the poems
we will be looking at. If you become interested in any one poem or poet, I will suggest
more scholarly texts and some secondary reading.
Reference Books
The Oxford Companion to English Literature, ed. M. Drabble, is probably the most
serviceable general-purpose reference-book on English Literature. M. H. Abrams, A
Glossary of Literary Terms helps to explain literary critical vocabularies, as does The Concise
Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms, ed. C. Baldick. The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and
Literary Theory, ed. J. A. Cuddon, is particularly useful on verse-forms, as is Paul Fussel's
Poetic Meter and Poetic Form. English Poetry: a Poetic Record, from Chaucer to Yeats, by David
Hopkins, provides an account of the ‘course’ of English poetry.
Reading Week by Week
For each week there is a poem or a group of poems that should be read carefully. The
titles of these are given in bold type. In addition I have listed a number of other poems
or works of criticism that it would be useful to read.
Most works are in the Norton Anthology. Works marked * will be supplied. Others will
have to be purchased or borrowed from the Library.
SYLLABUS
Week 1: What is Poetry?
The Wanderer, trans. Michael Alexander *
Beowulf, trans. Seamus Heaney (Norton Anthology)
Passages from:
Sidney, The Defence of Poesie (Norton Anthology)
Pope, An Essay on Criticism (Norton Anthology)
Wordsworth, ‘Preface’ to Lyrical Ballads (Norton Anthology)
Shelley, A Defence of Poetry (Norton Anthology)
Arnold, The Function of Criticism at the Present Time (Norton Anthology)
Eliot, Tradition and the Individual Talent (Norton Anthology)
Heaney, The Government of the Tongue *
Norton Anthology essays on Anglo-Saxon England, Old English Poetry, Old and Middle
English Prosody
Week 2: Medieval Verse
Anon., Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (Norton Anthology)
Chaucer, ‘The Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale’ (Norton Anthology)
Derek Pearsall, ‘The Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale’, in The Canterbury Tales, Unwin
Critical Library (London: Allen and Unwin, 1985), pp. 71-91
John Speirs, Chaucer the Maker (London: Faber and Faber, 1951), pp. 136-49
Ad Putter, An introduction to the Gawain-poet (London and New York: Longman,
1996)
Week 3: Sonnets
Handout: ‘The Sonnet, from Philip Sidney to Seamus Heaney’ *
Paul Fussell, ‘Structural Principles: The Example of the Sonnet’, in Poetic Meter and Poetic
Form, rev. edn (New York: Random House, 1979), pp. 109-26
Michael R. G. Spiller, The Development of the Sonnet: An Introduction (London: Routledge,
1992)
Week 4: Elizabethan/Jacobean Tragedy
Marlowe, The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus (Norton Anthology)
Shakespeare, King Lear (Norton Anthology)
A.C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy (London: Penguin, 2005)
Clifford Leech, Tragedy (London: Routledge, 1989)
Thomas Healy, ‘Doctor Faustus’, in Patrick Cheney, ed.,Cambridge companion to
Christopher Marlowe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004)
Robert N Watson, ‘Tragedies of revenge and ambition’ in Claire McEachern ed., The
Cambridge Companion to Shakespearean Tragedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2003)
Week 5: Horatian Odes
Marvell, ‘An Horatian Ode’ (Norton Anthology)
Article on Oliver Cromwell in Encyclopedia Britannica
Cleanth Brooks, ‘Marvell’s Horatian Ode’, in Andrew Marvell, ed. John Carey, Penguin
Critical Anthologies (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969), pp. 179-98
Douglas Bush, ‘Marvell’s Horatian Ode’, reprinted in Andrew Marvell, ed. John Carey,
Penguin Critical Anthologies (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969)
Blair Worden, ‘Andrew Marvell, Oliver Cromwell, and the Horatian Ode’, in Politics of
Discourse: The Literature and History of Seventeenth-Century England, ed. Kevin Sharpe and
Steven N. Zwicker (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), pp. 147-80
Week 6: Epic (Part One)
Milton, Paradise Lost, Books I-II (Norton Anthology)
Plot summary in The Oxford Companion to English Literature
Johnson on Paradise Lost in ‘Lives of the Poets’ (Norton Anthology)
David Loewenstein, Milton: Paradise Lost (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993)
Week 7: Epic (Part Two)
Milton, Paradise Lost, Books IV, IX (Norton Anthology) – and as much of the rest of
the poem (esp. books V-VIII as you can manage)
Chapters 8, 9, 10, and 11 of Dennis Danielson, ed., The Cambridge companion to Milton
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999)
Week 8: Mock-Epic
Pope, The Rape of the Lock (Norton Anthology)
Johnson on Pope in ‘Lives of the Poets’ (Norton Anthology)
David Fairer, ‘The Rape of the Lock’, in The Poetry of Alexander Pope (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1989)
David B. Morris, Alexander Pope: The Genius of Sense (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1984)
Week 9: Romantic Conversations
Wordsworth, ‘Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey’ (Norton
Anthology)
Coleridge, ‘Frost at Midnight’ (Norton Anthology)
Shelley, ‘Mont Blanc’ (Norton Anthology)
Keats, ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ (Norton Anthology)
Extracts from Keats’s Letters (Norton Anthology)
John Barnard, John Keats (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 104-8)
Cleanth Brooks, ‘Keats’s Sylvan Historian: History without Footnotes’, in The WellWrought Urn (1947; London: Methuen, 1968), pp. 124-35
Stephen Prickett, ‘Tintern Abbey’, in Wordsworth and Coleridge: The Lyrical Ballads (London:
Arnold, 1975), pp. 42-50
Nicholas Roe, ‘The Politics of the Wye Valley: Re-Placing “Tintern Abbey”’, in Nicholas
Roe, The Politics of Nature: William Wordsworth and Some Contemporaries (Basingstoke:
Palgrave, 2002)
Marjorie Levinson, ‘Insight and oversight: reading “Tintern Abbey”, in Wordsworth’s Great
Period Poems (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986)
Vincent Newey, ‘Keats, history and the poets’; Nicholas Roe, ‘Keats’s commonwealth’,
and Theresa M. Kelley, ‘Keats, ekphrasis and history’, in Nicholas Roe, Keats and
History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007)
Thomas McFarland, ‘The Clamour of Absence: Reading and Misreading in Wordsworth
Criticism’, in William Wordsworth: Intensity and Achievement (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1992), pp. 1-33
Michael O’Neill, Chapters 2 and 3 in Romanticism and the Self-Conscious Poem (Oxford:
Clarendon, 1997)
Week 10: The Byronic Hero
Byron, Manfred (Norton Anthology)
Peter L. Thorslev, Jr., The Byronic Hero: Types and Prototypes (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1962), pp. 165-76
Peter J. Manning, Byron and His Fictions (Detroit, Michigan: Wayne State University Press,
1978), pp. 71-87
Alan Richardson, ‘The Dangers of Sympathy: Sibling Incest in English Romantic Poetry’,
Studies in English Literature, 25 (1985), 737-54
Alan Rawes, ‘Childe Harold III and Manfred’, in Drummond Bone, ed., The Cambridge
Companion to Byron (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004)
Week 11: Dramatic Monologues
Tennyson, ‘Ulysses’ (Norton Anthology)
Robert Browning, ‘My Last Duchess’ (Norton Anthology)
Notes in The Poems of Tennyson, ed. by Christopher Ricks, 2nd edn, 3 vols (London:
Longman, 1988)
Christopher Ricks, Tennyson, 2nd edn (London: Macmillan, 1989), pp. 113-9
W. W. Robson, ‘The Dilemma of Tennyson’, in Critical Essays (London: Routledge, 1966)
W. W. Robson, ‘The Present Value of Tennyson’, in The Definition of Literature and Other
Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982)
Stefan Hawlin, The complete critical guide to Robert Browning (London: Routledge, 2001)
Assessment
Single Honours English and Joint Schools Students:
You are required to produce two essays for this course
• one essay of between 1,800 and 2,000 words to be submitted by 12.00 noon on Friday
of week seven, and
• one essay of between 3,600 and 4,000 words to be submitted by 12.00 noon on Friday
of week twelve (the end of the semester).
iBAMH Students
You are required to produce two essays for this course
• one essay with a maximum of 1,000 words to be submitted by 12.00 noon on Friday of
week seven. This essay is formative, which means that the piece will be assessed but will
not count toward your final unit mark.
• one essay with a maximum of 2,500 words to be submitted by 12.00 noon on Friday of
week twelve (the end of the semester). This essay is summative, which means that the
mark will count toward your final unit mark.
For each essay you are expected to discuss one or more of the topics from the course in
relation to one or more of the set texts. Your work should be focused on and informed
by the theoretical and critical questions addressed in class and by your secondary reading.
Essays should be submitted to the School Office, in 11 Woodland Road.
Essay Questions
Choose one topic from the following options for each essay.
Essay One:
1. Discuss the continuities and discontinuities between Old and Middle English poetry,
focused on either Beowulf and Gawain and the Green Knight, or The Wanderer and ‘The
Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale’.
2. Perform a close-reading and comparison of any two sonnets by any two writers.
3. Discuss the uses of the supernatural in the tragedies of Marlowe and Shakespeare.
Essay Two:
1. Compare the epic styles of Milton’s Paradise Lost and Pope’s The Rape of the Lock.
2. ‘Romantic transcendence is a bit of a white elephant’. Discuss.
3. Compare the development of character in Byron’s Manfred and Tennyson’s ‘Ulysses’,
or Browning’s ‘My Last Duchess’.
Reference Books:
I.
http://dictionary.oed.com/
The Oxford Companion to English Literature, ed. by Margaret Drabble, 6th edn (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2000)
M. H. Abrams, A Glossary of Literary Terms, 8th edn (Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace, 2005)
The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms, ed. by C. Baldick
The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory, ed. by J. A. Cuddon
II.
Paul Fussell, Poetic Meter and Poetic Form, rev. edn (New York: Random House, 1979)
John Hollander, Rhyme’s Reason, 3rd edn (New Haven and London: Yale University Press,
2001)
David Hopkins, ed., The Routledge Anthology of Poets on Poets (London: Routledge, 1994)
David Hopkins, ed., English Poetry: A Poetic Record, from Chaucer to Yeats, (London:
Routledge, 1990)
David Hopkins and Tom Mason, The Story of Poetry (Bristol: Broadside Books, 1992)
K. K. Ruthven, Critical Assumptions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979)
John Strachan and Richard Terry, Poetry, Elements of Literature (Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press, 2000)
Mark Strand and Eavan Boland, The Making of a Poem: A Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms
(New York: Norton, 2000)
III.
F. W. Bateson, ‘The Primacy of Meaning’, in English Poetry: A Critical Introduction, 2nd edn
(London: Longmans, 1966)
W. W. Robson, ‘On Liberty of Interpreting’, in The Definition of Literature and Other Essays
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp. 20-39
Geoffrey Strickland, ‘Thoughts on How we Read’, in Structuralism or Criticism? Thoughts on
How we Read (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 35-123
Essays on poetry by Sidney, Jonson, Dryden, Pope, Johnson, Wordsworth, Shelley, Mill,
and Arnold in Norton Anthology