Introduction

An Anecdote: Where Poetry Starts

Speaker, Listener, and Context

The Star-Spangled Banner

Lyric, Narrative, Dramatic

The Language of Poetry

Figurative Language

Allegory and Symbol

Tone of Voice

Repetition: Sounds and Schemes

Meter and Rhythm

Free Verse, Open Form and Closed Forms

Stanza Forms

Fixed Forms

Literary History, Poetic Conventions, and Theory

Writing about Poetry

Poetry

Anonymous

Western Wind

Bonny Barbara Allan

Sir Patrick Spens

Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503?-1542)

They Flee from Me

Whoso List to Hunt

Edmund Spenser (1552-1599)

Amoretti: Sonnet 75

Sir Philip Sidney (1554-1586)

Astrophel and Stella: Sonnet 1

Robert Southwell (1561?-1595)

The Burning Babe

Michael Drayton (1563-1631)

Idea: Sonnet 61

William Shakespeare (1564-1616)

Sonnet 18

Sonnet 20

Sonnet 29

Sonnet 73

Sonnet 116

Sonnet 129

Sonnet 130

When Daisies Pied (Spring and Winter)

Thomas Campion (1567-1620)

There Is a Garden in Her Face

John Donne (1572-1631)

The Flea

Holy Sonnet 10

Holy Sonnet 14

The Sun Rising

A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning

Ben Jonson (1573-1637)

On My First Son

Slow, Slow, Fresh Fount

Mary Wroth (1587?-1651?)

In This Strange Labyrinth How Shall I Turn

Robert Herrick (1591-1674)

To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time

George Herbert (1593-1633)

Easter Wings

The Pulley

Redemption

Edmund Waller (1606-1687)

Song

John Milton (1608-1674)

How Soon Hath Time

On the Late Massacre in Piedmont

When I Consider How My Light Is Spent

Anne Bradstreet (1612-1672)

The Author to Her Book

Richard Lovelace (1618-1658)

To Lucasta, Going to the Wars

Andrew Marvell (1621-1678)

To His Coy Mistress

John Dryden (1631-1700)

To the Memory of Mr. Oldham

Jonathan Swift (1667-1745)

A Description of a City Shower

Alexander Pope (1688-1744)

from An Essay on Criticism

Ode on Solitude

Thomas Gray (1716-1771)

Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard

William Blake (1757-1827)

The Chimney Sweeper

The Little Black Boy

A Poison Tree

The Tyger

Robert Burns (1759-1796)

A Red, Red Rose

John Barleycorn

William Wordsworth (1770-1850)

I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud

It Is a Beauteous Evening

Nuns Fret Not at Their Convent's Narrow Room

Ode: Intimations of Immortality

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834)

Frost at Midnight

Kubla Khan

Work Without Hope

George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788-1824)

She Walks in Beauty

Stanzas

When We Two Parted

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)

Ode to the West Wind

Ozymandias

John Keats (1795-1821)

* Bright Star, Would I Were Stedfast as Thou Art

La Belle Dame sans Merci

Ode to a Nightingale

On First Looking into Chapman's Homer

Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861)

Sonnets from the Portuguese, 18

Sonnets from the Portuguese, 43

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882)

The Arsenal at Springfield

The Cross of Snow

Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849)

The Haunted Palace

The Raven

Sonnet: To Science

Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-1892)

The Eagle

The Lady of Shalott

Tears, Idle Tears

Ulysses

Robert Browning (1812-1889)

My Last Duchess

Porphyria's Lover

Walt Whitman (1819-1892)

A Noiseless Patient Spider

O Captain, My Captain

A Sight in Camp in the Daybreak Grey and Dim

Song of Myself, 1

Song of Myself, 5

Song of Myself, 6

Song of Myself, 11

Song of Myself, 21

Song of Myself, 32

Song of Myself, 52

When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer

Matthew Arnold (1822-1888)

Dover Beach

Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)

After Great Pain a Formal Feeling Comes

Because I Could Not Stop for Death

The Brain Is Wider than the Sky

I Felt a Funeral, in My Brain

Much Madness is Divinest Sense

A Narrow Fellow in the Grass

Some Keep the Sabbath Going to Church

The Soul Selects Her Own Society

Tell All the Truth, But Tell It Slant

There's a Certain Slant of Light

Wild Nights--Wild Nights

Christina Rossetti (1830-1894)

Up-Hill

Thomas Hardy (1840-1928)

Ah, Are You Digging on My Grave?

Channel Firing

Neutral Tones

The Ruined Maid

Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889)

God's Grandeur

Pied Beauty

Spring and Fall: To a Young Child

Emma Lazarus (1849-1887)

The New Colossus

A. E. Housman (1859-1936)

Eight O'Clock

Loveliest of Trees, the Cherry Now

Stars, I Have Seen Them Fall

"Terence, This Is Stupid Stuff . . ."

William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)

The Lake Isle of Innisfree

Leda and the Swan

Sailing to Byzantium

The Second Coming

The Song of Wandering Aengus

Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869-1935)

Firelight

The Mill

Richard Cory

Stephen Crane (1871-1900)

The Trees in the Garden Rained Flowers

The Wayfarer

Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906)

We Wear the Mask

Robert Frost (1874-1963)

Acquainted with the Night

After Apple-Picking

Design

Home Burial

The Need of Being Versed in Country Things

The Road Not Taken

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

Adelaide Crapsey (1878-1034)

Amaze

Languor after Pain

Trapped

Wallace Stevens (1879-1955)

Anecdote of the Jar

Disillusionment of Ten O'Clock

The Emperor of Ice-Cream

The Snow Man

Sunday Morning

The Worms at Heavens Gate

William Carlos Williams (1883-1963)

The Last Words of My English Grandmother

The Red Wheelbarrow

Spring and All

Ezra Pound (1885-1972)

In a Station of the Metro

Portrait d'une Femme

The River-Merchant's Wife: A Letter

Elinor Wylie (1885-1928)

Let No Charitable Hope

Ophelia

H. D. (Hilda Doolittle) (1886-1961)

Pear Tree

Sea Rose

Siegfried Sassoon (1886-1967)

Dreamers

Robinson Jeffers (1887-1962)

The Purse-Seine

Marianne Moore (1887-1972)

The Fish

Silence

T. S. Eliot (1888-1965)

Journey of the Magi

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

Preludes

Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950)

If I Should Learn, in Some Quite Casual Way

Oh, Oh, You Will Be Sorry for that Word

What Lips My Lips Have Kissed, and Where, and Why

Wilfred Owen (1893-1918)

Dulce et Decorum Est

e. e. cummings (1894-1962)

pity this busy monster,manunkind

plato told

r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r

* somewhere I have never travelled, gladly beyond

Jean Toomer (1894-1967)

Georgia Dusk

Louise Bogan (1897-1970)

Women

Langston Hughes (1902-1967)

Dream Boogie

* Harlem Sweeties

The Weary Blues

Stevie Smith (1902-1971)

Our Bog Is Dood

Countee Cullen (1903-1946)

Incident

Yet Do I Marvel

W. H. Auden (1907-1973)

As I Walked Out One Evening

Musée des Beaux Arts

The Unknown Citizen

Theodore Roethke (1908-1963)

Dolor

My Papa's Waltz

Root Cellar

Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979)

The Fish

One Art

* The Shampoo

Robert Hayden (1913-1980)

Those Winter Sundays

Dudley Randall (1914-2000)

Ballad of Birmingham

William Stafford (1914-1993)

Traveling through the Dark

Dylan Thomas (1914-1953)

Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night

Poem in October

Weldon Kees (1914-1955)

For My Daughter

Margaret Walker (1915-1998)

For Malcolm X

Gwendolyn Brooks (1917-2000)

the ballad of chocolate Mabbie

the mother

We Real Cool

Lawrence Ferlinghetti (b. 1919)

A Coney Island of the Mind, #15

May Swenson (1919-1989)

How Everything Happens

Howard Nemerov (1920-1991)

A Primer of the Daily Round

Richard Wilbur (b. 1921)

Junk

* For C

The Writer

Year's End

Philip Larkin (1922-1985)

Next, Please

This Be the Verse

The Whitsun Weddings

James Dickey (1923-1997)

The Heaven of Animals

Alan Dugan (1923-2003)

Love Song: I and Thou

Anthony Hecht (b. 1923)

The Dover Bitch

Third Avenue in Sunlight

Daniel Hoffman (b. 1923)

As I Was Going to Saint-Ives

Louis Simpson (b. 1923)

American Classic

My Father in the Night Commanding No

Vassar Miller (1924-1997)

Subterfuge

Donald Justice (b. 1925)

Counting the Mad

Carolyn Kizer (b. 1925)

The Ungrateful Garden

Pro Femina: Part Three

Maxine Kumin (b. 1925)

Noted in the New York Times

Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997)

A Supermarket in California

James Merrill (1926-1995)

Casual Wear

Frank O'Hara (1926-1966)

The Day Lady Died

W. D. Snodgrass (1926-2009)

Mementos, I

John Ashbery (b. 1927)

Farm Implements and Rutabagas in a Landscape

Paradoxes and Oxymorons

W. S. Merwin (b....