◆Course Description:
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
◆课程描述：
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。教学内容选用16-20世纪英美诗歌名作；旨在让学生了解英诗要素，如意象、节奏、格律、修辞等；阅读莎士比亚、弥尔顿、邓恩、华兹华斯、济慈、布朗宁等英国著名诗人代表作品和惠特曼、狄金森、弗罗斯特等美国诗人代表诗作；挖掘诗歌主题以及诗化主题的艺术形式；从宏观角度揭示英美诗史脉络，讲解力求精练而不失其精要；从微观角度鞭辟入里地讲解名诗（片段），给学生一种豁然开朗又丝丝入扣的认知体验，达到引领学生进行英诗艺术审美体验，提高对英语语言的感受力和英美文学的鉴赏能力，拓展英美文学与文化知识，增强外语学习的文化意识，陶冶情操，提高人文素质。
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?
Multiple-Choice Questions for Week 1 (Poetry Delights and Instructs)
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?
Multiple-Choice Questions for Week 2 (William 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: John Milton\'s Life and Works
Lecture 3: Miltonic Sonnet
Lecture 4: Milton’s Sonnet 19: An Explanation
Lecture 5: Commentary on Milton\'s Sonnet 19
Lecture 6: The Invocation of Paradise Lost
Multiple-Choice Questions for Week 3 (John Milton)
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
Multiple-Choice Questions for Week 4 (John Donne)
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”: An Explanation
Multiple-Choice Questions for Week 5 (William Wordsworth)
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”: An Explanation
Lecture 4: “Negative Capability”
Lecture 5: “Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty”
Multiple-Choice Questions for Week 6 (John Keats)
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)
Multiple-Choice Questions for Week 7 (What Whitman)
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 -”
Multiple-Choice Questions for Week 8 (Emily Dickinson)
Week 9 Robert Frost: “A Road Less Traveled By”
Lecture 6: “Mowing”
Lecture 7: “Mending Wall”
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”
Multiple-Choice Questions for Week 9 (Robert Frost)