This is the syllabus I copied when auditing the course by Prof Tien-En Kao [高天恩] in spring 2013. I hope I will have time to reread these poems, and good poetry definitely rewards those who rereads.
Week 1
Alexander Pope: “Sound and Sense”
Archibald MacLeish: “Ars Poetica”
Adrienne Rich: “Poetry: I”
Week 2
Wilfred Owen: “Dulce et Decorum Est”
Keith Douglas: “Vergissmeinnicht”
Thomas Hardy: “Channel Firing”
Week 3
William Shakespeare: “Winter”
Robert Hayden: “Those Winter Sundays”
Thomas Hardy: “The Darkling Thrush”
Gerard Manley Hopkins: “Spring”
Week 4
William Carlos Williams: “The Widow’s Lament in Springtime”
e.e. Cummings: “in Just__”
William Shakespeare: “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”
Robert Hayden: “The Whipping”
Gwendolyn Brooks: “Kitchenette Building”
Week 5
Langston Hughes: “Cross”, “Dream Deferred”, “Suicide Note”
William Carlos Williams: “The Red Wheelbarrow”
Philip Larkin: “A Study of Reading Habits”, “Toads”
Week 6
Philip Larkin: “Aubade”, “Church Going”
Matthew Arnold: “Dover Beach”
Week 7
Wallace Stevens: “Sunday Morning”
Week 8
A.E. Housman: “Is My Team Plowing?”, “Loveliest of Trees”, “Terence, this is stupid stuff”
Week 10
Sylvia Plath: “Mirror”
Ellen Kay: “Pathedy of Manners”
Adrienne Rich: “Storm Warnings”, “Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers”, “Living in Sin”
Week 11
Linda Pastan: “Ethics”, “To a Daughter Leaving Home”
Elizabeth Bishop: “One Art”, “The Fish”
Week 12
Richard Eberhart: “For a Lamb”
Walt Whitman: “A Noiseless Patient Spider”
Robert Frost: “Bereft”, “Fire and Ice”
Week 13
Frost: “After Apple-Picking”, “Desert Places”, “Design”, “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”
Week 14
Frost: “Mending Wall”, “Nothing Gold Can Stay”, “The Road Not Taken”, “Out, Out”
Week 15
Seamus Heaney: “The Forge”, “Digging”
Richard Wilbur: “Mind”, “The Writer”
Week 16
William Shakespeare: “That Time of Year”
John Keats: “When I have fears that I may cease to be”, “To Autumn”, “Ode on a Grecian Urn”
Week 17
William Butler Yeats: “When You Are Old”, “The Wild Swans at Coole”, “Sailing to Byzantium”, “The Second Coming”
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