Abstract: After reading "Beowulf," students will identify Beowulf's heroic traits, generalize from these traits a list of typical traits for heroes, and then use these traits to compare Beowulf with contemporary heroes. As a culminating activity, students will define their concept of hero and then create a booklet of personal heroes from various areas.
Abstract: Emphasis on the analytical reading of lyric poetry in England and the United States. Syllabus usually includes Shakespeare's sonnets, Donne, Keats, Dickinson, Frost, Eliot, Marianne Moore, Lowell, Rich, and Bishop. A chronological survey of lyric poetry in the English language by major writers, running from Beowulf to the end of the twentieth century. For instance: Shakespeare, Donne, Wroth, Herbert, Milton, Marvell, Pope, Wordsworth, Keats, Whitman, Dickinson, Yeats, Frost, Stevens, Eliot, Auden, others more recent. There will be some attention to longer poems but mostly we will be reading (and hearing) short works. The last two weeks of the semester will be devoted to works selected and presented by members of the class. Frequent reading aloud, two group presentations, four or five papers (two revised) totaling at least twenty pages of final draft.
Abstract: This 6-unit subject gives students the opportunity to immerse themselves in the poetry of two living Nobel Laureates: the Caribbean poet, Derek Walcott, and the Northern-Irish poet, Seamus Heaney. We will begin and end the semester with their magnificent epic works: Heaney's translation of the Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf, and Walcott's Omeros (a modern epic set in the West Indies). Between these major narrative poems, we will read a rich selection of their shorter poems, as well as some of their reflections in prose on what poetry does, on what other poets do, and what it means to write in English from the historical and political situation of Northern Ireland (for Heaney) or the Caribbean (for Walcott).