Department of English

As we sample a wide range of poets from every era of British poetry after the Restoration, we shall give particular attention to changing fashions in form, diction, and subject matter. To learn how poetic meter and form work, students will produce a series of verse exercises, one in heroic couplets, one a sonnet, one in some other fixed form. These will be graded only after their authors have revised them as often as they wish. Class participation, two short critical responses to poems, a mid-term, and a final examination will, with the verse exercises, determine grades.