Department of English

How does a sonnet live on after Shakespeare?  How is the ballad form a political expression for the working poor? What does mock epic poetry have to do with consumer culture?  This course is a survey of British poetry from the Restoration period to beginning of the 20th century, with an emphasis on the 18th and 19th centuries.  We will study how forms like the epic, ode, pastoral, and elegy are reinvented over the course of two centuries.  Key themes will be memory, sex, the sublime, and revolution.  Poets will include: Milton, Dryden, Rochester, Behn, Pope, Swift, Gray, Goldsmith, Wordsworth, Shelley, Coleridge, Byron, the Rossettis, Hopkins, Yeats, T.S. Eliot.  

Assignments may include two short essays (2-3 pages), one comparison essay (6-8 pages), a midterm, and a creative, final group project.