• header Image

Understanding Poetry

Home/ Understanding Poetry
Course Type Course Code No. Of Credits
Discipline Core NSUS1EN309 4

Course Coordinator and Team:                   SES Faculty

Email of course coordinator:                       pcbabed@aud.ac.in 

Pre-requisites: No

Course Description:

The course aims to provide a comprehensive understanding of the poetic form, techniques and traditions. This course will take students on a journey from elementary concepts to more advanced experimentations, allowing them to develop a solid foundation in analyzing and appreciating poetry through close reading techniques. It will begin with investigating the limitations and possibilities of defining poetry. As the course progresses through a range of poetic forms and techniques, the students will learn to move from the grain and texture of the text towards the work's cultural context continually to answer questions of social importance of poetry and role of criticism. The course also aims to encourage students to find links between poetry as a language and poetry as a discourse.

Course Objectives:

  • To introduce students to the fundamental elements of poetry, including rhyme, meter, imagery, and figurative language.
  • To familiarize students with various poetic forms and structures, enabling them to recognize and analyze their impact on the meaning and effect of a poem;
  • To develop students' skills in reading and analysis, enabling them to identify and interpret poetic devices, symbolism, and the effectiveness of poetic techniques.
  • To expose students to experimental and avant-garde forms of poetry, expanding their understanding of the possibilities of the poetic form.
  • To cultivate critical thinking skills in analyzing and evaluating poetry, enabling students to articulate and support their interpretations with evidence from the text.

Course Outcomes:

  • Identify and analyze the fundamental elements of poetry, including rhyme, meter, imagery, and figurative language.
  • Understand the historical and cultural contexts that influence poetic expression and recognize the connections between poetry and its sociocultural milieu.
  • Demonstrate knowledge of different poetic forms and structures and analyze how they contribute to the overall meaning and effect of a poem.
  • Examine experimental and avant-garde forms of poetry and evaluate their impact on traditional poetic conventions.
  • Apply (close) reading techniques to analyze and interpret individual poems, identifying poetic devices, symbolic meanings, and the effectiveness of poetic techniques.

Brief description of the modules:

Module 1: Introduction

Definition, Concept and Categorization: Through class lectures an introduction to poetry via these three important axes will be attempted. The students will also be briefly introduced to the ideas of major critics and theorists like Plato, Aristotle, Horace, Longinus, Sydney, Blake, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Arnold, Leavis, Eliot, Fry, et al. Students will be encouraged to participate in discussion on their understanding of poetry and the associated critical questions.

Module 2: Ways of Understanding Poetry:

Students will be introduced to the elements of poetry and poetic composition with a special focus on style, technique, scansion, metrics, etc. Students will be encouraged to apply their knowledge and understanding in the analyses of at least one poem per category that hasn't been discussed in class.

  • Tone and Attitude: John Milton's "On His Blindness" orRobert Herrick's "The Bad Season Makes the Poet Sad".
  • Mood: W. H. Auden's "Musee des Beaux Arts" or Thomas Hardy's "The Oxen"
  • Setting: Arnold's "Dover Beach"or Tennyson's "Ulysses"
  • Theme: George Meredith's "Lucifer in Starlight" or William Blake's "London"
  • Figures of Speech: Langston Hughes's "Harlem" or Peter Meinke's "Progress".
  • Tropes: Rabindranath Tagore's "Kabuliwallah" or Sylvia Plath's "Mirror".
  • Imagery: Edgar Allan Poe's "To Helen" or Emily Dickinson's "After Great Pain".
  • Symbolism: Edwin Muir's "Horses" or Joy Harjo's "She Had Some Horses".
  • Enactment: Jimmy Durham's "Columbus Day" or WislawaSzymborska's "Under One Certain Little Star".
  • Metrics: Alexander Pope's "Sound and Sense", Elizabeth Barret Browning's "How Do I Love Thee", and William Shakespear 's "Flowers".
  • Rhyme and Rhythm: "Agha Shahid Ali's "Postcard from Kashmir" or P. B. Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind".

Module 3: Forms of Poetry:

This module will investigate select forms of poetry through some representative examples as well as the insights/ skills developed in the previous module.

  • Narrative: Excerpts from The Rime ofAncient Mariner (1798) or Alexander Pushkin's The Gypsies (1827).
  • Lyric: Selections from A. E. Housman's A Shropshire Lad (1896) or W. H. Auden's "If I Could Tell You" (1940).
  • Elegy: Thomas Gray'sElegy Written in a Country Churchyard (1751).
  • Ode: John Keats's "Ode to a Nightingale" ( I 819) or "To Autumn" (1819).
  • Pastoral: Selections from Virgil's Eclogues (c. 1 BC) or Alexander Pope's Pastorals (1709).
  • Sonnet: Shakespeare'sSonnet 1 (1609) and Sonnet 154 (1609).
  • Villanelle: Dylan Thomas' "Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night" (1951) or Selections from Annie Finch and Marie-Elizabeth Mali's Villanelles (2012).
  • Haiku: Selections from Matsuo Basho's The Narrow Road to the Deep North (1702) or YoshaBuson's Picture Scrolls.
  • ConcretePoetry: George Herbert's "Easter Wings" (1633) or Louis Little Coon Oliver's "The Sharp-breasted Snake".
  • Blank Verse: Selections from John Keats's Hyperion (1820) or W. B. Yeats's "The Second Coming" (1920).
  • Free Verse: Selections from Leaves of Grass (.1855) by Walt Whitman or T. S. Eliot's "The Hollow Men".(1925).
  • Songs: Selections from Bob Dylan's "It's Alright, Ma I'm Only Bleeding (1964)", Woody Guthrie's "This Land is Your Land" (1944), -Leonard Cohen's "Anthem" (1992), Bhupen Hazarika's "Dela" (2001) and "AwaraHoon" (2001).

Module 4:  Conclusion:

Students will be encouraged in this module to investigate poetry and the poetic expression present in different forms, like slams, performance, mushairas, kavisammelans, etc.

Assessment Plan:

S.No

Assessment

Weightage

1

Fortnightly writing exercises

25%

2

Project/Presentation

25%

3

End-Semester Examination

50%

References:

  • Eagleton, Terry. How to Read a Poem. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2007.
  • Hopkins, David. The Routledge Anthology of Poets on Poets. London: Routledge, 1990. Kapoor, Kapil. Canonical Texts of English Literary Criticism. New Delhi: Academic Foundation, 1995.
  • Wolosky, Shira. The Art of Poetry: How to Read a Poem. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.
  • Brooks Jr., Cleanth and Robert Penn Warren. Understanding Poetry: An Anthology for College Students. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1938.
  • Dev, AnjanaNeira, AnuradhaMarwah and Swati Pal. Creative Writing: A Beginner's Manual. Delhi: Dorling Kindersley (India) Pvt. Ltd, 2009.
  • Ferguson, Margaret, Mary Jo Salter and Jon Stallworthy. Eds. The Norton Anthology of Poetry. NewYork: W.W. Norton and Company, 2005.
  • Gill, Richard. Mastering English Literature. London: Macmillan Education Limited, 1985. Kaminsky, Ilya and Susan Harris. Eds. The ECCO Anthology of International Poetry. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2010.
  • Leech, Geoffrey N. A Linguistic Guide to English Poetry. London: Longman, 1969. Wolosky, Shira. The Art of Poetry: How to Read a Poem. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.
  • Kaminsky, Ilya and Susan Harris. Eds. The ECCO Anthology of International Poetry. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2010.
  • Kapoor, Kapil. Canonical Texts of English Literary Criticism. New Delhi: Academic Foundation, 1995.
  • Kennedy, X. J., and Dana Gioia. Literature: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, Drama, and Writing. Pearson, 2013.
Top