About This Course

The purpose of this course is to enable students to read various kinds of English poetry with understanding and appreciation. The course is not primarily historical, though poems from the 16th into the 20th century will be sampled. We shall do a lot of close readings of poetry in the lectures with emphasis on both the poetic language and poetic forms. Representative British and American poets like William Shakespeare, John Milton, John Donne, William Wordsworth, John Keats, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and Robert Frost will be focused respectively in each lecture. Such poetic forms as lyric, epic, and dramatic poetry will be discussed, while such poetic elements as rhythm and meter, figurative language, stanzaic forms will be carefully explored in poetry analysis in the lectures. Students are encouraged to practice reading aloud or even to learn by heart all the poems discussed in the course.

Requirements

College students.

Designed to meet the demands of general education in English among colleges and universities around the world, this course can be taken both as an elective course for English majors and non-English majors. It can also be regarded as an elective for graduate students whose research fields are not British and American literature.

Course Staff

Zongying Huang, Ph. D. from Peking University, Professor of English at Beijing Union University: the instructor of “Selected Readings in British and American Poetry, one of the best undergraduate on-line courses at national level to meet general education; the author of Emerson and American Poetic Tradition, A Comparative Study on Zhao Luorui's Chinese Translation of T S. Eliot 's The Waste Land, A Road Less Traveled By: The Deceptive Simplicity in the Poetry of Robert Frost, etc.. the editor of Selected Readings in British and American Poetry and A Literary Introduction to the Bible; the researcher who has completed such projects as a National Social Science Research Fund Project, two Humanities and Social Science Research Projects of the Ministry of Education, etc.

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