Description

On completion of this course, students will be able to: Identify the historical and cultural backgrounds of classical poetry. Recognize the major themes and techniques of each century’s poetry. Describe the features of different types of poems. Identify the different poetic devices used when analyzing poems. Describe concepts and terms appropriate to the study of poetry. Use literary terminology, language structures and rhyming devices. Interpret new ideas from Courtly Love poetry to Romantic poetry. Analyze the relationship between a text and its biographical and cultural contexts. Write reading responses and critical essays on selected verse. Analyze the diction of the poems discussed in class. Listen to audio material of poets reading to recognize the effect of sound devices. Analyze a poem by focusing on its features. Discuss a variety of poems in class. Compare between poems on related themes. Conduct stylistic analyses to different verse forms. Give oral presentations on some poems of their choice. Write a short term-paper explaining the historical and cultural backgrounds as well as the major theme and technique of a poem of their choice. Improve their knowledge of the historical and the cultural backgrounds of classical poetry by providing them with work samples from the sixteenth to the late nineteenth centuries. Display knowledge of major verse forms. Read, appreciate, analyze and write critical essays on a variety of poems that belong to different periods and movements. Apply all learned poetic devices to the poems under study.

Objectives

• The course aims to introduce students to the complexity and pleasure of poetry. It provides an overview of the major developments in the English poetry history. It offers a series of introductions to key poetic genres, conventions and debates. It presents an array of theoretical and methodological approaches to the study of poetry. It equips students with a multifaceted framework with in-depth analyses might be achieved linking them to the multiple cultural, social and aesthetic contexts of their time. It introduces students to a variety of literary elements and devices including character, narrator, plot, setting, point of view, style, theme, tone, technique, and conflict.