This course looks at poetry and how it works. It considers poems from many different periods (from the sixteenth century to the present), in a wide variety of traditional forms (ballad, lyric, sonnet, epic, narrative, ode, dramatic monologue, etc.), using a range of different types of versification (blank verse, common measure, couplets, and so on). Students taking the course can expect to improve their skills in the critical appreciation of poetry; and, on the principle that the best way to learn is by doing, they will be given plenty of opportunity for composing different kinds of verse of the types studied.
