- Department: English and Related Literature
- Credit value: 20 credits
- Credit level: H
- Academic year of delivery: 2022-23
- See module specification for other years: 2024-25
I don’t know but I’ve been told
Terza rima’s mighty old
Right then, you ’orrible lot. If you like poetry, but your understanding of how it works needs building up, this module is for you. You will undergo a rigorous training in poetic form, starting with prosody (rhythm and metre), progressing through diction, ambiguity, syntax, stanza and poem shapes, argument, genre and more. Week by week you will encounter samples of poetry, grouped to throw light on different aspects of poetics, and you will learn how to identify and describe them accurately. Lectures will introduce you to important critical and formal concepts, and essential background reading will expand your understanding of methodologies and strategies for close reading and analysis.
What makes this module different, however, is that seminar time will be dedicated 100% to practical criticism: that means that each week you will receive new, unseen, anonymized samples of poetry and you will analyse them formally as a group, under my guidance. We will not be discussing the poems’ broader historical background or authorship, and will touch on matters of identity, politics, etc. only as far as they are raised by questions of poetic technique (which may be more than you think). The objection that poetry is fuzzy, vague, and subjective will not be tolerated, and our discussions will be none of those things.
You will build up the knowledge and the requisite mental muscle to describe and analyse poetry clearly, confidently, and with technical precision. This module is your opportunity to get on top of all the difficult stuff about poetry you’ve been hazy on up to now. It’s a tough course, but you’ll come out at the end with a real and informed understanding of this beautiful and complex art form.
Occurrence | Teaching period |
---|---|
A | Spring Term 2022-23 |
This module aims to supply a technical knowledge of poetic form that you may have found lacking, or imperfect, up to now. It provides a training in close reading skills for poetry, and offers a chance to do unhurried, careful, formal analysis of a wide range of unseen texts. The module will give you real substantive knowledge of the formal techniques of poetry, as well as a training in careful, critical, detail-oriented textual analysis which is a great transferable skill.
On successful completion of the module, you should be able to:
Seminars will be taken up with practical criticism of poems, rather than discussion of reading done during the week. To make sure you are busy during the week short homework assignments will be given (formal exercises, writing tasks, short tests). However, in order to shore up the content of the lectures, as well as to provide fruitful methodological examples, there will be quite substantial further reading
Task | % of module mark |
---|---|
Essay/coursework | 100 |
None
You will be given the opportunity to hand in a 1000 word formative essay in the term in which the module is taught (usually in the week 7 seminar). Material from this essay may be re-visited in your summative essay and it is therefore an early chance to work through material that might be used in assessed work. This essay will be submitted in hard copy and your tutor will annotate it and return it two weeks later (usually in your week 9 seminar). Summary feedback will be uploaded to your eVision account. All students will have the opportunity to give an in-class individual presentation during a seminar in weeks 2-9.
Task | % of module mark |
---|---|
Essay/coursework | 100 |
Sample texts may include, but will not be limited to, all or parts of the following: