8
Poetic Form: Open and Closed
Closed form poetry did not just dominate poetry from its origins up to the end of the 19th century; it was synonymous with poetry. For thousands of years, all poems were written in closed form. It was not until the middle of the 19th century that poets like Walt Whitman in the United States and a group of French poets (who came up with the term vers libre–or “free verse”) gave up on meter and began to write poems without any prescribed forms. Indeed, the first, easiest test of whether a poem is in open or closed form is simply to know when it was written: before 1850, closed; after 1850—better check and see.
But that won’t tell you anything about what makes a poem “open” or “closed.”
Two ways of thinking about form.
The poetics you were introduced to in the previous chapter was all about so-called “closed” or “fixed form” poetry. The word “closed” (or “fixed”) must be understood properly. In fact, language itself is never absolutely open or absolutely closed. On the one hand, language is always more or less fixed—by grammar, syntax (word order), and the meanings of the words.
- If I say “I locked my keys in the car,” everyone should know what I mean. These are the words the language asks you to use, and this is the order you are expected to put them in if you want to say the thing expressed here. There aren’t a lot of ways to say it. And if you do try to say it another way, you risk not being understood. Language is always more or less closed.
But, on the other hand, language is always also more or less open; within the restrictions of grammar, syntax, and meanings, one can always say new things. One can recombine words, use old words in new ways (“verbing” a noun for example), and reorder phrases in new ways. It would not be language if content didn’t play (move about) within form like furniture in a house. Language needs to be both open and closed to function.
- One can say, “my car was locked with the keys inside.” Or “Inside my locked car are my keys.” One can say, “my keys were locked in the car.” People will understand you if you say, “Locked in the car were my keys.” But they’d think you were weird. (You can also say, “I locked my keys in the car” and mean, as a secret code, “I left the disk drive with the secret formula in my computer.” But you’ll probably have to establish the code beforehand.) But you probably can’t say with any hope of being understood, “Keys my in car left locked I.” Not even Yoda has that much freedom.
So, to repeat: language itself is always more or less open, more or less closed.
So what do we mean when we call some poems “open” and some “closed”?
There are two ways to think about this. Both of them apply.
In fact, all poems exist on a continuum.
Imagine if we had a class of eighth graders and we had to put them into two groups: tall and short. There will be some in the middle. But we don’t have a middle circle. Everyone is marked as “tall” or “short.”
When critics and other readers use the words “open” and “closed,” they tend to think of them as designating two fields that never touch.
They put some poems in the left circle and some in the right.
Although it can be misleading, it is also useful. The judgment is made based on certain criteria, the most important of which is meter.
We say that poems that lack rhyme and meter are “open” in form, and poems that have rhyme and meter are closed.
And that way of thinking will cover most of what we need to say this week.
But we can do better. Once you start studying what is called “open” and “closed” form, things start to become complicated.
What is called closed form poetry is an organization of language that adds more than common rigidity to language and then tries to create the maximum possible freedom—or openness—within that space. Closed form is an obstacle course for the poet to run language through as gracefully as possible. Watching language run gracefully through these often formidable obstacles is one of the greatest pleasures of reading poetry.
While there is more than one way for a poem to be considered closed, the vast majority of poems are called closed because of their steady beat. Closed form poems also often rhyme, and when they rhyme they do so in consistent and sometimes complex patterns. They also often repeat the same stanza over and over (in a song, this is often called a “chorus”). But it is the meter, not the rhyme or the stanza, that defines the closed type.
The Varieties of “Closed Form.”
Although meter has been the most prominent element in closed form poetry since the Middle Ages, there are other factors besides meter that determine whether or not a poem is in closed form. But let me be clear here: if a poem is written in meter, it’s closed. Period. As for rhyme, while most poems that rhyme are closed and most open form poems do not rhyme, rhyme alone is not a good indication of whether a poem is in open or closed form. Why? Open form poems sometimes use rhyme (in a limited way), but more importantly many closed form poems do not rhyme.
So what besides meter can close a poem?
Alliteration can. Old English poetry (like Beowulf) was written in alliterative verse. Alliterative poetry is closed by the number of repeated sounds in the line. The line of an alliterative poem has, usually, three instances of the same sound (note the “f” sounds in this line: “The folk-kings’ former fame we have heard of”). Alliterative verse does not necessarily count stresses or syllables, only alliterative sounds.
Accent Count Sometimes Old English alliterative verse does count accents. When it does, or when any verse does, we call that “accentual verse.” In this type, one can have as many unstressed syllables as one wants, but the accented syllables remain constant or follow a pattern.
Syllable count Syllabic verse (such as haiku) counts only syllables. It is not written in meter or rhyme. In fact, any poem that maintains the same number of syllables in each line or in corresponding lines in each stanza is closed by syllable count alone.
Accentual-syllabic As you may have guessed from the name, if you count both the syllables and the accents, you have accentual-syllabic verse. The sonnet is an accentual-syllabic form. But so is most English-language poetry.
Pre-established form. Named forms, such as villanelle and sestina (we’ll learn about them later in this chapter), are determined by word or line pattern. Villanelles rhyme, but they don’t have to be in meter. Sestinas don’t rhyme and are rarely in meter.
If none of these criteria apply (meter, alliteration, syllable count, or form name), then you can be pretty sure your poem is in open form. We’ll be reading more about Open Poetic Form during Week Nine.
Here’s a flow chart for the confused.
Some Basic Stanza Patterns in Closed Form Poetry
In traditional, closed form poetry (the dominant system of poetry in English from the late Middle Ages to the early 20th Century), lines are often grouped together in different patterns.
Stanza: a group of lines, usually set off by a space above and below, is called a stanza. Some stanza patterns are more regular than others. For example, in John Milton’s long epic poem Paradise Lost (if read out loud, it would take about 12 hours–it’s a very expanded version of the story of Adam and Eve being tempted by Satan in the Garden of Eden, Genesis 2-3), he uses stanzas of differing lengths in the way that a prose writer would use paragraphs to organize their ideas together. Rather than using a regular stanza pattern, Milton’s main organizing feature is the rhythm of each line. He uses unrhymed iambic pentameter (based on the discussion in last week’s reading, I’m hoping you know what that means; if not, make sure to ask me about it), or blank verse.
Long ago, English poets experienced the poverty of rhyme in our language (rhymes are more common in some other languages such as Italian). Hence, they often did not bother with it. Retaining the meter of the most common English line, iambic pentameter, they dispensed with end rhyme. Shakespeare’s famous “To be or not to be” soliloquy from Hamlet is a good example:
To be or not to be, that is the question.
Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them. To die, to sleep—
No more, and by that sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to…
Some regular stanza patterns, however, do have names. General names for stanzas are generally based on the number of lines.
There’s no name for a one-line stanza. But a two-line stanza is called a couplet. (A “heroic couplet” is a pair of rhymed iambic pentameter lines.) Here are some other stanza names:
Three lines = tercet
Four lines = quatrain
Five lines = quintet
Six lines = sestet
Seven lines = septet
Eight lines = octave or octet
Stanzas longer than eight lines are rare (although in The Faerie Queene, Spenser did use a nine-line stanza: eight lines of iambic pentameter with a concluding “Alexandrine,” iambic hexameter, with the rhyme scheme of ABABBCBCC, the result of which he got a stanza pattern named after himself).
To give the basic name for a stanza, one need only count the number of lines. Nothing else matters. (The tricky thing about this, though, is that sometimes these stanzas are separated and sometimes they’re not. Pope, for example, uses rhymed couplets in his poetry, but he arranges these lines in varying stanza lengths–Pope’s stanzas work more as a prose paragraph does.)
However, in addition to these general names based on the number of lines, certain stanzas have more specific names based on the particular combination of the number of lines, the meter, and the rhyme scheme. For example, an iambic pentameter tercet that rhymes aaa is called a triplet.
At once extinguish’d all the faithless name;
And I myself, in vengeance of my shame,
Had fall’n upon the pile, to mend the fun’ral flame.
Terza Rima: Terza rima is a special kind of tercet that was used by the Italian poet Dante in his famous Divine Comedy. Terza Rima stanzas’ interlocking rhyme sequence runs aba bcb cdc, etc. Percy Bysshe Shelley has done a particularly good job in this form in English. Here’s an example, the first of five sonnet (more on sonnets next week) stanzas in Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind,” which we read in Week Five (and you might reread this week).
You might notice that this sonnet also ends with a couplet.
A four-line stanza written in iambic tetrameter, or alternating iambic tetrameter and iambic trimeter, is called a ballad quatrain or ballad stanza.
All in the merry month of May,
When green buds they were swellin’,
Young Jemmy Grove on his death-bed lay,
For love of Barbara Allen.
Ottava rima is an octet of iambic pentameter lines with the rhyme scheme ABABABCC. Originally, this stanza form developed in Tuscany in the 13th and 14th centuries. It was used for long epic/narrative poems on heroic themes, but it eventually came to be associated with mock-heroic works. Lord Byron, for example, uses this form in his mock-heroic epic Don Juan (written between 1819 and 1824).
There are a great number of specialized stanzas in English poetry. We will not, however, be concerned with any others for now.
Some Traditional Poetic Forms
Lyric, Narrative, Dramatic, the ancient distinction, held until the 18th-century. It derives from Aristotle (who used the word “epic” rather than “narrative”). From the 19th-century on, it has lost categorical force.
Lyric, poetry written from the first-person point of view of the poet. Originally poems intended to be recited or sung to the accompaniment of a lyre. (Almost all the poetry we are reading this quarter is in this mode as lyric poetry has become almost synonymous with “poetry” in general.)
Narrative, epic poetry, poetry that tells a story (usually in third-person point of view) in which a variety of characters speak and interact. What had been the stuff of narrative poetry has become the purview of novels and prose fiction nowadays.
Dramatic, poetry told in the point of view of character(s) only (usually no narrator as in the narrative/epic mode).
This categorization of types held from the time of Aristotle (4th C. BCE) until the time of Samuel Johnson (18th C. CE). Most poetry today, however, is written in the lyric mode. The “Dramatic” and “Narrative” modes have been largely taken over by prose fiction. The subgenres, mostly subgenres of lyric, must still be recognized, however.
Poetry can also be Didactic or pedagogical in nature–poetry written to state a message or teach a body of knowledge. One of the earliest texts that we might identify as a kind of Physics textbook–Lucretius’s On the Nature of Things, written in the first century BCE in Latin–is written in “verse” form (or what we might more commonly call “poetry”).
The Ode: The ode comes in a number of flavors—Pindaric, Horatian, English, Irregular. We’re not going to cover them individually. Some are very strict in form (or “closed”), some very loose (or “open”).
Its origins are in the Latin poetry of the Roman Empire, and there its form is very strict. Some English poets imitated Latin forms. But most practitioners of the Ode in English have taken only some of the particulars of the ancient ode to heart as they reproduce the form. The ode is a longer poem, serious or meditative in nature, commonly about events of a public nature, written in formal language and usually having a strict stanzaic structure.
It’s hard to come up with a better definition than that because the actual poems that call themselves odes vary a lot. You will notice, for example, that Pope’s “Ode on Solitude” is a short poem—unusual for an ode—and that Keats’ “great odes” are about very private matters. In fact, from the late 18th century on, odes commemorating public events rarely survive the event of their publication. The odes we read today do not seem so public. Let’s look briefly at two odes, one with a regular stanza, the other irregular.
Regular odes, such as those of Keats, are often composed in very elaborate stanzas. Students often find these difficult to read both because of the form and because of the elaborate language.
Here’s the first stanza of the “Ode to a Nightingale.” It’s intimidating even to look at:
This is exactly the kind of thing that makes students say they hate poetry. It can make you feel stupid. That’s a false impression however. You can scan the poem and note the rhyme scheme if you like. We’re going to be concerned primarily with the language—which is the most significant feature that separates the ode from other forms.
What should you notice about it? You may or may not find Shakespearean sonnets (we’ll be focusing on those more next week) difficult. If you do, it is not because the language itself is difficult; it is because the language is old. If you’d lived in 1595, you would not have had trouble reading Shakespeare. On the other hand, Keats’ odes have always been difficult. They use words that were unusual or specialized even in their own day. They also have the most formal syntax possible, and allusions only educated people could get. (Did the average coal miner of the early 19th century know of the river “Lethe,” the classical river of forgetfulness through which the dead soul passed in order to forget its early life as it crossed into the underworld? It was one of five rivers in Hades.)
Here’s a paraphrase of the first stanza of Keats’s poem: Listening to you, little nightingale, makes my heart ache, and I feel a drowsy numbness pain my senses as though I’d drunk the deadly poison Hemlock or as though I’d drunk some other dulling drug to the bottom of the glass. If I’d listened to your song one more minute, I think I would have sunk down into the river of forgetfulness. It’s not because I envy your happy life that I feel this way; it’s because you are too happy in your happiness. It’s because you—light-winged spirit of the trees—sing your strong, beautiful song about summer (in a musical place full of green trees and lots of shadows) so easily, so naturally. [Whereas I, the poor human poet, have to work so damn hard to make my poems—and I don’t end up with anything nearly so beautiful as your song.]
The meaning isn’t hard. Only the language.
As far as the stanza goes, I want you to notice that although it is as formal as a sonnet (again, we will be looking at that form more next week), the stanza was freely chosen. If Keats had written the ode in some other stanza, it would still be an ode. The length of the stanza and of the poem is up to the poet as well. He’s not restricted to a certain number of lines.
Beyond the structure (it needs to have some structure), and the language (formal) and the subject matter (serious), any restrictions the poet puts on him or herself are freely chosen.
The irregular ode is even more free. We have one on our syllabus. Here’s a sample stanza:
Ode: Intimations of Immortality from
Recollections of Early Childhood
You’ll notice that words like “celestial” (heavenly) and “yore” are very formal. The tone of the poem is serious, but the line length varies quite a lot—more even than it seems to from looking at it. The long lines are not all the same length nor are the short lines. (If you scan this yourself, you will see this.) The rhyme scheme is also unpredictable: ababa cddc in the first stanza but aabcbcded elsewhere. (Where does that “e” come from? It’s part of an internal rhyme in line 16: “But yet I know, wher’er I go.”)
You’ll also notice that the number of lines within each stanza varies. It’s obvious why it’s called “irregular.”
Both the sonnet and the ode are formal poems, but for the most part the ode is a more open form in English than the sonnet. The poet is freer to choose the length and the stanza and the rhyme scheme. (But the poet may have less room for choice in the subject matter or tone.)
Ballad: Folk and Literary: Our second form gets us back to the very roots of poetry. One of the oldest reasons that poems have rhyme and meter is that these elements made the poems easier to memorize. We have kept rhyme and meter so long because they are pleasurable in themselves. But preliterate people used them also for their mnemonic value. The ballad is among the oldest forms in English verse. Not only can it be easily remembered, it can easily be set to music and sung. Virtually all ballads have in common their stanzaic form (but not every poem using this form is a ballad). The ballad stanza or ballad quatrain is a four-line stanza that rhymes abcb (or sometimes abab–many traditional hymns use this form for their lyrics and this form is hence sometimes called hymn meter or common meter). It consists of either four lines in iambic tetrameter, or alternating iambic tetrameter and iambic trimeter. The first is called “eights and eights” because there are eight syllables in each line. The second option is called “eights and sixes.”
Eights and eights:
O, she is young and she is fair
With evil eye that longs to roam.
But she is mine, and so beware
If e’er into her eye you come.
Eights and sixes:
When as King Henry rulde this land,
The second of that name,
Besides the queene, he dearly lovde
A faire and comely dame.
Early ballads were meant to be sung in the evening or on holidays to entertain weary, hardworking people. They differ from literary ballads in that they have no individual author. They came into being before copyright, and, having no owners and being easily remembered, were told and retold, written and rewritten over and over. They were often set to familiar tunes that could be applied to different poems. (For example, the U.S. national anthem used the tune of a pre-existing British drinking song in popular culture.) Just about the only language today that circulates like a ballad did in the fourteenth century is a joke. People improved ballads in retelling or just replaced forgotten stanzas with their own. Once they were finally written (and many of course were never written down and have been lost), they very likely were written down in several versions.
Aside from their stanza form (they can be any length of course–however long it takes to tell the story), the one thing they have in common with literary ballads is that they tell a story. Usually it’s a sad story, often a sad love story. Ballads also often have refrains: repeated lines or stanzas.
An example of a literary ballad is Keats’ “La Belle Dame Sans Merci.” I want you to notice that this ballad can properly exist in only one form—Keats’ final version. Although its story is quasi-medieval (it seems to tell the kind of story an ancient folk ballad would have told), it’s much more regular in its meter than the folk ballad is. It seems to have been written (as it was) by a self-conscious poet who was very carefully composing a poem, not by a wandering minstrel who is trading entertaining stories for bread. He will not be able to compensate for the imperfections in his meter with his voice. (Note that I am not requiring a reading of this specific poem, but it is on the list of supplemental poems if you’re curious.)
Elegy : As with so many words in the study of poetry, this one has a complex history and may designate different things at different times. For the last several hundred years, however, the word has been used almost exclusively to signify mostly mournful poetry lamenting loss, usually through death, of a loved person. Elegies can be either general, as in Gray’s most famous “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” or specific, as Tennyson’s In Memoriam A. H. H., which was written to help the poet overcome the loss of his best friend Arthur Hallam.
A sub-genre that played a more prominent role in the past (it has its origins in classical Greek and Latin literature and enjoyed a resurgence during the Elizabethan era–1558-1603–in Britain) is Pastoral Elegy where an elegy is set in the context of an idealized rural environment, featuring an anachronistic use of shepherds. The persona of such a poem is reflecting on the death of a fellow “shepherd” (but the poet is usually living in an urban context–only using this rural context in a nostalgic sense). Two prominent examples of this subgenre include Milton’s Lycidas and Shelley’s Adonais: An Elegy on the Death of John Keats about the death of his friend, the poet John Keats.
Epic: One of the most basic and ancient classificatory divisions of all poetry is into the Narrative, Dramatic and Lyric. Although this three-fold distinction is of some use, particularly in understanding the poetry written before the 19th century, today, when what presents itself as poetry is overwhelmingly lyric poetry, it is no longer the primary rubric through which we learn to understand what poetry is. When it was, epic poetry, a form of narrative poetry, was considered the highest form of the art. Narrative poetry, as the name reveals, tells a story. Epic poetry tells a particular type of story. Epic poetry is always long, traditionally 12 or 24 books (similar to chapters) (reading Paradise Lost out loud, for example, would take about 12 hours–an hour per book). It tells the story of a hero whose heroic deeds define not only heroism but the culture in which those deeds are performed. Achilles and Odysseus stand for the Greek culture that told their stories in the Iliad and the Odyssey. Adam and Eve stand for the whole Christian West in Milton’s Epic Paradise Lost. Epic poetry defines its culture through a limited view of a lost past, a time of heroism and great deeds, when, as they say, giants roamed the earth. Although there have been many attempts to write epics since the 17th century, most scholars agree that the epic form came to its end at that time. What followed was either epic parodies, such as the “mock epic” form popular in the 18th century, in which the element of the epic were used to describe and mock ordinary events (such as Pope’s The Rape of the Lock), and serious, longer narratives that lack too many of the qualities or elements that the use of the word to describe them is more suggestive than literal, e.g. Wordworth’s “epic” poem about the development of a poetic mind (The Prelude) or E. B. Browning’s novel-in-verse, Aurora Leigh.
Dramatic Monologue: If epic provides the best example of narrative poetry, dramatic monologue provides at least the most identifiable example of dramatic poetry. Narrative poetry tells a story; dramatic poetry presents a situation. This type of poem was particularly popular in the 19th century, and the master practitioner is Robert Browning. In this kind of poem, Browning will allow an imaginary character to speak. And as there was no narrator to help orient the reader into the action and there is never more than a single speaker whose words are available to us, the reader is compelled to reconstruct what is going on in the scene through the words of this single speaker. Complicating the situation still further is the fact that the tone of the speech is often at odds with the subject. The readers’ reaction to “My Last Duchess” (not required reading, but interesting anyways) is first stalled and then intensified by, for example, a murderer explaining in such a matter-of-fact why how and why he has killed his beloved. The dramatic monologue is often described as a speech from an unwritten play.
Villanelle: Like so many French forms, the villanelle is complex and difficult to write. Unlike the dramatic monologue, it is defined by form rather than content. In this, it resembles the sonnet. It is a great form for showing off. It consists of 19 lines
- five tercets that rhyme aba, and
- an ending quatrain that rhymes abaa
The real distinctive feature of the form, however, is the repetition of the first and third lines of the first stanza in specific places throughout the poem. The first line of the first stanza will be repeated as the last line of the second and fourth stanzas and the third line of the final stanza. The last line of the first stanza will recur as the last line of the third, fifth and final stanzas. In the best examples of the type, the meaning of the lines varies slightly with every iteration though the words do not change at all.
Sestina: Yet more complex is the sestina. Like the villanelle, the sestina has no set line length. In fact, in the shortest possible version of the form, Lloyd Schwartz has published a sestina containing only six different words, one word per line (“Six Words”). Most sestinas are much longer. What matters here is not meter or rhyme but the word that ends each line. The form consists of
- six six-line stanzas and
- one three-line final stanza (called an envoy).
The last word of each of the six lines of the first stanza must be repeated as the last word of each of the six lines of every other stanza before the envoy, in the following invariable order:
1-2-3-4-5-6 (in stanza one)
6-1-5-2-4-3 (in stanza two),
3-6-4-1-2-5 (in stanza three),
5-3-2-6-1-4 (in stanza four),
4-5-1-3-6-2 (in stanza five), and
2-4-6-5-3-1 (in stanza six).
5-3-2 (in the envoy)
You will notice that numbers are used to designate these words rather than letters; this is because there is no requirement that the words rhyme, and overwhelmingly they do not. In addition to the ending words, the envoy incorporates the other three words in the middle of each line in the order 1-4-6.
Forms tend to start as individual poems—nonce forms—whose forms other poets find so intriguing that they wish to repeat them. Hence there are innumerable other forms, many more obscure than these I’ve presented here. And new forms can always be created while old forms fall into disuse until some clever, historically-minded poet recovers them. At the same time, poets travel the world, or read the world’s books, in order to find and adapt foreign forms, the best example of which is perhaps the use of Japanese Haiku in English, a surprisingly successful transformation given how unlike the two languages are in even their basic understanding of the boundaries of a word. Next week, we will investigate the form of the sonnet, a poetic form that the English picked up from an Italian form.
Assigned Poems:
- Milton, first two sentences from Paradise Lost I.1-26 (first stanza) (example of blank verse)
- Pope, Section One from An Essay on Man Epistle II (example of couplets)
- (You might recall Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind” from Week Five as an example of terza rima.)
- Shelley, “Mutability” (example of quatrains)
- Tennyson, In Memoriam A.H.H. #95 (example of quatrains and elegies)
- Newton, “Amazing Grace” (example of ballad stanza form)
- Dickinson, #J712/F479 “Because I could not stop for Death” (example of ballad stanza form)
- Byron, Dedication to Don Juan (example of ottava rima) (This is quite long; you need not read more than a few stanzas. It’s basically Byron dissing on and making fun of the Lake Poets (Robert Southey, William Wordsworth, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge). Bryon saw this group as a bunch of sellouts because initially they were in favor of the French Revolution, but they became more conservative with Southey becoming the official Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom in 1813.)
VILLANELLES (I’d recommend reading at least a couple of these):
- Thomas, “Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night”
- Bishop, “One Art”
- Auden, “If I Could Tell You”
- Joyce: Villanelle from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
SESTINA (you need only read one of these):
- Bishop, “Sestina”
- Bishop, “A Miracle for Breakfast” (sestina)
- Auden, “Paysage Moralisé” (sestina)
- Schwartz, “Six Words” (sestina)
- Paredez, “Uvalde Shooting Highlights Role of Doors in Security Plans” (adapted sestina)
ODES (Pick 3 odes from the following list–including at least one of Keats’ 1819 odes):
- Keats, “To Autumn,” “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” “Ode to a Nightingale,” “Ode on Melancholy,” “Ode to Psyche,” “Ode on Indolence” (1819)
- Milton, “L’Allegro” and “Il Penseroso” (written between 1630-45)
- Dryden, “Alexander’s Feast; or, the Power of Music” (1697)
- Gray, “Ode on the Death of a Favorite Cat, Drowned in a Tub of Gold Fishes” (1747)
- Collins, “Ode to Evening” (1747); “Ode on the Poetical Character” (1747)
- Wheatley, “On Imagination” (1773)
- Coleridge, “Dejection: An Ode” (1802)
- Wordsworth, “Ode: Intimations of Immortality” (1802-04); “Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey” (1798)
- Hölderlin, ”The Ister” and “As on a Holiday” (written between 1799-1803)
- Byron, “Prometheus” (1816)
- Shelley, “Mont Blanc” (1816); “Ode to the West Wind” (1819)
- Hughes, “Let America Be America Again” (1936)
- Data, “Ode to Spot” (c. 2369)
Some Poems Suggested by Lindsay and Bergstrom (not required):
“Caedmon’s Hymn” (Links to an external site.)
Audio recording (Links to an external site.)
Geoffrey Chaucer, “From The Canterbury Tales, The General Prologue,” ll. 1-42 (Links to an external site.)
Anonymous, “Western Wind”
Anonymous, “Bonny Barbara Allen”
Edmund Spencer, “From The Faerie Queen,” stanza I (Links to an external site.)
George Herbert, “Easter Wings” (Links to an external site.)
“The Collar” (Links to an external site.)
Edgar Allen Poe, “The Raven” (Links to an external site.)
Thomas Hardy, “During Wind and Rain” (Links to an external site.)
ODE:
Andrew Marvel, “An Horation Ode” (Links to an external site.)
Alexander Pope, “Ode on Solitude” (Links to an external site.)
Williams Wordsworth, “Ode: Intimations of Immortality” (Links to an external site.)
ELEGY:
Thomas Gray, “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” (Links to an external site.)
W. H. Auden, “In Memory of W.B. Yeats” (Links to an external site.)
BALLAD:
Anonymous, “Sir Patrick Spens” (Links to an external site.)
Anonymous, “Lady Isabelle and the Elf Knight”
John Keats, “La Belle Dame sans Merci” (Links to an external site.)
DRAMATIC MONOLOGUE:
Alfred Lord Tennyson, “Ulysses” (Links to an external site.)
Robert Browning, “My Last Duchess” (Links to an external site.)
SESTINA:
John Ashbery, “The Painter” (Links to an external site.)
EPIC:
Anonymous, Beowulf,
John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book I