Mfa master Reading List poetry wichita State University

MFA Master Reading List POETRY Wichita State University

Chaucer Canterbury Tales, Troilus and Criseyde 

Homer Iliad, Odyssey

Ovid Metamorphoses, The Art of Love

New Testament
(King James Version)  The Gospels, Acts, Revelation

Beowulf

Piers Plowman (B-Text or C-Text), Prologue, Passus I, IV, VI, VIII, IX, XX

Selected English Ballads: “Lord Randall,” “Edward,” “Twa Corbies,” “Sir Patrick Spens,” “Barbara Allen”

Virgil Aeneid, Eclogues

Drayton “Since there's no help, come let us kiss and part” 

Herbert “Virtue,” “Easter Wings,” “Redemption,” “The Collar,” “The Pulley,” “Jordan” (I) and (III), “Aaron,” “Love” (Ill), “The Flower,” “The Pilgrimage”

Herrick “The Argument of His Book,” “Delight in Disorder,” “Corinna's Gowg a Maying,” “To Virgins, to Make Much of Time,” “Upon Julia's Clothes”

Jonson, Ben “On My First Son,” “Epitaph to Elizabeth, L.D., “ “Son: To Celia,” “To the Memory of My Beloved, the Author William Shakespeare,” “To Penhurst,” “To the Memory of My Beloved Master William Shakespeare,” “To the Immortal Memory... [of] Sir Lucius Cary and Sir H. Morrison,” “Ode to Himself” Petrarch Rime, 1, 30, 41, 93, 126, 129, 140, 164, 185, 189, 204, 248, 264, 310

“As You Came from the Holy Land of Walsingham” (Attibuted to Raleigh)

Lovelace “To Athena, from Prison,” “To Lucasta, Going to the Wars”

Marlowe “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love,” Hero and Leander;(“Come, leave the loathed stage,”), “Ode to Himself' (“Where dost thou careless lie”)

Marvell “To His Coy Mistress,” “The Garden,” “The Mower to the Glowworms,” 'The Mower's Song,” “A Dialogue between the Soul and Body,” “Upon Appleton House,” also see Marvell's “On Paradise Lost”

Milton “Lycidas,” “L'Allegro,” and “Il Penseroso,” Paradise Lost, Samson Agonistes, selected shorter poems including Sonnets (7-23)

Raleigh “The Lie,” “The Nymph's Reply to the Shepherd,” “On the Life of Man,” “The Passionate Man's Pilgrimage,” “The Author's Epitaph Made by Himself”

Shakespeare Sonnets (and most of the plays)

Sidney Astrophil and Stella, “Ye Goatheard Gods,” “Thou Blind Man's Mark,” “Leave Me, O Love”

Spenser Faerie Queene, Bks. I, II, Ill, VI, “Epithalamion”

Surrey “Love, That Doth Reign and Live within My Thought,” “The Soote Season,” “Alas! So All Things Now Do Hold Their Peace,” “Epitaph on Sir Thomas Wyatt,” “Prisoned in Windsor...”

Vaughan “The Are All Gone into a World of Light!,” “Regeneration,” “The Retreat”

Waller 'Song” (“Go, Lovely Rose”)

Wyatt “They Flee from Me,” “Whoso List to Hunt,” “The Long Love That in My though Doth Harbor,” “Farewell, Love,” “My Galley Charged with Forgetfulness,” “Madam, Withouten Many Words,” “My Lute Awake!” “Tagus, Farewell,” “Mine Own Joh Poins,” “Stand Whoso List upon the Slipper Top,” Blame Not My Lute,” “Unstable Dream”

Burns “To a Mouse,” “John Anderson,” “My Jo,” “Bonie Doon,” “A Red, Red Rose,” “Flow Gently, Sweet Afton,” “Holy Willie's Prayer,” 'Tam O'Shanter,” “Scots, Wha Hae,” “For A'That,” “To a Louse”

Dryden  “Mac Flecknoe,” “A Song for St. Cecilia's Day,” “To the Memory of Mr. Oldham,” “Absalom and Achitopel,” “The Secular Masque”

Goldsmith “When Lovely Woman Stoops to Folly,” “The Deserted Village”

Gray, Thomas “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” “Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College”

Johnson, Samuel “The Vanity of Human Wishes”

Pope The Rape of the Lock, “Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot,” “Windsor Forest,” An Essay on Criticism, An Essay on Man, “Epistle I,” “Eloisa to Abelard,” “Epistle II. To a Lady,” The Dunciad, Bk. IV

Smart Jubilate Agno, “A Song of David”

Swift “A Description of a City Shower,” “Verses on the Death of Doctor Swift,” “Description of the Morning,” “Stella's Birthday”


Romantic Poetry
Byron Child Harold's Pilgrimage, Don Juan, “Prometheus,” “On This Day I Complete My Thirty-Sixth Year,” “Darkness,” “So We'll Go No More A-Roving”

Coleridge “Kubla Khan,” “Frost at Midnight,” “Christabel,” “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” “Dejection: An Ode, “ “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison,” “Inscription (for a Fountain on a Heath)” “Ilion,” “Dirce”

Keats “On First Looking into Chapman's Homer,” “When I Have Fears,” “The Eve of St. Agnes,” “La Belle Dame Sans Merci,” “Bright Star,” “Ode on Melancholy,” “Ode to a Nightingale,” “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” “Ode to Psyche,” “To Autumn,” Hyperion I and II

Shelley “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty,” “Ozymandias,” Ode to the West Wind,” “To a Skylark,” “Adonais,” Prometheus Unbound

Wordsworth “An Evening Walk,” “Lines (Composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey on revisiting the banks of the Wye during a tour. July 13, 1978),” The Prelude, “Resolution and Independence,” “London, 1802,” “Lines Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802,” “Ode (Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood),” “Mutability,” “There is an Eminence,” “The World Is Too Much with Us,” “Extempore Effusion upon the Death of James Hogg,” Lucy poems and other selections from the Lyrical Ballads.
Pre-Twentieth Century American Poetry
Bradstreet “Contemplations,” “The Author to Her Book,” “Before the Birth of One of Her Children,” 'To My Dear and Loving Husband,” “Upon the Burning of Our House”

Bryant “Thanatopsis,” “The Prairies,” “Hymn of the City”

Dickinson Final Harvest (selection from Complete Poems)

Emerson “Concord Hymn,” “Hamatreya,” “Brahma,” “Days”

Freneau “The Indian Burying Ground,” “To Sir Toby,” “The Wild Honey Suckle,” “One the Universality and Other Attributes of the God of Nature”

Melville “The Maldive Shark,” “The Housetop”

Poe “Sonnet--To Science,” “The City in the Sea,” “To Helen,” “Annabel Lee,” “Ulalume,” “Israfel”

Taylor, Edward “Upon a Spider Catching a Fly,” “Huswifery,” Prologue to Preparatory Meditations, Meditation 8

Whitman Leaves of Grass


Victorian Poetry
Arnold “The Scholar Gypsy,” “Dover Beach”

Browning, Robert “My Last Duchess,” “Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister,” “Fra Lippo Lippi,” “A Toccata of Galuppi's,” “Andrea del Sarto”

Hardy “Hap,” “Thoughts of Phena,” “I Look into My Glass,” “Neutral Tones,” “Drummer Hodge,” “The Darkling Thru sh,” “The Ruined Maid,” “In Tenebris,” “The Convergence of the Twain,” “Channel Firing,” selected poems from Poems of 1912, 1913

Hopkins Poems

Rossetti, Christina “When I am dead,” “After Death,” “In an Artist's Studio,” “A Birthday,” “Goblin Market”

Tennyson “The Lotos-Eaters,” “Ulysses,” In Memoriam A.H.H., “Tithonus”

Modern British and American Poetry

Auden Complete Poems

Bogan Blue Estuaries

Crane Complete Poems

Cummings “In Just-,” “the Cambridge ladies who live in funrished souls,” “next to of course god america i,” “i sing of Olaf glad and big,” “my father moved through dooms of love”

Eliot Collected Poems

Frost Complete Poems

Graves “Warning to Children,” “Apollo of the Physiologists,” “The Persian Version”

H.D. Complete Poems

Hayden, Robert Collected Poems

Houseman A Shropshire Lad

Hughes Panther & the Lash, Collected poems, Selected Poems

Lawrence Selected Poems

Jeffers Selected Poems

MacLeish Selected Poems

Millay “Euclid Alone Has Looked on Beauty Bare,” “Above These Cares”

Moore Complete Poems

Pound Personae, Selected Poems, Selected Cantos

Ransom “Bells for John Whiteside's Daughter,” “Blue Girls,” “Janet Waking,” “The Equilibrists”

Robinson Selected Poems

Spender “I Think Continually of Those Who Were Truly Great,” “Locomotive”

Stevens Harmonium, Auroras of Autumn, “Notes towards a Supreme Fiction”

Tate, Allen “Ode to the Confederate Dead,” “To the Lacedemonians,” “Ode to Our Young Pro-consuls of the Air,” “The Traveler,” “The Swimmers,” “Sonnets of the Blood”

Toomer “Face,” “Georgia Dusk”

Wheatley Collected Poems

Williams Selected Poems, Pictures from Brueghel and Other Poems, Paterson, “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower”

Yeats Complete Poems
Post-Modern English Poetry/Poetry in Translation
Ashbery, John
Baraka, Imamu Amiri
Berryman, John
Bishop, Elizabeth
Bly, Roberth
Bogan, Louise
Brooks, Gwendolyn
Creeley, Robert
Dickey, James
Dobyns, Stephen

Dove, Rita

Gilbert, Jack

Gregg, Linda

Koch, Kenneth

Lorca, Federico

Milosz, Czeslaw

Neruda, Pablo

Rilke, Rainer Maria

Rogers, Pattiann

Arnold Culture and Anarchy (chapter one), “The Study of Poetry,” “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time”

Coleridge Biographia Literaria

Dryden Of Dramatic Poesy: An Essay

Emerson “The Poet,” 'The American Scholar,” “Nature”

Eliot “Tradition and the Individual Talent”

Keats Selected Letters

Longinus On the Sublime (Peri Hypsos)

Plato The Republic (especially, books II, III, VII, X)

Poe “The Philosophy of Composition,” “The Poetic Principle”

Pope Essay on Criticism

Shelley  Defense of Poetry

Sidney An Apology for Poetry (Defence of Poesy)

Wordsworth Preface to the Second Edition of Lyrical Ballads

Barthes “Is There Any Poetic Writing?” (in Writing Degree Zero), Empire of Signs

Bloom  The Anxiety of Influence, The Western Canon

Brooks Modern Poetry and the Tradition, The Well-Wrought Urn

Eliot Selected Essays, On Poetry and Poets

Pound The ABC of Reading, Literary Essays

Richards Practical Criticism, Principles of Literary Criticism

Warren “Pure and Impure Poetry,” other Selected Essays


Other Important Works
Ackerman, Diane A Natural History of the Senses

Aristotle Rhetoric

Bachelard The Poetics of Space, The Poetics of Reverie

Bishop, Elizabeth One Art, Collected Prose

Brodsky, Joseph Less Than One

Deutsch, Babette Poetry Handbook

DeMan Allegories of Reading

Finch, Annie, ed. A Formal Feeling Comes

Forché, Carolyn Against Forgetting: 20th Century Poetry of Witness

Fussell, Paul Poetic Meter and Poetic Form

Gioia, Dana Can Poetry Matter?

Hall, Donald Claims for Poetry, Poetry and Ambition, Preface to Contemporary American Poetry

Hugo The Triggering Town

Kalstone Five Temperaments

Lawrence, D.H. Studies in Classic American Literature

Oliver, Mary A Poetry Handbook

Ostiker, Alicia Stealing the Language

Paz The Bow and the Lyre, The Children of the Mire

Pinsky, Robert The Situation of Poetry

Rich, Adrienne What Is Found There

Rilke Letters to a Young Poet

Roethke, Theodore On the Poet and His Craft, Straw for the Fire

Rose, Jacqueline The Haunting of Sylvia Plath

Sontag “The Aesthetics of Silence,” “Against Interpretation”

Stryk, Lucien Encounters with Zen

Vendler Part of Nature, Part of Us

Wright, Charles Half-Life