This book is different from other poetry textbooks in the following ways.First,focusis shifted from poets to knowledge about poetry and sample poems.The poetic knowledgeis explained in great detail and simple terms.The book provides students with a systematicexplanation of types,elements and themes of poetry.Second,a comparative approach is adoptedin designing some questions for discussion.Many English poems are studied in a comparativecontext,eliciting students'attention to both English poetry and Chinese poetry.Third,thedesign of the questions is bold in the sense that various tasks are assigned: ranging fromanalyzing,reciting,translating to making comments,making comparisons,and even experiencingpoetry-writing.

Preface

Part One Introduction

Chapter One Brief Introduction to British and American Poetry

Chapter Two What Is Poetry

Chapter Three How to Read a Poem

Chapter Four How to Evaluate a Poem

Chapter Five Themes of a Poem

Part Two Elements of Poetry

Chapter One Voice: Speaker and Tone

John Donne: The Flea

Robert Frost: Stopping by Woods On a Snowy Evening

William Blake: The Lamb

Theodore Roethke: My Papa's Waltz

Robert Hayden: Those Winter Sundays

Chapter Two Diction

John Milton: Methought I Saw My Late Espoused Saint

William Blake: London

William Wordsworth: I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud

Alfred,Lord Tennyson: Crossing the Bar

Chapter Three Imagery

Robert Browning: Meeting at Night

Alfred,Lord Tennyson: Break,Break,Break

Ezra Pound: In a Station of the Metro

Seamus Heaney: The Play Way

Chapter Four Figures of Speech

 Section One Simile,Metaphor

Robert Bums: A Red,Red Rose

Alfred Tennyson: The Eagle: A Fragment

Sylvia Plath: Metaphors

 Section Two Metonymy,Synecdoche

Andrew Marvell: To His Coy Mistress

Percy Bysshe Shelley: Ozymandias

 Section Three Personification,Apostrophe

William Wordsworth: London,1802

John Keats: To Autumn

Sylvia Plath: Mirror

 Section Four Irony

William Blake: The Chimney Sweeper

Stephen Crane: The War Is Kind

 Section Five Paradox

Richard Lovelace: To Lucasta,Going to the War

William Wordsworth: She Dwelt Among the Untrodden Ways

Thomas Hardy: Hap

Chapter Five Symbolism and Allegory

William Blake: The Sick Rose

Thomas Stearns Eliot: The Boston Evening Transcript

Emily Dickinson: I Heard a Fly Buzz--When I Died

William Buffer Yeats: The Second Coming

Chapter Six Syntax

Thomas Hardy: The Man He Killed

William Buffer Yeats: An Irish Airman Foresees His Death

Chapter Seven Sound: Rhyme,Alliteration and Assonance

Emily Dickinson: The Soul Selects Her Own Society

Wystan Hugh Auden: That Night When Joy Began

Chapter Eight Rhythm and Meter

Robert Herriek: An Ode to Him

Edna St. Vincent Millay: God's World

Part Three Types of Poetry

Chapter One Narrative Poetry

 Section One Epic

John Milton: Paradise Lost

 Section Two Ballad

Anonymous: Get Up and Bar the Door

John Keats: La Belle Dame Sans Merci

 Section Three Romance

Anonymous: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

Chapter Two Lyric Poetry

 Section One Sonnet

William Shakespeare: Sonnet

William Wordsworth: The World Is Too Much with Us

John Keats: On the Grasshopper and the Cricket

 Section Two Ode

Percy Bysshe Shelley: Ode to the West Wind

John Keats: Ode on a Grecian Urn

 Section Three Song

John Donne: Song

Ben Jonson: Song: To Celia

Robert Burns: Auld Lang Syne

 Section Four Elegy

John Milton: Lycidas

Thomas Gray: Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard

Percy Busshe Shelley: Adonais

 Section Five Dirge

William Shakespeare: Full Fathom Five

Percy Bysshe Shelley: A Dirge

 Section Six Aubade

John Donne: The Sun Rising

Robert Browning: Parting at Morning

 Section Seven Pastoral

Christopher Marlowe: The Passionate Shepherd to His Love

William Wordsworth: Michael: A Pastoral Poem

Chapter Three Dramatic Poetry

Robert Browning: My Last Duchess

Percy Bysshes Shelley: Prometheus Unbound

Chapter Four Other Types of Poetry

 Section One Descriptive Poetry

James Thomson: The Seasons

William Wordsworth: Composed Upon Westminster Bridge,September 3,1802

 Section Two Reflective Poetry

William Cowper: The Task: The Stricken Deer

 Section Three Didactic Poetry

Alexander Pope: An Essay on Criticism

 Section Four Satirical Poetry

Percy Bysshe Shelley: England in 1819

Erenst Jones: The Song of the Lower Classes

A Glossary of Poetic Terms

List of Poets

Bibliography