This course will introduce you to the astonishingly wide range of works that fall within the genre of British poetry. We will read poems from all literary periods, from various corners of the British Empire, and in a variety of forms. We will also not restrict ourselves in terms of content , and will be exploring anything from contemplative religious verse to bawdy satires. In our encounters with elegies, odes, sonnets, narrative poems, nonsense verse or ballads, you will obtain the means to understand and analyse poems, and hone your rhetorical skills. Texts will be provided in a reader to be downloaded via Stud-IP. Students who partake of this course as part II of their genre module will be required to give an oral presentation; other participants must additionally finish the course with an end-of-term paper that offers an individual poem analysis.
