Junior Poet Project
All English majors at the University of Dallas are required to take ENG 3324/ Literary Study I: Lyric, an introduction to the intensive critical study of poetry. As part of the requirements for this course, students must explore the work of a chosen poet. Their research culminates in a thirty-minute oral examination before three faculty members. In addition, they must submit an annotated bibliography listing relevant criticism and scholarship.
The purpose of the project is to develop analytical skills, poise, articulateness, critical judgment, and authority in students, along with an ability to discuss matters of style, theme, and technique in the poetry of their chosen authors.
List of some exemplary poets (with representative poems)
Renaissance
- Edmund Spenser: Sonnets from Amoretti
- Philip Sidney: Sonnets from Astrophil and Stella
- William Shakespeare: Sonnet 29, 65, 94, 116, 129
17th Century
- John Donne: Holy Sonnet 10; "Sun Rising"; "The Canonization"
- George Herbert: "The Collar"; "Virtue"; "Love (III)"
- Ben Jonson: "Inviting a Friend to Supper"; "To Celia"
- Andrew Marvell: "To His Coy Mistress"; "The Garden"
- John Milton (lyric poems only): "When I Consider how My Light is Spent"; "On the Morning of Christ's Nativity"
18th Century
- Alexander Pope: "An Essay on Man"
- Thomas Gray: "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard"
- William Cowper: "The Castaway"
Romantic (1798-1830)
- William Blake: "The Tyger"; "Sick Rose"
- William Wordsworth: ""Tintern Abbey"; "Surprised by Joy"; "The Solitary Reaper"
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge: "Frost at Midnight"; "Kubla Khan"
- Percy Bysshe Shelley: "Ode to the West Wind"; "Ozymandias"
- John Keats: "When I Have Fears"; "Ode on a Grecian Urn"
Victorian (1830-1900)
- Alfred Lord Tennyson: In Memoriam, 7 ("Dark House"); "Ulysses"; "The Lady of Shallot"
- Robert Browning: "My Last Duchess"
- Matthew Arnold: "The Buried Life"; "Dover Beach"
- Christina Rossetti: "Uphill"; "In an Artist's Studio"; "Echo"
- Gerard Manley Hopkins: "God's Grandeur"; "Pied Beauty"; "The Windhover"
- Thomas Hardy: "Convergence of the Twain"; "During Wind and Rain"
19th Century American
- Walt Whitman: "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry"; "Vigil Strange I Kept on the Field One Night"; "A Noiseless Patient Spider"
- Emily Dickinson: "As Imperceptibly as Grief"; "After Great Pain a Formal Feeling Comes"; "Success is Counted Sweetest"; "Tell All the Truth"
20th Century: British and American
- William Butler Yeats: "Easter 1916"; "The Wild Swans at Coole"; "Leda and the Swan"
- Ezra Pound: "The Return"; "The River-Merchant's Wife"; "In a Station of the Metro"
- Robert Frost: "Desert Places"; "Mending Wall"; "The Road Not Taken"; "Out, Out"
- T. S. Eliot: "The Love-Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"; "The Preludes"; "The Hollow Men"
- Wallace Stevens: "The Snow Man"; "Sunday Morning"; "The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm"
- William Carlos Williams: "Spring and All;" "The Dance"; "This is Just to Say"
- Marianne Moore: "A Grave;" "The Fish"
- John Crowe Ransom: "Bells for John Whiteside's Daughter"; "Blue Girls"
- E.E. Cummings: "my father moved through dooms of love"; "in just spring"; "anyone lived in a pretty how town"
- Hart Crane: from The Bridge: "Poem: to Brooklyn Bridge"; "At Melville's Tomb"
- Allen Tate: "Aeneas at Washington"; "Ode to the Confederate Dead"
- W. H. Auden: "Musee de Beaux Arts"; "In Memory of W.B. Yeats"; "The Shield of Achilles"
- Robert Penn Warren: "Bearded Oaks"; "Evening Hawks"
- Elizabeth Bishop: "One Art"; "The Fish"; "Sestina"
- Derek Walcott: "Season of Phantasmal Peace"; "Ruins of a Great House"
- Dylan Thomas: "Fern Hill"; "In My Craft or Sullen Art"
- John Berryman: The Dream Songs 1, 4, 14, 29; "The Ball Poem"
- Gwendolyn Brooks: "kitchenette building"; "the rites for Cousin Vit"; "Children of the Poor"
- Adrienne Rich: "Diving into the Wreck;" "Twenty one Love-Poems (XX)"
- Richard Wilbur: "Love Calls Us to the Things of This World"; "A Baroque Wall Fountain at the Villa Sciarra"
- Seamus Heaney: "Death of a Naturalist;" "The Haw Lantern"; "Digging"; "Punishment"