Year’s End by Richard Wilbur
A Dream of Trains by Mark Van Doren
The Flitting by John Clare
The Poison Tree by William Blake
Pied Beauty by G.M. Hopkins
A Rolling Stone by Robert Service
What if a much of a which of a wind by E.E. Cummings
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by S. T. Coleridge
The Deserted Village by Oliver Goldsmith
Ode on a Grecian Urn by John Keats
O Western Wind by Anonymous
To His Coy Mistress by Andrew Marvell
You, Andrew Marvell by Archibald MacLeish
The Charge of the Light Brigade by Lord Tennyson
A Coat by W.B. Yeats
To an Athlete Dying Young by A.E. Houseman
If by Rudyard Kipling
Second Space by Czeslaw Milosz
Tintern Abbey by William Wordsworth
This is Just to Say by William Carlos Williams
Sanctity by Patrick Kavanagh
The Tyger by William Blake
When I have fears that I may cease to be by John Keats
Sonnets by William Shakespeare
Vigil Strange Kept I on the Field One Night by Walt Whitman
Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird by Wallace Stevens
Ozymandias by P.B. Shelley
Ode: Intimations on Immortality by William Wordsworth
Toombridge by Seamus Heaney
Birches by Robert Frost
The Windhover by G.M. Hopkins
Armadillo by Elizabeth Bishop
Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night by Dylan Thomas
Loveliest of Trees by A.E. Housman
The Cremation of Sam McGee by Robert Service
Adam’s Curse by W.B. Yeats
Mowing by Robert Frost
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T.S. Eliot
To A Mouse by Robert Burns
The World Is Too Much With Us by William Wordsworth
Ulysses by Alfred Lord Tennyson
Some Trees by John AshberyThe Garden by Andrew Marvell
Ode to a Nightingale by John Keats
Part IV – [History and Origin of Poetry]
Poetry in general seems to have sprung from two causes, each of them lying deep in our nature. First, the instinct of imitation is implanted in man from childhood, one difference between him and other animals being that he is the most imitative of living creatures, and through imitation learns his earliest lessons; and no less universal is the pleasure felt in things imitated. We have evidence of this in the facts of experience. Objects which in themselves we view with pain, we delight to contemplate when reproduced with minute fidelity: such as the forms of the most ignoble animals and of dead bodies. The cause of this again is, that to learn gives the liveliest pleasure, not only to philosophers but to men in general; whose capacity, however, of learning is more limited. Thus the reason why men enjoy seeing a likeness is, that in contemplating it they find themselves learning or inferring, and saying perhaps, ‘Ah, that is he.’ For if you happen not to have seen the original, the pleasure will be due not to the imitation as such, but to the execution, the coloring, or some such other cause.
Imitation, then, is one instinct of our nature. Next, there is the instinct for ‘harmony’ and rhythm, meters being manifestly sections of rhythm. Persons, therefore, starting with this natural gift developed by degrees their special aptitudes, till their rude improvisations gave birth to poetry.
[My notes]
1. Poetry (art) came from two causes:
A. instinct of imitation
-implanted in our nature from childhood
-man is differentiated from the other animals because he is the most imitative animal
-man learns much through imitation (especially early on)
-men delight in learning by nature
-there is a pleasure given from imitation
~men enjoy seeing likeness because in contemplating it they find themselves learning or inferring
~another pleasure in seeing likeness could come from how exact the likeness is to the original (perhaps in execution, coloring, or something else).
B. instinct for ‘harmony’
-harmony
-rhythm
-meters (sections of rhythm)
Aristotle by Rembrandt
Poetry Links
Davey’s Poetry Foundation Bartleby’s 3 Year Old Recites “Litany” by Billy Collins Literary Terms
