• Office: Room 122, Wetmore Hall, New College
• Phone: 416 978-8279
• Fax: 416 978-0554
• WebCT site: new.courseware.utoronto.ca
• Class on-line seminars: Thursday evenings 7-8 (lecture poems), 8:10-9:10 pm (seminar poems)
• E-mail: ian@chass.utoronto.ca

All students who have registered in this section should send an e-mail message to me ( ian@chass.utoronto.ca ) before class begins so that WebCT access can be arranged.

1. General Description of Course
2. Texts
3. Course Requirements
4. First Readings
5. Use of Computer in Course
6. First Meeting
7. Short-list of Reference Works

1. General Description of Course

During the first 13 weeks we will focus on "touchstone" poems (works often read, taught, and honoured decades or even centuries after their first publication) from the sixteenth century to the nineteenth century, and on later poems written in homage to those touchstones, or in criticism of their themes. In the second term we will study touchstone poems by modern poets from different regions of the English-speaking world, and (again) poems inspired by them.

This section of ENG 201Y is an Internet-based course, meeting on-line in the WebCT chatroom twice a week to discuss the lecture material in tutorial. Each tutorial will be on a different poem and the chatroom logs will be archived.

Each week, students should read (a) the lecture poems and the on-line material on them, and (b) the seminar poem, about which there is no on-line lecture material. In the seminars you will develop skills in reading sight-poems. Come to the chat to discuss bopth lecture and seminar poems. Lecture poems are usually a cluster of related works, a well-known poem (a touchstone, representative of the best of its kind) and one or more other poems written about it by modern poets. For this reason, poems in the course anthology are said to be chosen by poets. A seminar poem is usually a single poem by the touchstone poet responsible for the lecture poem.

2. Texts and Resources

• Ian Lancashire. Reading Poetry Chosen by Poets. Toronto, 2003-2004. A Web-based coursepack of all poems and lectures on poems. This draws heavily on the Department of English / Library Representative Poetry On-line, and less so on Literature Online (see under Library Web resources), and other texts. No paper textbooks or anthologies are required.

Note: all students who access the Web from outside the University, or by an Internet Service Provider (ISP) other than UtorDial, must obtain a proxy account from the Library in order to access Literature Online or other copyrighted materials.

3. First Poets Read

4. Course Requirements

• 30%: six 500-word responses (totaling 3000 words) to single poems from the course anthology, Reading Poems Chosen by Poets. Three responses should be on poems from the sixteenth to the end of the nineteenth centuries; the other three responses should be on poems published since 1900. Each response must be placed in the WebCT Bulletin Board. The choice of which poems you respond to is yours. Responses on pre-twentieth-century poems must be submitted by December 1, responses on later poems by March 15. You should submit a response, then, about every three weeks if you want to keep up. Do not submit responses in batches of three. Grades and instructor comments will be privately e-mailed to each student; these will help you improve subsequent responses. If you bundle your responses, you will lose the advantages that instructor feedback will give you in writing future responses.

  A penalty of 2% per working day late may be assessed for overdue responses.

  Responses take off from your observations about words, topical or literary allusions, or figures of speech, or from your analysis of the poem's dramatic situation, or from your thoughts on lectures, etc. Observations, analysis, and thoughts, however, are only part of a response. Each response should be personal, highlighting what is important to you as a reader. Responses need not say everything there is to say about a poem. They need not repeat or agree with lectures. They must be reasoned and well-written, and they also must show what happens in the mind of one reader, you, during an encounter with the poem. Three quite different responses to the same poem can achieve an identical high grade. Feel free to disagree with what I say.

• 10%: a 1500-word study of one volume of poems published by a living poet in English. Literature Online and the RPO bibliography are useful starting points in selecting your poet. Read all the poems in one collection of poems published by your poet. Analyse them in whatever way seems valuable to you, but consider in your essay the life and times of the poet as they affect the poems (in your opinion). This study is due between Reading Week in the second term, and the last day of classes.

• 20%: 2-hour examination in mid-December: (1) identification of, and commentary on, selected passages from poems in the course anthology (sixteenth- to nineteenth-centuries); and (2) analysis of a sight poem. This exam will be held in a room on the St. George Campus.

• 30%: 3-hour examination in late April-early May: (1) identification of, and commentary on, selected passages from poems in the course anthology (1900-); (2) analysis of a sight poem; and (3) an essay on pre-announced topics. This exam will be held in a room on the St. George Campus.

• 10%: contribution to chatroom discussions, or to bulletin board threads. I do not take attendance at chatrooms. This part of your grade will be based on your comments, as archived in the course of chats or as contributed to the bulletin board.

5. Use of Computer in Course

All course materials -- anthology, written and audio lectures, bulletin board, chatroom, and student grades -- will be found on the WebCT site. This is operated by the Resource Centre for Academic Technology (RCAT), located on the fourth floor of the Robarts Library. WebCT is available at all hours.

Once the WebCT administrators have set up an account for you, you will log in, following instructions that will be emailed to you.

It is up to you as a student to e-mail me, notifying me of your preferred email address, and to keep me informed during the year if your email address changes. The Faculty of Arts and Science does not give me your e-mail address. A student's inability to access course material or do course assignments because of a failure to obtain a means to log on to the WebCT site is not a valid excuse for not doing assigned work on time.

6. First Meeting

If you arrive for the 7 pm chatroom late, you may have difficulty logging in. System response time is affected by the number of students in the chatroom. In that event, consult the log of the first chatroom discussion later and immediately enter the second chatroom, which will be inactive until 8:10 pm.

7. Short-list of Reference Works

• Canadian Poetry. Toronto: University of Toronto Library.
• Fussell, Paul. Poetic Meter and Poetic Form. Rev. edn. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1979. PE 1505 F78 University College / SMC
• Hollander, John. Rhyme's Reason: A Guide to English Verse. New edn. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989. PE 1505 H6
• New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. Ed. Alex Preminger and T. V. F. Brogan. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993.
• Representative Poetry On-line. Toronto: University of Toronto Library, 1994-.