Chewing tobacco advertisements featuring Romeo and Juliet (c.1874 and c.1873, respectively). (Image courtesy of the Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division [reproduction numbers: LC-USZC4-5019 (color film copy transparency) and LC-USZC4-5018 (color film copy transparency), respectively])
Instructor(s)
Prof. Stephen Tapscott
MIT Course Number
21L.004
As Taught In
Fall 2005
Level
Undergraduate
Course Description
Course Features
Course Description
This subject is an introduction to poetry as a genre; most of our texts are originally written in English. We read poems from the Renaissance through the 17th and 18th centuries, Romanticism, and Modernism. Focus will be on analytic reading, on literary history, and on the development of the genre and its forms; in writing we attend to techniques of persuasion and of honest evidenced sequential argumentation. Poets to be read will include William Shakespeare, Queen Elizabeth, William Wordsworth, John Keats, T.S. Eliot, Langston Hughes, Sylvia Plath, Elizabeth Bishop, and some contemporary writers.
Other Versions
Other OCW Versions
OCW has published multiple versions of this subject. 
- 21L.004 Reading Poetry (Spring 2018)
- 21L.004 Reading Poetry (Spring 2009)
- 21L.004 Major Poets (Fall 2001)
Archived versions: 