On becoming a poet / by Mark Strand
Poetic form : a personal encounter / by Eavan Boland
The villanelle: Villanelle of his lady's treasures / Ernest Downson ; The house on the hill / Edwin Arlington Robinson ; Missing dates / William Empson ; The waking / Theodore Roethke ; One art / Elizabeth Bishop ; Do not go gentle into that good night / Dylan Thomas ; The world and the child / James Merrill ; Condemned site / Mona Van Duyn ; By the sound / John Hollander ; Saturday at the border / Hayden Carruth ; Under the hill / Daryl Hine ; Villanelle / Marilyn Hacker ; Reading scheme / Wendy Cope ; Villanelle for the middle of the night / Jacqueline Osherow ; Close-up of a villanelle : "One art" by Elizabeth Bishop
The Sestina: Ye wastefull woodes, bear witness of my woe / Edmund Spenser ; from Old Arcadia / Philip Sidney ; Sestine 4 from Parthenophil and Parthenophe / Barnabe Barnes ; Sestina : Of the Lady Pietra degli Scrovigni / Dante Gabriel Rossetti ; Sestina / Algernon Charles Swinburne ; Sestina / Edmund Gosse ; Sestina of the tramp-royal / Rudyard Kipling ; Sestina : Altaforte / Ezra Pound ; After the trial / Weldon Kees ; The book of Yolek / Anthony Hecht ; The shrinking lonesome sestina / Miller Williams ; Nani / Alberto Rios ; Close-up of a sestina : "Sestina : Altaforte" by Ezra Pound
The pantoum: In town / Austin Dobson ; Pantoum of the Great Depression / Donald Justice ; Parents' pantoum / Carolyn Kizer ; Pantoum / John Ashbery ; Grandmothers's song / Nellie Wong ; The method / J.D. McClatchy ; Close-up of a pantoum : "Pantoum of the Great Depression" by Donald Justice
The sonnet: Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? / William Shakespeare ; Farewell to love / Michael Drayton ; from Pamphilia to Amphilanthus / Mary Wroth ; Sonnet XXIII : Methought I saw my late espoused saint / John Milton ; Holy sonnet : at the round earth's imagined corners / John Donne ; Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802 / William Wordsworth ; Ozymandias / Percy Bysshe Shelley ; Bright star / John Keats ; from Monna innominata / Christina Rossetti ; from Sonnets from the Portuguese (XLIII) / Elizabeth Barrett Browning ; Carrion comfort / Gerard Manley Hopkins ; What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why / Edna St. Vincent Millay ; From the Dark Tower / Countee Cullen ; Epic / Patrick Kavanagh ; from "Tulips and chimneys" / E.E. Cummings ; To my mother / George Barker ; After the bomb tests / Jane Cooper ; A game of chess / Gwen Harwood ; The haw lantern / Seamus Heaney ; Heat / Denis Johnson ; The Roman baths at Nimes / Henri Cole ; Half a double sonnet / Mary Jo Salter ; Sonnet / Michael Palmer ; Close-up of a sonnet : "What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why" by Edna St. Vincent Millay
The ballad: The Cherry-tree carol / Sir Patrick Spens ; The Wife of Usher's well ; My boy Willie ; The changeling / John Greenleaf Whittier ; from The ballad of Reading Gaol / Oscar Wilde ; Peter and John / Elinor Wylie ; Bagpipe music / Louis MacNeice ; Death in Leamington / John Betjeman ; The tale of Custard the Dragon / Ogden Nash ; We real cool / Gwendolyn Brooks ; Riverbank blues / Sterling A. Brown ; Ballad of John Cable and three gentlemen / W.S. Merwin ; Close-up of a ballad : "We real cool" by Gwendolyn Brooks
Blank verse: from his translation of The Aeneid / Henry Howard ; from Tamburlaine the Great / Christopher Marlowe ; from Julius Caesar / William Shakespeare ; from Paradise Lost / John Milton ; from Beachy Head / Charlotte Smith ; from The prelude / William Wordsworth ; Ulysses / Alfred, Lord Tennyson ; Rain / Edward Thomas ; Directive / Robert Frost ; Lying / Richard Wilbur ; Stanzas in Bloomsbury / Richard Howard ; Close-up of blank verse : "Directive" by Robert Frost
The Heroic Couplet: from The Description of Cooke-ham / Aemilia Lanyer ; The author to her book / Anne Bradstreet ; A letter to Daphnis, April 2, 1685 / Anne Finch ; from Absalom and Achitophel / John Dryden ; from The Vanity of human wishes / Samuel Johnson ; To S.M., a young African painter, on seeing his works / Phillis Wheatley ; from The deserted village / Oliver Goldsmith ; from An essay on criticism / Alexander Pope ; My last duchess / Robert Browning ; Strange meeting / Wilfred Owen;- The J car / Thom Gunn ; Close-up of the heroic couplet : "My Last Duchess" by Robert Browning
The stanza: from Troilus and Criseyde / Geoffrey Chaucer ; from The faerie queene / Edmund Spenser ; They flee from me / Thomas Wyatt ; Easter wings / George Herbert ; The tyger / William Blake ; So we'll go no more a-roving / George Gordon, Lord Byron ; I died for beauty
but was scarce / Emily Dickinson ; The convergence of the twain / Thomas Hardy ; The song of the Mad Prince / Walter de la Mare ; A quoi bon dire / Charlotte Mew ; Song of the son / Jean Toomer ; The tropics in New York / Claude McKay ; Night song at Amalfi / Sara Teasdale ; Not waving but drowning / Stevie Smith ; On teaching the young / Yvor Winters ; Those winter sundays / Robert Hayden ; Yes / Muriel Rukeyser ; Warming Her pearls / Carol Ann Duffy ; Epith / Carol Muske ; Close-up of a stanza : "I died for beauty
but was scarce" by Emily Dickinson
III. Shaping forms. The elegy: Lament for the Makaris / William Dunbar ; If ever hapless woman had a cause / Mary Sidney Herbert ; On my first son / Ben Jonson ; Epitaph. On her son H.P. at St. Syth's Church where her body also lies Interred / Katherine Philips ; Lycidas / John Milton ; Here follows some verses upon the burning of our house July 10th, 1666. Copied out of a loose paper / Anne Bradstreet ; Elegy written in a country churchyard / Thomas Gray ; R. Alcona to J. Brenzaida / Emily Bronte ; O captain! My captain! / Walt Whitman ; Dover Beach / Matthew Arnold ; To his love / Ivor Gurney ; Bells for John Whiteside's daughter / John Crowe Ransom ; Tears in sleep / Louise Bogan ; In memory of W.B. Yeats / W.H. Auden ; from The Quaker graveyard in Nantucket / Robert Lowell ; Dream song / John Berryman ; To the dead / Frank Bidart ; In memoriam Paul Celan / Edward Hirsch ; The legend / Garrett Hongo ; The elegy for New York / Douglas Carse ; Tiara / Mark Doty ; Supernatural love / Gjertrud Schnackenberg ; Mirror in February / Thomas Kinsella ; Iris / David St. John ; Child burial / Paula Meehan ; Song / Rosanna Warren
The pastoral: The passionate shepherd to his love / Christopher Marlowe ; from Love's labor's lost / William Shakespeare ; The garden / Andrew Marvell ; To my sister / William Wordsworth ; Ode on a Grecian urn / John Keats ; Loveliest of trees / A.E. Housman ; The wife of Llew / Francis Ledwidge ; Urban pastoral / Babette Deutsch ; Remembered morning / Janet Lewis ; The thought-fox / Ted Hughes ; The explosion / Philip Larkin ; Lying in a hammock at William Duffy's farm in Pine Island, Minnesota / James Wright ; Midsummer, Tobago / Derek Walcott ; The bear / Galway Kinnell ; Fog / Amy Clampitt ; Let evening come / Jane Kenyon ; Smoke / Philip Levine ; Meditation at lagunitas / Robert Hass ; From the porch / John Koethe ; A walrus tusk from Alaska / Alfred Corn ; Looking west from Laguna Beach at night / Charles Wright ; The broad bean sermon / Les Murray ; Of the finished world / Lucie Brock-Broido ; Tornados / Thylias Moss ; Loss / C.K. Williams ; Waiting for the storm / Timothy Steele ; An engraving of Blake / Mary Kinzie ; Pygmalion's image / Eilean Ni Chuilleanain ; Mock orange / Louise Gluck ; The black walnut tree / Mary Oliver ; Gateposts / Medbh McGuckian ; Heart of the matter / Susan Prospere ; Shoeing the Currach / Mary O'Malley
The Ode: Ode to the west wind / Percy Bysshe Shelley ; To autumn / John Keats ; Ode / Henry Timrod ; The fire of driftwood / Henry Wadsworth Longfellow ; from The bridge / Hart Crane ; The paper nautilus / Marianne Moore ; Australia 1970 / Judith Wright ; Miracle Glass Co. / Charles Simic ; The blue swallows / Howard Nemerov ; America / Robert Creeley ; Ode to meaning / Robert Pinsky ; Perhaps the world ends here / Joy Harjo
IV. Open forms: The circus animals' desertion / W.B. Yeats ; The love song of J. Alfred Prufrock / T.S.
Eliot ; I, too / Langston Hughes ; The Idea of order at Key West / Wallace Stevens ; Spring and all / William Carlos Williams ; America / Allen Ginsberg ; Ave Maria / Frank O'Hara ; Uncertain oneiromancy / Denise Levertov ; Daddy / Sylvia Plath ; Diving into the wreck / Adrienne Rich ; move / Lucille Clifton ; The language of the brag / Sharon Olds ; The Colonel / Carolyn Forche ; The German Army, Russia, 1943 / Ai ; Starlight scope myopia / Yusef Komunyakaa ; Reading Plato / Jorie Graham ; Close-up of open forms : "Diving into the wreck" by Adrienne Rich.
