Teaching Eighteenth-Century Poetry (Ams Studies in the Eighteenth Century)

Aside from the fact that the various "periods" of English literature were devised at a time - the 19th century - most hostile to 18th-century poetry, this poetry also has suffered, on occasion, from the way it is taught, particularly in undergraduate survey courses. This volume addresses this problem by providing a handbook on the subject, not conceived as a generalized and anecdotal survey of teaching, but one which approaches specific problems and specific poems. Divided into two sections, the book discusses problems that arise in the classroom when introducing 18th-century verse to undergraduates, when teaching the couplet form and approaching complicated questions of satire and parody, when presenting to students a "nature" poetry very different from a kind they are accustomed to, and when teaching mid- and late-18th- century verse. Part 2 includes a series of essays, each (a) developing a specific strategy for teaching one poem or group of poems and (b) ending with suggestions of how this strategy might work for other poems by the same poet. The poets considered include Dryden, Pope, Johnson, and Blake as well as Swift, Gray and others.