Major Poets
An introduction to poetry as a literary genre, moving from the Renaissance through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries into Romanticism and Modernism. The course, from MIT OpenCourseWare, centers on close analytic reading and on tracing how poetic forms and conventions changed across periods. Readings include William Shakespeare, Queen Elizabeth, William Wordsworth, John Keats, T.S. Eliot, Langston Hughes, Sylvia Plath, Elizabeth Bishop, and a selection of contemporary poets. Writing assignments push students toward evidenced, sequential argumentation rather than impressionistic response, treating literary analysis as a form of persuasive prose. Materials include the full syllabus, reading lists, and assignment sheets as published by MIT, free to access with no certificate offered. It suits anyone wanting a structured, historically grounded path through English-language poetry rather than a survey of isolated favorite poems.