• Classical Chinese Poetry
• Close Reading Exercise: "Spring and Fall" by Gerard Manley Hopkins (an exercise in close reading). Click here for a PDF version of the poem.
• Dr. Wheeler's Super Secret Scansion Flowchart for Sonnets
• Examples of Iambs, Trochees, Spondees, Dactyls, and Anapests (PDF file)
• Haiku: What is Haiku Poetry?
• Literary Terms and Definitions (a list of vocabulary every English student should know)
• Meter (a large--150k+--handout discussing how to do scansion)
• Paraphrasing versus summarizing poetry
• Periods of Literary History (a handout in PDF format)
• Poetry to Download:

• "Andrea Del Sarto" by Robert Browning in PDF format
• "The Bait" by John Donne in PDF format
• "A Birthday" by Christina Rossetti in PDF format.
• Beowulf: the First Nineteen Lines (an examination of how textual editing affects the poetry we read)
• Close Reading of a Literary Passage (a guide to closely examining a piece of literature). Click here for the same material as a downloadable PDF document.
• "Eating Poetry" by Mark Strand in PDF format.
• "Evolution," by Langdon Smith in PDF format.
• "Goblin Market" by Christina Rossetti in PDF format.
• Haiku Samples (PDF handout of various poets--Japanese and Western)
• "Hymn to Proserpine" (by Algernon Swinburne, PDF handout)
• "The Haunted House," by George Sylvester Viereck, a poem in pdf format.
• "The Lake Isle of Innisfree," by Yeats, a poem in PDF format.
• "Lady Lazarus" by Sylvia Plath in PDF format.
• "Lapis Lazuli," by W.B. Yeats, a poem in PDF format.
• "Non Sum Qualis Eram" by Ernest Dowson, a poem in PDF format.
• "The Rape of the Lock" by Alexander Pope, excerpts of the mock epic poem in PDF format.
• Sonnets: (a downloadable PDF handout)
• "Spring and Fall" by Gerard Manley Hopkins in PDF format; click here for an online version.
• "Stanzas of the Graves" (TBA: A beautiful and haunting Celtic lamentation)
• "Terence, This is Stupid Stuff" by A. E. Housman. (Housman contrasts the virtues of drinking alcohol versus reading tragic poetry.) Click here to download a pdf version.
• "To His Coy Mistress" by Andrew Marvell (PDF format)
• Two Poems ("A Birthday" and "Goblin Market") by Christina Rossetti.
• "Two Songs for Hedli Anderson" by W. H. Auden (in PDF format)
• "The Unknown Citizen" by W. H. Auden (in PDF format)

• Rhetoric of Pathos in Sylvia Plath's "Daddy" (an analysis of how emotion works in poetry)
• Schemes and Tropes (the poetic and rhetorical devices that create eloquence)
• Shakespearean Sonnet Assignment (a downloadable pdf handout)