Literature

Edgar V. Roberts, Emeritus Professor of English at Lehman College of The City University of New York, is a native of Minnesota. He graduated from the Minneapolis public schools in 1946, and received his Doctorate from the University of Minnesota in 1960. He taught English at Minnesota, the University of Maryland Overseas Division, Wayne State University, Hunter College, and Lehman College. From 1979 to 1988, He was Chair of the English Department of Lehman College.   He served in the U.S. Army in 1946 and 1947, seeing duty in Arkansas, the Philippine Islands, and Colorado.   He has published articles about the plays of Henry Fielding, the subject of his Ph.D. dissertation. In 1968 he published a scholarly edition of John Gay's The Beggar's Opera (1728), and in 1969 he published a similar edition of Fielding's The Grub-Street Opera (1731), both with the University of Nebraska Press. He first published Writing About Literature (then named Writing Themes About Literature) in 1964, with Prentice Hall. Since then, this book has undergone eleven separate revisions, for a total of twelve editions. In 1986, with Henry E. Jacobs of the University of Alabama, he published the first edition of Literature: An Introduction to Reading and Writing. After Professor Jacobs's untimely death in the summer of 1986, Professor Roberts continued working on changes and revisions to keep this text up to date. The Ninth Edition was published early in 2009, with Pearson Longman. The Fourth Compact Edition of Literature: An Introduction to Reading and Writing was published in 2008.   Professor Roberts is an enthusiastic devoté of symphonic music and choral singing, having sung in local church choirs for forty years. Recently he has sung (bass) with the New Choral Society of Scarsdale, New York (where he lives), singing in classic works by Handel, Beethoven, Bruckner, Bach, Orff, Britten, Brahms, and others. He is a fan of both the New York Mets and the New York Yankees. When the two teams play in inter-league games, he is uneasy because he dislikes seeing either team lose. He also likes both the Giants and the Jets. He has been an avid jogger ever since the early 1960s, and he enjoys watching national and international track meets.   Professor Roberts encourages queries, comments, and suggestions from students who have been using any of the various books. Use the following email address: .    

1 •    Introduction: reading, responding to, and writing about literature

 

Guy de Maupassant, The Necklace

 

2 •    Fiction: An Overview

Ambrose Bierce, An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge

William Faulkner, A Rose for Emily

Tim O’Brien, The Things they Carried

Luigi Pirandello, War

Eudora Welty,  A Worn Path

 

3 • Point of View: The Position or Stance of the Work’s Narrator or Speaker

 

Raymond Carver, Neighbors

Shirley Jackson, The Lottery

Lorrie Moore, How to Become a Writer

Joyce Carol Oates, The Cousins

 

4 •    Characters: The People in Fiction

 

Ernest Gaines,  The Sky Is Gray

Katherine Mansfield, Miss Brill

Amy Tan, Two Kinds

Mark Twain, Luck

 

5 •    Setting: The Background of Place, Objects, and Culture in Stories

Joseph Conrad, The Secret Sharer

James Joyce, Araby

Cynthia Ozick, The Shawl

Edgar Allan Poe, The Masque of the Red Death

 

6   Structure: The Organization of Stories,

Formal Categories of Structure,  ¨ Formal and Actual Structure

 

Ralph Ellison, Battle Royal

Thomas Hardy, The Three Strangers

Tom Whitecloud, Blue Winds Dancing

 

7 •    tone and style: the words that convey attitudes in fiction

 

Kate Chopin, The Story of an Hour

Ernest Hemingway, Hills Like White Elephants

Alice Munro, The Found Boat

Frank O’Connor,  First Confession

Daniel  Orozco, Orientation

John Updike,  A & P

 

8 •    Symbolism and Allegory: Keys to Extended Meaning

 

Aesop, The Fox and the Grapes

Anonymous,  The Myth of Atalanta

Anita Scott Coleman, Unfinished Masterpieces

Nathaniel Hawthorne, Young Goodman Brown

St. Luke, The Parable of the Prodigal Son

Katherine Anne Porter, The Jilting of Granny Weatherall

John Steinbeck, The Chrysanthemums

 

9 •    Idea or Theme: The Meaning and the Message in Fiction

 

Toni Cade Bambara, The Lesson

D. H. Lawrence, The Horse Dealer’s Daughter

Ameríco Paredes, The Hammon and the Beans

 

1 •  Four Stories for Additional Enjoyment and Study

 

John Chioles,  Before the Firing Squad

Andre Dubus, The Curse

Charlotte Perkins Gilman,  The Yellow Wallpaper

Flannery O’Connor, A Good Man Is Hard to Find

 

11•  Meeting Poetry: An Overview

 

Billy Collins, Schoolsville

Lisel Mueller, Hope

Robert Herrick,  Here a Pretty Baby Lies

Anonymous, Sir Patrick Spens

Elizabeth Brewster, Where I Come From

William Cowper, The Poplar Field

Emily Dickinson,  Because I Could Not Stop for Death

Robert Francis,  Catch

Robert Frost, Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

John Haines, Little Cosmic Dust Poem

Thomas Hardy, The Man He Killed

Joy Harjo, Eagle Poem

Randall Jarrell, The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner

Dorianne Laux, The Life of Trees

Emma Lazarus, The New Colossus

Louis MacNeice, Snow

Eugenio Montale, English Horn (Corno Inglese)

Jim Northrup, Ogichidag

Naomi Shihab Nye, Where Children Live

Joyce Carol Oates, Loving

Molly Peacock, Desire

William Shakespeare, Sonnet 55: Not Marble Nor the Gilded Monuments

Percy Bysshe Shelley, To--------- (“Music, when Soft Voices Die”)

Elaine Terranova, Rush Hour

William Wordsworth, Tintern Abbey Lines

 

12 •  Words: The Building Blocks of Poetry

 

Robert Graves, The Naked and the Nude

William Blake, The Lamb

Robert Burns, Green Grow the Rashes, O

Lewis Carroll, Jabberwocky

Hayden Carruth, An Apology for Using the Word “Heart” in Too Many Poems

E. E. Cummings, next to of course god america I

John Donne, Holy Sonnet 14: Batter My Heart  

Richard Eberhart, The Fury of Aerial Bombardment

Bart Edelman, Chemistry Experiment

Thomas Gray, Sonnet on the Death of Richard West

Thomas Hardy, The Ruined Maid

Jane Hirshfield, The Lives of the Heart

A. E. Housman,  Loveliest of Trees

Carolyn Kizer, Night Sounds

Denise Levertov, Of Being

Henry Reed, Naming of Parts

Edwin Arlington Robinson, Richard Cory

Theodore Roethke, Dolor

Stephen Spender, I Think Continually of Those Who Were Truly Great

Wallace Stevens, Disillusionment of Ten O’Clock

Mark Strand, Eating Poetry

William Wordsworth, Daffodils

James Wright, A Blessing

 

13 •  Imagery: The Poem’s Link to the Senses

 

John Masefield, Cargoes

Wilfred Owen, Anthem for Doomed Youth

Elizabeth Bishop, The Fish

Elizabeth Barrett Browning,  Sonnets, No 14: If Thou Must Love Me

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Kubla Khan

Ray Durem, I Know I'm Not Sufficiently Obscure

T. S. Eliot, Preludes

Susan Griffin, Love Should Grow Up Like a Wild Iris in the Fields

Thomas Hardy, Channel Firing

George Herbert, The Pulley

Gerard Manley Hopkins, Spring

A. E. Housman, On Wenlock Edge

Denise Levertov, A Time Past

Thomas Lux, The Voice You Hear When You Read Silently

Eugenio Montale, Buffalo

Micheal O’Siadhail, Abundance

Ezra Pound, In a Station of the Metro

Friedrich Rückert, If You Love for the Sake of Beauty

William Shakespeare,Sonnet 13: My Mistress’ Eyes Are Nothing Like the Sun

James Tate, Dream On

 

14 •  Figures of Speech, or Metaphorical Language: A Source of Depth and Range in Poetry

 

John Keats, On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer

John Keats, Bright Star

John Gay, Let Us Take the Road

Jack Agüeros, Sonnet for You, Familiar Famine

William Blake, The Tyger

Robert Burns, A Red, Red Rose

John Donne, A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning..

John Dryden, A Song for St. Cecelia’s Day

Abbie Huston Evans, The Iceberg Seven-eighths Under

Thomas Hardy, The Convergence of the Twain

Joy Harjo, Remember

John Keats, To Autumn

Maurice Kenny, Legacy

Jane Kenyon, Let Evening Come

Henry King, Sic Vita

Judith Minty, Conjoined

Marge Piercy,A Work of Artifice

Muriel Rukeyser, Looking at Each Other

William Shakespeare, Sonnet 18: Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer’s Day?

William Shakespeare, Sonnet 3: When to the Sessions of Sweet Silent Thought

Elizabeth Tudor, Queen Elizabeth I, On Monsieur's Departure

Mona Van Duyn, Earth Tremors Felt in Missouri

Walt Whitman, Facing West from California’s Shores

William Wordsworth, London, 182

Sir Thomas Wyatt, I Find No Peace

 

15 •  Tone: The Creation of Attitude in Poetry

 

Cornelius Whur, The First-Rate Wife

Wilfred Owen, Dulce et Decorum Est

Thomas Hardy, The Workbox

Alexander Pope, Epigram from the French

Alexander Pope, Epigram, Engraved on the Collar of a Dog. . .  

William Blake, On Another’s Sorrow

Robert Browning, My Last Duchess

Jimmy Carter, I Wanted to Share My Father’s World

Lucille Clifton, homage to my hips

Billy Collins, The Names

E. E. Cummings, she being Brand / -new

Bart Edelman, Trouble

Mari Evans, I Am a Black Woman

Seamus Heaney, Mid-term Break

William Ernest Henley, When You Are Old

Langston Hughes, Theme for English B

Abraham Lincoln, My Childhood’s Home

Sharon Olds, The Planned Child

Robert Pinsky, Dying

Alexander Pope, From Epilogue to the Satires, Dialogue I

Salvatore Quasímodo, Auschwitz

Anne Ridler, Nothing Is Lost

Theodore Roethke, My Papa’s Waltz

Jane Shore, A Letter Sent to Summer

Jonathan Swift, A Description of the Morning

David Wagoner, My Physics Teacher

C. K. Williams, Dimensions

William Wordsworth, The Solitary Reaper

William Butler Yeats, When You Are Old

 

16 •  Form: The Shape of the Poem

 

William Wordsworth, Passage from The Prelude

Alfred, Lord Tennyson, The Eagle

John Milton, Passage from Lycidas

Anonymous, Spun in High Dark Clouds

William Shakespeare, Sonnet 116: Let Me Not to the Marriage of True Minds

Walt Whitman, Reconciliation

E. E. Cummings, Buffalo Bill’s

George Herbert, Easter Wings

Charles Harper Webb, The Shape of History

William Heyen, Mantle

John Hollander, Swan and Shadow

May Swenson, Women

Carolyn Forché, The Colonel

Elizabeth Bishop, One Art

Billy Collins, Sonnet

John Dryden, To the Memory of Mr. Oldham

T. S. Eliot, Macavity: The Mystery Cat

Robert Frost, Desert Places

Allen Ginsberg, A Supermarket in California

Nikki Giovanni,  Nikki-Rosa

Robert Hass, Museum

George Herbert, Virtue

Gerard Manley Hopkins, God’s Grandeur

John Hall Ingham, George Washington

John Keats, Ode to a Nightingale

Claude McKay, In Bondage

Herman Melville, Shiloh: A Requiem

John Milton, On His Blindness

Alexander Pope, From An Essay on Man, I:17-8

Dudley Randall, Ballad of Birmingham

Theodore Roethke, The Waking

George William Russell (Æ), Continuity

William Shakespeare, Sonnet 73: That Time of Year Thou May’st in Me Behold

Percy Bysshe Shelley, Ozymandias

Dylan Thomas, Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night

Jean Toomer, Reapers

Phyllis Webb, Poetics Against the Angel of Death

William Carlos Williams,The Dance

 

17 •  Symbolism and Allusion: Windows to Wide Expanses of Meaning

 

Virginia Scott, Snow

Emily Brontë, No Coward Soul Is Mine

Amy Clampitt, Beach Glass

Arthur Hugh Clough, Say Not the Struggle Nought Availeth

Peter Davison, Delphi

John Donne, The Canonization

Stephen Dunn, Hawk

Isabella Gardner, Collage of Echoes

Ralph Waldo Emerson,Concord Hymn

Louise Glück, Celestial Music

Jorie Graham, The Geese

Susan Griffin,  Love Should Grow Up Like a Wild Iris in the Field

Thomas Hardy, In Time of “The Breaking of Nations”

George Herbert, The Collar

Josephine Jacobsen, Tears

Robinson Jeffers, The Purse-Seine

John Keats, La Belle Dame Sans Merci

X. J. Kennedy, Old Men Pitching Horseshoes

Ted Kooser, Year’s End

Philip Larkin, Next, Please

David Lehman, Venice Is Sinking

Andrew Marvell, To His Coy Mistress

Mary Oliver, Wild Geese

Judith Viorst, A Wedding Sonnet for the Next Generation

Walt Whitman, A Noiseless Patient Spider

Richard Wilbur, Year's End

William Butler Yeats, The Second Coming

 

18 •  Four Major American Poets: Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, Langston Hughes, Sylvia Plath

 

Emily Dickinson (183–1886)

Poems by Emily Dickinson, alphabetically arranged

 

After Great Pain, a Formal Feeling Comes (J341, F 372)

Because I Could Not Stop for Death (J712, F479) (See Chapter 11.)

The Bustle in a House (J178, F118)

I Cannot Live with You (J64, F76)

I Dwell in Possibility (F466, J657)

I Felt a Funeral in My Brain (J28, F34)

I Heard a Fly Buzz - When I Died (J465, F491)

I Like to See It Lap the Miles (J585, F383)

I Never Lost as Much But Twice (J49, F39)

I Taste a Liquor Never Brewed (J214, F27)

Much Madness Is Divinest Sense (J435, D62)

My Life Closed Twice Before Its Close (J1732, F1773)

My Triumph Lasted Till the Drums (J1227, F1212)

Safe in Their Alabaster Chambers (J216, F124

Some Keep the Sabbath Going to Church (J324, F236)

The Soul Selects Her Own Society (J33, F49)

Success Is Counted Sweetest (J67, F112)

There’s a Certain Slant of Light (J258, F32)

Wild Nights - Wild Nights! (J249, F269)

 

Robert Frost (1873–1963),

 

Poems by Robert Frost                                                             

Chronologically Arranged

 

The Tuft of Flowers (1913)

Mending Wall (1914)

Birches (1915)

The Road Not Taken (1915)

`Out, Out—’ (1916)

Fire and Ice (192)

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening (1923) (In Chapter 11) 

Misgiving (1923)

Nothing Gold Can Stay (1923)

Acquainted with the Night (1928)

Desert Places (1936) (In Chapter 16)  

Design (1936)

The Silken Tent (1936)

The Gift Outright (1941)

A Considerable Speck (1942)

Take Something like a Star (1943)

 

Langston Hughes (192–1967)

Poems of Langston Hughes, alphabetically arranged

 

Bad Man (1927)

Cross (1925, 1926)

Dead in There (1951)

Dream Variations (1924, 1926)

Harlem  1951 (1951)

Let America Be America Again (1936)

Madam And Her Madam (1943, 1949)

Negro (1958)

The Negro Speaks of Rivers (1926)

125th Street (1951)

 Po' Boy Blues (1926, 1927)

Silhouette (1936)

Subway Rush Hour (1939)

Theme for English B (1959) in chapter15

The Weary Blues (1923, 1926)

 

Sylvia Plath (1932–1963)

Poems of Sylvia Plath, alphabetically arranged

 

Ariel (1962)

The Colossus (1959)

Cut (1962)

Daddy (1962)

Edge (1963)

The Hanging Man (196)

Lady Lazarus (1962)

Last Words (1961)

Metaphors (1959)

Mirror (1961)

The Rival (1961)

Song for a Summer’s Day (1956)

Tulips (1961)

 

19 Eighty-four Poems for Additional Enjoyment and Study

 

 

Anonymous (Navajo), Healing Prayer from the Beautyway Chant,

Matthew Arnold, Dover Beach,

W. H. Auden, The Unknown Citizen,

Wendell Berry, Another Descent,

William Blake,  London

Louise Bogan, Women

Arna Bontemps, A Black Man Talks of Reaping

Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Sonnets . . .  Number 43. How Do I Love Thee?

Robert Browning, Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister

William Cullen Bryant, To Cole, the Painter, Departing for Europe

Leonard Cohen, `The killers that run . . .’

Billy Collins, Days

Frances Cornford, From A Letter to America on a Visit to Sussex . . .

Stephen Crane, Do Not Weep, Maiden, for War Is Kind

Robert Creeley, “Do you think . . .”

E. E. Cummings, if there are any heavens

Carl Dennis, The God Who Loves You

James Dickey, Kudzu

John Donne, The Good Morrow

John Donne, Holy Sonnet 1: Death Be Not Proud

Paul Laurence Dunbar, Sympathy

James Emanuel, The Negro

Lynn Emanuel,  Like God

Chief Dan George, The Beauty of the Trees

Nikki Giovanni, Woman

Louise Glück, Snowdrops

Marilyn Hacker, Sonnet Ending with a Film Subtitle

Daniel Halpern, Snapshot of Hué

H. S. (Sam) Hamod, Leaves

Frances E. W. Harper, She’s Free!

Robert Hass, Spring Rain

Robert Hayden, Those Winter Sundays

William Heyen, The Hair: Jacob Korman’s Story

A. D. Hope, Advice to Young Ladies

Carolina Hospital, Dear Tia

Robinson Jeffers, The Answer

John Keats, Ode on a Grecian Urn

Galway Kinnell, After Making Love We Hear Footsteps

Irving Layton, Rhine Boat Trip

Alan P. Lightman, In Computers

Liz Lochhead, The Choosing

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Sound of the Sea

Audre Lorde, Every Traveler Has One Vermont Poem

Amy Lowell, Patterns

Claude McKay, The White City

W. S. Merwin, Listen

N. Scott Momaday, The Bear

Howard Nemerov, Life Cycle of Common Man

Jim Northrup, wahbegan

Mary Oliver, Ghosts

Linda Pastan, Marks

Marge Piercy,The Secretary Chant

Edgar Allan Poe, Annabel Lee

John Crowe Ransom, Bells for John Whiteside’s Daughter

John Raven, Assailant

Luis Omar Salinas, In a Farmhouse

Sonia Sanchez, rite on: white america

Carl Sandburg, Chicago

Siegfried Sassoon, Dreamers

Gjertrud Schnackenberg, The Paperweight

Alan Seeger, I Have a Rendezvous with Death

Brenda Serotte, My Mother’s Face

William Shakespeare,Sonnet 29: When in Disgrace . . .

William Shakespeare, Sonnet 146: Poor Soul . . .

Karl Shapiro, Auto Wreck

Leslie Marmon Silko, Where Mountain Lion Lay Down with Deer

Stevie Smith, Not Waving But Drowning

William Stafford, Traveling Through the Dark

Gerald Stern, Burying an Animal on the Way to New York

Wallace Stevens, The Emperor of Ice-Cream

May Swenson, Question

Dylan Thomas, A Refusal to Mourn . . .

John Updike, Perfection Wasted

Shelly Wagner, The Boxes

Alice Walker, Revolutionary Petunias

Edmund Waller, Go Lovely Rose

Bruce Weigl, Song of Napalm

Walt Whitman, Beat! Beat! Drums!

Walt Whitman, Dirge for Two Veterans

Walt Whitman, Full of Life Now

Walt Whitman, I Hear America Singing

John Greenleaf Whittier, The Bartholdi Statue

Richard Wilbur, April 5, 1974

Paul Zimmer, The Day Zimmer Lost Religion

 

 

19A   Writing About Literature with the Aid of Research, 2   Writing Essays on Poetry: Using Extra Resources for Understanding

 

 

2 •     The Dramatic Vision: An Overview

 

Edward Albee, The Sandbox

Susan Glaspel, Trifles

Betty Keller, Tea Party

Eugene O’Neill, Before Breakfast

 

21 •  The Tragic Vision: Affirmation 

Sophocles, Oedipus the King

William Shakespeare, Hamlet

 

22 •  The Comic Vision: Restoring the Balance

 

William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Anton Chekhov, The Bear

Beth Henley, Am I Blue

 

23 •  Four Plays for Additional Enjoyment and Study

 

Henrik Ibsen, A Dollhouse (Et Dukkehjem)

Langston Hughes, Mulatto

Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman

August Wilson, Fences

 

23A• Writing About Literature with the Aid of Research, 3.   Writing Essays on Drama: Using Extra Resources for Understanding

 

24 •     Critical Approaches Important in the Study of Literature

 

25 •  Comparison-Contrast and Extended Comparison-Contrast: Learning by Seeing Literary Works Together

 

26 •  Taking Examinations on Literature

 

AppendixI.MLA Recommendations for Documenting Electronic Sources

Appendix II. Brief Biographies of the Poets inn Part III

Glossary of important Literary Terms

Index of Authors, Titles, and First Lines