Poetry is the primal literary art form, the oldest and arguably the most supple.

For its combination of conciseness and richly suggestive expression, it has no rival. A favorite poem is your friend and companion forever. It can move you, delight you, and enrich your hours of reflection over and over again.

Now you can learn to savor poetry—the joys that come from "the best words in the best order"—to a fuller degree than you might otherwise have imagined.

Professor Willard Spiegelman's friendly yet sophisticated approach to poetry has been delighting students at SMU for more than 30 years, and he has twice been named an Outstanding Professor there.

In these 24 lectures, he invites you to share what he has learned over his distinguished career as a scholar and teacher of literature.

Gain New Tools to Enrich Your Appreciation

Professor Spiegelman begins with the idea that a thorough understanding of poetic patterns, techniques, habits, and genres will give you the tools you need to increase your own enjoyment of poetry and its insights.

Dr. Spiegelman provides you these tools through a careful reading and thoughtful analysis of the outstanding poems discussed in this course.

Rejecting the widespread misconception that good poetry must be difficult or arcane, he points out that whatever else it is, poetry is music-in-words. Within every poem speaks a living voice.

You don't need to be a professional scholar or critic to develop an excellent ear for poetic music and poetic voices.

Have Fun Learning from Our Best-Loved Poets

The poems are the heart of this course. These 113 examples span a rich variety of verse forms and all the periods of English literature from the Renaissance to the present.

They represent the work of many of our best-loved poets. At two pages or less, most are short enough to be memorized completely or in part with relative ease, so you can leave no line unturned in thinking about them with respect to four questions:

* What do I notice about this poem?
* What is odd, quirky, or peculiar about it?
* What new words do I see, or familiar ones in new situations?
* Why is it the way it is, and not some other way?

If you encounter existing favorite poems here, chances are you'll come away with a fresh and more profound sense of why you liked them so much in the first place.

And you'll almost certainly find yourself adding entirely new favorites of your own.
You also learn an array of literary insights and reading skills.