British Poetry Down the Ages: From the Canterbury Tales to The Wasteland

Summary
Number of Sessions: 15
Principal Teachers: Professor Dr. Sridhar Rajeswaran with Professor Dr. Nilufer E. Bharucha and Dr. Preeti Shirodkar
Medium – English

Description
A feast to the lovers of British literature. This time we are focussing on Poetry and taking you on a whirlwind tour spanning several centuries, from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales to T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland.
Lovers of English poetry can look forward to being regaled by great poets and poems beginning with extracts from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and then moving into the Elizabethan age where we shall be looking at poets like Sidney, Spenser , Marlowe and of course Shakespeare.

The English Literary canon has until recently been very male centric, so to redress the balance we shall be devoting at least one complete session to women poets – Emily Bronte, Christina Rossetti, Dame Edith Sitwell, Rose Macaulay and May Sinclair.
So we shall end with a flurry of female voices, some of them pre-feminist.

Syllabus
Session 1 (Prof. Dr. Sridhar Rajeswaran)
Geoffrey Chaucer’s Excerpts from the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales and Excerpts from The Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale
Christopher Marlowe’s Helen of Troy from the play Faustus

Session 2 (Prof. Dr. Sridhar Rajeswaran)

Sir Philip Sidney’s Loving in Truth, I have not pain enough
William Shakespeare’s Shall I compare thee, Seven Stages of Man, Quality of Mercy
Edmund Spenser’s One Day I wrote her name

Session 3 (Dr. Preeti Shirodkar)

Robert Herrick’s To the Virgins to make much of Time
Sir John Suckling’s A Soldier
RichardcLovelace’s The Snail
Henry Vaughan’s The Retreat
Thomas Carew’s A Deposition from Love

Session 4 (Prof. Dr. Nilufer Bharucha)
John Donne’s Sunne Rising, Cannonization
Andrew Marvell’s To His Coy Mistress

George Herbert’s The Pulley

Session 5 (Prof. Dr. Sridhar Rajeswaran)

John Milton’s On His Blindness , On Arriving at the Age of Twenty three
John Dryden’s Farewell Ungrateful Traitor, A Song to a Fair Young lady

Alexander Pope’s On a Certain Lady in Court, Ode on Solitude

Session 6 (Prof. Dr. Sridhar Rajeswaran)
Oliver Goldsmith’s Village Priest and the School Master from The Deserted village
Thomas Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard

Session 7 (Prof. Dr. Sridhar Rajeswaran)
William Blake’s Introduction Songs of innocence, Songs of Experience, Chimney Sweeper poems The Lamb, The Tyger
S.T. Coleridge’s Kubla Khan

Session 8 (Dr. Preeti Shirodkar)

William Wordsworth’s We are Seven, Untrodden Ways, Solitary Reaper
John Keats’s La Belle Dame…, Grecian Urn, When I have fears
Percy Bysshe Shelley’s To a Skylark, Ozymandias

Session 9 (Prof. Dr. Nilufer Bharucha)

Lord Byron’s She Walks in Beauty, When We Two Parted, ‘On This Day I Complete My Thirty-Sixth Year’

Robert Burns’s A Red, Red Rose

Robert Southey’s Sonnets on the Slave Trade, Sonnets, 4,5 and 6.

Session 10 (Prof. Dr. Nilufer Bharucha)
Alfred Lord Tennyson’s Thithonus/Ulysses, Break Break Break
Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s How do I Love thee , The Cry of the Children

Emily Bronte’s No Coward Soul Is Mine, To Imagination and Often rebuked, yet always back returning

Session 11 (Dr. Preeti Shirodkar)

Matthew Arnold’s Dover Beach, Marguerite
Robert Browning’s My Last Duchess, Meeting at Night, Parting at Morning
Christina Rossetti’s Echo, After Death, Crying my little one

2Session 12 (Prof. Dr. Nilufer Bharucha)
William Butler Yeats’s Cloths of Heaven, A Prayer for my Daughter, The Lake Isle of Innisfree and When You are Old
W.H.Auden’s Unknown Citizen, O What is that Sound, Musee des Beaux Arts

Session 13 (Prof. Dr. Sridhar Rajeswaran)

G.M.Hopkins’s The Windhover, Pied Beauty, Spring and Fall
T.S.Eliot’s Excerpts from The Wasteland
Ezra Pound’s Lament of the Frontier Guard

Session 14 (Dr. Preeti Shirodkar)
Wilfred Owen’s Strange Meeting, Futility
Phillip Larkin’s This be the Verse, Afternoons and Aubade

Keith Douglas’s How to Kill and Aristocrats

Session 15  (Dr. Sridhar Rajeswaran)
Dame Edith Sitwell’s Still Falls the Rain
Rose Macaulay’s Many Sisters to Many Brothers

May Sinclair’s After the Retreat

Kathleen Jessie Raine’s The Pythoness

Elizabeth Jennings’s One Flesh, In a Garden

About the Speakers
Prof.Dr. Sridhar Rajeswaran is a Visiting Professor of Humanities at the Centre for Excellence in Basic Sciences, University of Mumbai and Department of Atomic Energy. He is also a member of the Advisory Committee of the CoHaB IDC Constructions of Home and Belonging Indian Diaspora Centre, University of Mumbai. He is Global Faculty at the Fairleigh Dickinson University, NJ, USA. He has studied at the Universities of Madras and Bombay. His doctoral work dealt with postcolonial perspectives on the poetry of W.B. Yeats. His postdoctoral areas of research are Modernist Poetry, Modern Indian Drama, Postcolonial Studies and Studies of the Indian Diaspora in Literature and films.

Prof. Dr. Nilufer E Bharucha is Director of the Diasporic Constructions of Home and Belonging – Indian Diaspora Centre, Visiting Professor of Humanities, Centre for Excellence in Basic Sciences and Former Senior Professor and Chair, Department of English, all at the University of Mumbai. Professor Bharucha is Faculty Associate Emeritus, South Asian Studies Institute, University of the Fraser Valley, B.C., Canada and Global Faculty, Fairleigh Dickinson University, NJ, USA. She has served on the jury of the Commonwealth Literature award and the Sahitya Akademi, Delhi Literature award in English. She has also been on the jury for the Rhodes scholarship. She has authored and edited 6 books in the areas of Postcolonial Indian Writing, Diasporic Indian Literature & Cinema and the Writing of the Parsis. One of her recent books is entitled Indian Diasporic Literature and Cinema. She is co-editor of the CoHaB IDC’s Diaspora Studies Series. She has contributed 3 modules on Indian Diasporic Literature and Cinema to the University Grants Commission’s online Postgraduate E-pathshala.

Dr. Preeti Shirodkar has Ph.D. in English Language and Literature from the University of Mumbai, Dr. Preeti Shirodkar, Associate Professor has over 28 years of experience in teaching English Literature, Communication and Soft Skills. She has conducted numerous training programmes and delivered talks for the academia and industry, served at varied undergraduate and postgraduate departments in Mumbai and has been to Germany and England as a Visiting Scholar. A Fellow of the Indian Institute of Advanced Studies, Shimla, she has also completed 2 Minor Research Projects for the University of Mumbai. She is a recipient of many awards and has written 7 books and has presented and published many articles and papers at national and international forums. She is passionate about teaching, mentoring, editing and creative and critical writing.