Fiction. Talking with Amy Tan --
Reading a story --
The art of fiction --
Types of short fiction --
Death has an appointment in Samarra / Sufi Legend --
The north wind and the sun / Aesop --
The tortoise and the geese / Bidpai --
Independence / Chuang Tzu --
Godfather death / Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm --
Plot --
The short story --
A & P / John Updike --
Writing effectively --
Point of view --
Identifying point of view --
Types of narrators --
How much does a narrator know? --
Stream of consciousness --
A Rose for Emily / William Faulkner --
Tell-tale Heart / Edgar Allan Poe --
Why I live at the P.O. / Eudora Welty --
Girl / Jamaica Kincaid --
Writing effectively --
Character --
Characterization --
Motivation --
The jilting of Granny Weatherall / Katherine Anne Porter --
Bullet in the brain / Tobias Wolff --
Everyday use / Alice Walker --
Cathedral / Raymond Carver --
Writing effectively --
Setting --
Elements of setting --
Historical fiction --
Regionalism --
Naturalism --
The storm / Kate Chopin --
To build a fire / Jack London --
The gospel according to Mark / Jorge Luis Borges --
A pair of tickets / Amy Tan --
Writing effectively --
Tone and Style --
Tone --
Style --
Diction --
A clean, well-lighted place / Ernest Hemingway --
Barn burning / William Faulkner --
Irony --
The necklace / Guy de Maupassant --
The story of an hour / Kate Chopin --
Writing effectively --
Theme --
Plot versus theme --
Summarizing the theme --
Finding the theme --
Dead men's path / Chinua Achebe --
The house on Mango Street / Sandra Cisneros --
The parable of the prodigal son / Luke --
Harrison Bergeron / Kurt Vonnegut Jr. --
Writing effectively --
Symbol --
Allegory --
Symbols --
Recognizing symbols --
The chrysanthemums / John Steinbeck --
The yellow wallpaper / Charlotte Perkins Gilman --
The ones who walk away from Omelas / Ursula K. Le Guin --
The lottery / Shirley Jackson --
Writing effectively --
Stories for further reading --
This is what it means to say Phoenix, Arizona / Sherman Alexie --
Happy endings / Margaret Atwood --
Young Goodman Brown / Nathaniel Hawthorne --
The gift of the magi / O. Henry --
Sweat / Zora Neale Hurston --
Saboteur / Ha Jin --
Araby / James Joyce --
Before the law / Franz Kafka --
Miss Brill / Katherine Mansfield --
Where are you going, where have you been? / Joyce Carol Oates --
The things they carried / Tim O'Brien --
A good man is hard to find / Flannery O'Connor --
Tell them not to kill me! / Juan Rulfo --
A haunted house / Virginia Woolf --
Poetry. Talking with Kay Ryan --
Reading a poem --
Poetry or verse --
How to read a poem --
Paraphrase --
The Lake Isle of Innisfree / William Butler Yeats --
Lyric poetry --
Those winter Sundays / Robert Hayden --
Aunt Jennifer's tigers / Adrienne Rich --
Narrative poetry --
Sir Patrick Spence / Anonymous --
"Out, out --" / Robert Frost --
Dramatic poetry --
My last duchess / Robert Browning --
Didactic poetry --
Writing effectively --
Ask me / William Stafford --
Listening to a voice --
Tone --
My papa's waltz / Theodore Roethke --
The wayfarer / Stephen Crane --
The author to her book / Anne Bradstreet --
To a locomotive in winter / Walt Whitman --
I like to see it lap the miles / Emily Dickinson --
For my daughter / Weldon Kees --
The speaker in the poem --
White lies / Natasha Trethewey --
Luke Havergal / Edwin Arlington Robinson --
Dog haiku / Anonymous --
Theme for English B / Langston Hughes --
The farmer's bride / Charlotte Mew --
The red wheelbarrow / William Carlos Williams --
Irony --
Oh no / Robert Creeley --
The unknown citizen / W.H. Auden --
Rite of passage / Sharon Olds --
Second fig / Edna St. Vincent Millay --
The workbox / Thomas Hardy --
For review and further study --
Deliberate / Amy Uyematsu --
To Lucasta / Richard Lovelace --
Dulce et decorum est / Wilfred Owen --
Writing effectively --
Words --
Literal meaning : what a poem says first --
This is just to say / William Carlos Williams --
Diction --
Cargoes / John Masefield --
Batter my heart, three-personed God, for you / John Donne --
The value of a dictionary --
Aftermath / Henry Wadsworth Longfellow --
That will to divest / Kay Ryan --
Friend, on this scaffold Thomas More lies dead / J.V. Cunningham --
Bread / Samuel Menashe --
Grass / Carl Sandburg --
Word choice and word order --
Upon Julia's clothes / Robert Herrick --
The ruined maid / Thomas Hardy --
Lonely hearts / Wendy Cope --
For review and further study --
anyone lived in a pretty how town / e.e. cummings --
Carnation milk / Anonymous --
English con salsa / Gina Valdés --
My heart leaps up when I behold / William Wordsworth --
Mutability / William Wordsworth --
Jabberwocky / Lewis Carroll --
Writing effectively --
Saying and suggesting --
Denotation and connotation --
London / William Blake --
Disillusionment of ten o'clock / Wallace Stevens --
Fire and ice / Robert Frost --
The minefield / Diane Thiel --
Bilingual/bilingüe / Rhina P. Espaillat --
Tears, idle tears / Alfred, Lord Tennyson --
Love calls us to the things of this world / Richard Wilbur --
Writing effectively --
Imagery --
In a station of the Metro / Ezra Pound --
The piercing chill I feel / Taniguchi Buson --
Imagery --
The winter evening settles down / T.S. Eliot --
Root cellar / Theodore Roethke --
The fish / Elizabeth Bishop --
A route of evanescence / Emily Dickinson --
Reapers / Jean Toomer --
Pied beauty / Gerard Manley Hopkins --
About haiku --
The falling flower / Arakida Moritake --
Heat-lightning streak / Matsuo Basho --
In the old stone pool / Matsuo Basho --
On the one-ton temple bell / Taniguchi Buson --
Moonrise on mudflats / Taniguchi Buson --
only one guy / Kobayashi Issa --
Cricket / Kobayashi Issa --
Haiku from Japanese internment camps --
Rain shower from mountain / Suiko Matsushita --
Cosmos in bloom / Suiko Matsushita --
Even the croaking of frogs / Hakuro Wada --
The war, this year / Neiji Ozawa --
Contemporary haiku --
The old neighborhood / Nick Virgilio --
Visitor's room / Lee Gurga --
Born again / Jennifer Brutschy --
Learning to shave / Adelle Foley --
For review and further study --
Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art / John Keats --
Lipstick / Tami Haaland --
El hombre / William Carlos Williams --
Drinking alone by moonlight / Li Po, translated by Arthur Waley --
Not waving but drowning / Stevie Smith --
Driving to town late to mail a letter / Robert Bly --
Writing effectively --
Figures of Speech --
Why speak figuratively? --
The eagle / Alfred, Lord Tennyson --
Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? / William Shakespeare --
Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? / Howard Moss --
Metaphor and simile --
My life had stood, a loaded gun / Emily Dickinson --
Flower in the crannied wall / Alfred, Lord Tennyson --
To see a world in a grain of sand / William Blake --
Metaphors / Sylvia Plath --
Simile / N. Scott Momaday --
A Martian sends a postcard home / Craig Raine --
Other figures of speech --
The wind / James Stephens --
You fit into me / Margaret Atwood --
Epitaph / Timothy Steele --
Money / Dana Gioia --
Fog / Carl Sandburg --
For review and further study --
The secret sits / Robert Frost --
Turtle / Kay Ryan --
Love and friendship / Emily Brontë --
Ode on a Grecian urn / John Keats --
Writing effectively --
Sound --
Sound as meaning --
Who goes with Fergus? / William Butler Yeats --
(from) Ulalume / Edgar Allan Poe --
A slumber did my spirit seal / William Wordsworth --
Alliteration and assonance --
The watch / Frances Cornford --
The splendor falls on castle walls / Alfred, Lord Tennyson --
Rime --
The hippopotamus / Hilaire Belloc --
Leda and the swan / William Butler Yeats --
God's grandeur / Gerard Manley Hopkins --
Desert places / Robert Frost --
How to read a poem aloud --
In memoriam John Coltrane / Michael Stillman --
Writing effectively --
Rhythm --
Stresses and pauses --
Stress and meaning --
Line endings --
We real cool / Gwendolyn Brooks --
Break, break, break / Alfred, Lord Tennyson --
Résumé / Dorothy Parker --
Meter --
Counting-out rhyme / Edna St. Vincent Millay --
When I was one-and-twenty / A.E. Housman --
Beat! beat! drums! / Walt Whitman --
Writing effectively --
Closed form --
The value of form --
Formal patterns --
Days of wine and roses / Ernest Dowson --
Song ("Go and catch a falling star") / John Donne --
Ballads --
Bonny Barbara Allan / Anonymous --
Ballad of Birmingham / Dudley Randall --
The sonnet --
Let me not to the marriage of true minds / William Shakespeare --
What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why / Edna St. Vincent Millay --
Acquainted with the night / Robert Frost --
Shakespearean sonnet / R.S. Gwynn --
The Facebook sonnet / Sherman Alexie --
The epigram --
Of treason / Sir John Harrington --
Two somewhat different epigrams / Langston Hughes --
Other forms --
Do not go gentle into that good night / Dylan Thomas --
We wear the mask / Paul Laurence Dunbar --
Sestina / Elizabeth Bishop --
Writing effectively --
Open Form --
Ancient stairway / Denise Levertov --
Free verse --
Buffalo Bill's / e.e. cummings --
The dance / William Carlos Williams --
The heart / Stephen Crane --
Cavalry crossing a ford / Walt Whitman --
Thirteen ways of looking at a blackbird / Wallace Stevens --
Prose poetry --
The magic study of happiness / Charles Simic --
For review and further study --
in Just- / e.e. cummings --
I shall paint my nails red / Carole Satyamurti --
I, too / Langston Hughes --
Writing effectively --
Symbol --
The meanings of a symbol --
The Boston Evening Transcript / T.S. Eliot --
The lightning is a yellow fork / Emily Dickinson --
Identifying symbols --
Neutral tones / Thomas Hardy --
Facing it / Yusef Komunyakaa --
Allegory --
The parable of the good seed / Matthew --
Redemption / George Herbert --
Proverbios y cantares (XXIX) / Antonio Machado --
Traveler / translated by Michael Ortiz --
The road not taken / Robert Frost --
Up-hill / Christina Rossetti --
For review and further study --
Wild geese / Mary Oliver --
Popcorn-can cover / Lorine Niedecker --
Anecdote of the jar / Wallace Stevens --
Writing effectively --
Myth and Narrative --
The subjects and uses of myth --
Origins of myth --
Nothing gold can stay / Robert Frost --
The world is too much with us / William Wordsworth --
Helen / H.D. --
Archetype --
Medusa / Louise Bogan --
First love : a quiz / A.E. Stallings --
Personal myth --
The second coming / William Butler Yeats --
Memento mori in middle school / Diane Thiel --
Lady Lazarus / Sylvia Plath --
Myth and popular culture --
Cinderella / Anne Sexton --
Writing effectively --
What is poetry? --
Poems for further reading --
thirteen ways of looking at a tortilla / Aaron Abeyta --
First poem for you / Kim Addonizio --
The powwow at the end of the world / Sherman Alexie --
Last words of the prophet / Anonymous (Navajo chant) --
Dover Beach / Matthew Arnold --
Musée des Beaux Arts / W.H. Auden --
One art / Elizabeth Bishop --
The tyger / William Blake --
the mother / Gwendolyn Brooks --
How do I love thee? let me count the ways / Elizabeth Barrett Browning --
Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister / Robert Browning --
Dostoevsky / Charles Bukowski --
Quinceañera / Judith Ortiz Cofer --
Kubla Khan / Samuel Taylor Coleridge --
Care and feeding / Billy Collins --
Wild nights, wild nights! / Emily Dickinson --
I felt a funeral, in my brain / Emily Dickinson --
Because I could not stop for death / Emily Dickinson --
Death be not proud / John Donne --
The flea / John Donne --
The love song of J. Alfred Prufrock / T.S. Eliot --
Mending wall / Robert Frost --
Birches / Robert Frost --
Stopping by woods on a snowy evening / Robert Frost --
A supermarket in California / Allen Ginsberg --
The convergence of the twain / Thomas Hardy --
Digging / Seamus Heaney --
Easter wings / George Herbert --
To the virgins, to make much of time / Robert Herrick --
Spring and fall / Gerard Manley Hopkins --
The windhover / Gerard Manley Hopkins --
Loveliest of trees, the cherry now / A.E. Housman --
To an athlete dying young / A.E. Housman --
The Negro speaks of rivers / Langston Hughes --
Harlem [dream deferred] / Langston Hughes --
The death of the ball turret gunner / Randall Jarrell --
Fire on the hills / Robinson Jeffers --
Missed time / Ha Jin --
On my first son / Ben Jonson --
On the death of friends in childhood / Donald Justice --
Ode to a nightingale / John Keats --
Home is so sad / Philip Larkin --
Piano / D.H. Lawrence --
Learning to love America / Shirley Geok-lin Lim --
To his coy mistress / Andrew Marvell --
The Harlem dancer / Claude McKay --
Recuerdo / Edna St. Vincent Millay --
When I consider how my light is spent / John Milton --
We are many / Pablo Neruda, translated by Alastair Reid --
Anthem for doomed youth / Wilfred Owen --
Daddy / Sylvia Plath --
Annabel Lee / Edgar Allan Poe --
The river-merchant's wife : a letter / Ezra Pound --
Naming of parts / Henry Reed --
Miniver Cheevy / Edwin Arlington Robinson --
Song ("When I am dead, my dearest") / Christina Rossetti --
When, in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes / William Shakespeare --
My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun / William Shakespeare --
Ozymandias / Percy Bysshe Shelley --
The emperor of ice-cream / Wallace Stevens --
Ulysses / Alfred, Lord Tennyson --
Fern Hill / Dylan Thomas --
When I heard the learn'd astronomer / Walt Whitman --
O captain! my captain! / Walt Whitman --
Spring and all // William Carlos Williams --
Queen-Anne's-lace / William Carlos Williams --
Composed upon Westminster Bridge / William Wordsworth --
Autumn begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio / James Wright --
In this strange labyrinth / Mary Sidney Wroth --
He wishes for the cloths of heaven / William Butler Yeats --
Sailing to Byzantium / William Butler Yeats --
When you are old / William Butler Yeats --
Drama. Talking with David Ives --
Reading a play --
Interpreting plays --
Theatrical conventions --
Elements of a play --
Trifles / Susan Glaspell --
Analyzing Trifles --
Writing effectively --
Tragedy and comedy --
Tragedy --
(Scene from) Doctor Faustus / Christopher Marlowe --
Comedy --
(Scene from) The importance of being earnest / Oscar Wilde --
Soap opera / David Ives --
Writing effectively --
The theater of Sophocles --
Theater in ancient Greece --
The civic role of Greek drama --
Aristotle's concept of tragedy --
Sophocles --
The origins of Oedipus the King --
Oedipus the King / Sophocles, translated by David Grene --
Writing effectively --
The theater of Shakespeare --
William Shakespeare --
A note on Othello --
Picturing Othello --
Othello, the Moor of Venice / William Shakespeare --
Writing effectively --
The modern theater --
Realism --
A doll's house / Henrik Ibsen, translated by R. Farquharson Sharp, revised by Viktoria Michelsen --
The glass menagerie / Tennessee Williams --
Experimental drama --
The Cuban swimmer / Milcha Sanchez-Scott --
Documentary drama --
(Scenes from) Twilight : Los Angeles, 1992 / Anna Deavere Smith --
Writing effectively --
Plays for further reading --
The sound of a voice / David Henry Hwang --
El Santo Americano / Edward Bok Lee --
Click / Brighde Mullins --
Fences / August Wilson --
Writing. Writing about literature --
Read actively --
Nothing gold can stay / Robert Frost --
Think about the reading --
Plan your essay --
Prewriting : generate ideas and issues --
Sample student prewriting exercises --
Develop your argument --
Strengthen your argument : rhetorical appeals --
Draft your argument --
Revise your argument --
Some final advice on rewriting --
What's your purpose? common approaches to writing about literature --
The form of your finished paper --
Topics for writing --
Writing a research paper --
Browse the research --
Choose a topic : formulate your argument --
Begin your research --
Evaluate your sources --
Organize your research --
Organize your paper --
Maintain academic integrity --
Acknowledge all sources --
Document sources using MLA style --
Concluding thoughts --
Reference guide for MLA citations.