English Department
Seamus Cooney

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Assignment related pages
Exemplary Writing
Humor and trivia
Help with e-mail, LYNX, etc.

Relevant to assignments:

• Reading
• An interactive quiz on metrics
• Reading aloud
• Imagery: some notes and analyses.
• A "slow reading" (by me) of Shakespeare's Sonnet 65, "Since brass, nor stone . . ."
• An even slower line-by-line commentary on Shakespeare's sonnet 138 ("When my love swears that she is made of truth").
• A newspaper critic on Shakespeare's sonnet 30 ("When to the sessions of sweet silent thought"). Can you imagine this appearing in an American newspaper?
• Shakespeare's grammar -- some elementary notes


• Writing
  • Paraphrase: definition and instructions
  • Sample paraphrase
  • A glossary of poetic terms from the Univ. of Pennsylvania. But watch out for some slips (e.g. under "iambic").
  • The sonnet form, a sample entry from the foregoing source.
  • Writing papers of literary analysis. Copious advice!
  • How to quote appropriately in your papers.
  • Some notes on syntax as an aspect of literature for analysis. (This page needs more work.)

• Also consult a page of links to web sites of special literary interest

Exemplary writing:

• Coleridge, Mnemonic about meters
• Coombes on "Dover Beach". A fine piece of close reading.
• Empson on Donne
• D. H. Lawrence, excerpts from his letters
• Charles Olson: extracts from "Projective Verse" The manifesto (developed in collaboration with Robert Creeley) of "the new American Poetry" of the 1960s.
• Shelley and Shakespeare -- close reading of two passages by the critic F. R. Leavis.

Humor, Trivia, etc.

• The Julia A. Moore home page: meet "The Sweet Singer of Michigan" and your literary life will never be quite the same again.
• Some more remarkably bad poems. Feel superior even to some famous authors!
• Anti-pedantry page : Jane Austen and other famous authors violate what everyone learned in their English class (e.g. the singular "their" construction). This page will give students valuable weapons against the grammar pedants.
• Country song titles. Are these for real?
• Safe faxing. Lots of double entendres.
• Rhymes on English Pronunciation . An amusing exercise that will make you sympathize with foreigners who have to learn English -- and will challenge the pronunciation abilities of native speakers!
• Satire on post-modernism by Mark Leyner -- a brilliant piece of work!

Since 19 October 1996, this page has been visited times.
Updated 1 October 1998.
Created 19 October 1996. Comments and suggestions to Seamus Cooney