English Department
Seamus Cooney

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

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!

Computer help pages

• Using WMU dial-up modems: Help on dialing in from home.
• Guide to WMU Computer Labs , with lab hours, rules, etc.
• Using LYNX to access the World Wide Web: this will help you read our class pages even if you don't have Netscape on your home computer. All you need is a modem and the ability to log in to your VMS account.

• Confer Beginner's Guide: basic instructions for using Confer on the VaxVMS cluster (Tigger, Piglet).

• E-mail basics.
• Advanced e-mail.
• Look up the e-mail address of faculty and students
• Be sure to register your e-mail address so others can find you. Here's how to begin: at the $ prompt enter EMAILREG.

  Enrolled students use EMAILREGISTER to select and register their
  E-mail name and associate it with one of their E-mail accounts.
  Once an E-mail name is registered, other users can look the student
  up in EMAILUSERS (and, eventually, GOPHER and the World Wide Web).

  When you use EMAILREGISTER, you will be asked for your university ID,
  and your last name.  You will also be asked for your Registration PIN
  unless you are using your VMS student personal account.  If you change
  your PIN, EMAILREGISTER will not know immediately.

Class home pages

• Literary Interpretation home page
• Studies in Verse home page
• Nature of Poetry home page
• The home page of my Summer 1995 seminar, Modern British Poetry , containing links to an excellent graduate student paper on Hardy and to other materials.

Go to English Department Home Page

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