A most congenial listening experience. The only problem is tracking the stress patterns in your head while Drout is talking.

I was amused at the mention of Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle, which I have yet to quite finish reading. ( )

Aside from songs, I'm not a big fan of poetry. Yes, I have at least nine books that are each collections of one poet's works, but otherwise my poetry books tend to be textbooks. However, I've enjoyed Professor Drout's Singers and Tales: Oral traditions and the Roots of Literature, The Anglo-Saxon World, and How to Think : The Liberal Arts and Their Enduring Value. That's why seeing his name on A Way With Words IV: Understanding Poetry, was enough to get me to check it out.

The titles of the 14 lectures for this Modern Scholar offering are:

1. What is Poetry?

2. Oral Tradition

3. The Roots of the Tree: Anglo Saxon Poetry

4. Of Meters and Rhyming Craftily: Middle English and the Development of Rhymed Poetry

5. Early Renaissance: An Exploration of Form

6. Metaphysical, Milton

7. The Hard Stuff: The Eighteenth Century and the Influence of Classical Learning

8. Romantics: Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge

9: Later Romantics: Byron, Shelley, and Keats

10. Victorians!

11. American Poetry and the Development of Free Verse

12. Modernism

13. Late Modernism

14. Poetry Now

Lessons one through ten are exclusively English poets, with two poetesses: Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Christina Rossetti. (He says he's left out Aemilia [also spelled 'Emilia'] Lanyer [1569 - 1645], and Dorothy Wordsworth [1771 - 1855] because ...'subsequent writers did read them very much and so did not base the next stages of poetry upon their work.'

Our first Americans in this series, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Walt Whitman, and Emily Dickinson, get lesson eleven to themselves. I remember most of the names from lessons twelve and thirteen from high school and college, but lesson fourteen? Who are those people?

I'll give Professor Drout a gold star for reminding us what various poetic terms, such as 'iambic pentameter' when he brings them up again in later lessons, because I'd have had to keep going back to lesson four if he hadn't. I'd learned some of what he wrote in the earliest lessons from his other series, but the focus was different here.

I'd never given a thought to how difficult it must be to try to write poetry in the style of poets from other languages because English doesn't work well with those styles. Thumbs up to the poets who succeeded. (It was very interesting to learn that Longfellow's 'The Song of Hiawatha' was written in the style of the Finnish 'Kalevala'.) I also enjoyed learning that each period's style was a reaction to the previous one.

I'm with Professor Drout on changing the name of the Renaissance to 'the Early Modern Period'. Not only is that a flat and lifeless name compared to the original, I wish we'd get better names for the 20th and 21st century poetry that don't involve being modern. They won't stay modern forever. I've stopped using the phrase 'the last century' because that no longer means '19th century' as it did for most of my life. I'll be 64 in less than a month and I've long since become used to having the toys, books, TV shows, and music of my youth being considered vintage. Professor Drout does bring up the probability that later generations will give these periods other names, but why wait?

This series is supposed to help us appreciate poetry. Some of the poems only sampled in the audio are printed in full or at least have a longer sample in the course guide. We are encouraged to seek translations of poets from other countries. Am I sold on poetry? No, but I like it a little more than I did. ( )

I didn't find this course as insightful as Drout's others. ( )