This course is a general introduction to reading poetry, with a focus on narrative poetry. We begin with Milton’s epic, Paradise Lost, and then turn to eighteenth-century mock epics and verse narratives by Pope and Swift, and work by the Romantics, particularly Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Keats. The course will end with Byron’s satiric masterstroke, Don Juan, and TS Eliot’s toppled epic, The Waste Land.