Literature: A Portable Anthology
Sixth EditionJanet Gardner; Joanne Diaz; Beverly Lawn; Jack Ridl; Peter Schakel
©2025In this collection you will discover a choice gathering of classic and contemporary fiction, poetry, and drama. Great writers you may know about, such as Edgar Allan Poe, Emily Dickinson, Langston Hughes, and William Shakespeare, are joined by current authors worth knowing, among them Carmen Maria Machado, Jamil Jan Kochai, Solmaz Sharif, Natalie Diaz, Lynn Nottage, and James Ijames.
Table of Contents
[* Indicates material new to this edition]
Preface for Instructors
Selections by Form and Theme
1. Introduction to Reading and Writing about Literature
Why Read Literature?
Why Write about Literature?
What to Expect in a Literature Class
Literature and Enjoyment
*Literature and Difficulty
2. The Role of Good Reading
The Value of Rereading
Close Reading
The Myth of “Hidden Meaning”
Questions for Close Reading: Fiction
Annotating
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS, “The Second Coming” (Annotated Poem)
Questions for Close Reading: Poetry
Note-Taking
Questions for Close Reading: Drama
Informal Writing
Using Reference Materials
Asking Critical Questions of Literature
BEN JONSON, “On My First Son” (Annotated Poem)
☑ Checklist for Good Reading
3. The Writing Process
Prewriting
Choosing a Topic
Developing an Argument
The Thesis
Gathering Support for Your Thesis
Organizing Your Paper
Drafting the Paper
Revising and Editing
☑ Global Revision Checklist
☑ Local Revision Checklist
☑ Final Editing Checklist
Peer Editing and Workshops
Tips for Writing about Literature
Using Quotations Effectively
Quoting from Stories
Quoting from Poems
Quoting from Plays
Formatting Your Paper
4. Common Writing Assignments
Summary
Response
STUDENT ESSAY: Taylor Plantan, “A Response to ‘Sweat’ ”
Explication
ROBERT HERRICK, “Upon Julia’s Clothes”
STUDENT ESSAY: Jessica Barnes, “Poetry in Motion: Herrick’s ‘Upon Julia’s Clothes’ ”
Analysis
ROBERT BROWNING, “My Last Duchess”
STUDENT ESSAY: Adam Walker, “Possessed by the Need for Possession: Browning’s ‘My Last Duchess’ ”
Comparison and Contrast
CHRISTINA ROSSETTI, “After Death”
STUDENT ESSAY: Todd Bowen, “Speakers for the Dead: Narrators in ‘My Last Duchess’ and ‘After Death’ ”
Essay Exams
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, “Sonnet 73”
ROBERT HERRICK, “To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time”
STUDENT ESSAY EXAM: Midterm Essay
5. Writing about Stories
Elements of Fiction
Plot
Character
Point of View
Setting
Theme
Symbolism
Style
Stories for Analysis
KATE CHOPIN, “The Story of an Hour” (Annotated Story)
STUDENT ESSAY: An Essay That Compares and Contrasts: Melanie Smith, “Good Husbands in Bad Marriages”
6. Writing about Poems
Elements of Poetry
The Speaker
The Listener
Imagery
Sound and Sense
Two Poems for Analysis
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, “Sonnet 116” (Annotated Poem)
T. S. ELIOT, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (Annotated Poem)
STUDENT ESSAY: An Explication: Patrick McCorkle, “Shakespeare Defines Love”
7. Writing about Plays
Elements of Drama
Plot, Character, and Theme
Diction
Spectacle
Setting
How to Read a Play
Watching a Play
The Director’s Vision
STUDENT ESSAY: An Analysis: Sarah Johnson, “Moral Ambiguity and Character Development in Trifles”
8. Writing a Literary Research Paper
Finding Sources
Evaluating Sources
Working with Sources
Quotations
Paraphrases and Summaries
Commentaries
Keeping Track of Your Sources
Writing the Paper
Refine Your Thesis
Organize Your Evidence
Start Your Draft
Revise
Edit and Proofread
Understanding and Avoiding Plagiarism
*Understanding Artificial Intelligence
What to Document and What Not to Document
Documenting Sources: MLA Format
In-Text Citations
Preparing Your Works Cited List
STUDENT ESSAY: Sample Research Paper: Rachel McCarthy, “The Widening Gyres of Chaos in Yeats’s ‘The Second Coming’ ”
9. Literary Criticism and Literary Theory
Formalism and New Criticism
Feminist and Gender Criticism
Queer Theory
Marxist Criticism
Cultural Studies
Postcolonial Criticism
Historical Criticism and New Historicism
Psychological Theories
Reader-Response Theories
Structuralism
Poststructuralism and Deconstruction
Ecocriticism
PART TWO: Fiction
Nathaniel Hawthorne, Young Goodman Brown
Edgar Allan Poe, The Cask of Amontillado
Ambrose Bierce, An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wallpaper
Kate Chopin, The Story of an Hour
Anton Chekhov, The Lady with the Dog
James Joyce, The Dead
Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis
Virginia Woolf, Kew Gardens
Zora Neale Hurston, Sweat
Ernest Hemingway, Hills Like White Elephants
William Faulkner, A Rose for Emily
Shirley Jackson, The Lottery
Ralph Ellison, Battle Royal
Flannery O’Connor, A Good Man Is Hard to Find
James Baldwin, Sonny’s Blues
*Paule Marshall, Reena
*Julio Cortázar, Continuity of Parks
Joyce Carol Oates, Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?
*Ursula LeGuin, The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas
Alice Walker, Everyday Use
Jamaica Kincaid, Girl
Raymond Carver, Cathedral
Sandra Cisneros, My Name
Louise Erdrich, The Red Convertible
Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried
Margaret Atwood, Happy Endings
*Leila Aboulela, The Museum
ZZ Packer, Brownies
Yiyun Li, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, The Thing Around Your Neck
*Simon Rich, I Love Girl
Ted Chiang, The Great Silence
*Carmen Maria Machado, The Husband Stitch
*Anthony Veasna So, Three Women of Chuck’s Donuts
*Jonathan Escoffery, Splashdown
*Etgar Keret, For the Woman
Who Has Everything
*Jamil Jan Kochai, The Haunting of Hajji Hotak
*Morgan Talty, The Name Means Thunder
*Yvette Lisa Ndlovu, Home Became a Thing with Thorns
PART THREE: Poetry
Anonymous, The Wife’s Lament
*Rumi, Let’s love each other
*Hwang Jini, Expectation
Sir Thomas Wyatt, Whoso list to hunt
Queen Elizabeth I, On Monsieur’s Departure
Christopher Marlowe, The Passionate Shepherd to His Love
Walter Raleigh, The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd
William Shakespeare, Sonnet 18 (“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”)
William Shakespeare, Sonnet 73 (“That time of year thou mayst in me behold”)
William Shakespeare, Sonnet 116 (“Let me not to the marriage of true minds”)
Aemilia Lanyer, Eve’s Apology in Defense of Women
Ben Jonson, On My First Son
John Donne, A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning
John Donne, Death, be not proud
George Herbert, The Collar
Robert Herrick, To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time
Andrew Marvell, To His Coy Mistress
John Milton, When I consider how my light is spent
Anne Bradstreet, Here Follows Some Verses upon the Burning of Our House
Thomas Gray, Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard
Phillis Wheatley, On Being Brought from Africa to America
William Blake, The Lamb
William Blake, The Tyger
William Wordsworth, Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey
Kobayashi Issa, (“All the time I pray to Buddha”)
Kobayashi Issa, (“Don’t worry, spiders,”)
Kobayashi Issa, (“Goes out, comes back — ”)
George Gordon, Lord Byron, Prometheus
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Kubla Khan
John Keats, When I have fears that I may cease to be
John Keats, Ode to a Nightingale
Percy Bysshe Shelley, Ode to the West Wind
Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Ulysses
Robert Browning, My Last Duchess
Edgar Allan Poe, Annabel Lee
Elizabeth Barrett Browning, How do I love thee? Let me count the ways
Matthew Arnold, Dover Beach
Lewis Carroll, Jabberwocky
Emily Dickinson, I heard a Fly buzz — when I died
*Emily Dickinson, could I but ride indefinite
Emily Dickinson, Because I could not stop for Death
*Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Learning to Read
*Gerard Manley Hopkins, Pied Beauty
*José Marti, Two Homelands
Walt Whitman, From Song of Myself
William Butler Yeats, The Lake Isle of Innisfree
William Butler Yeats, The Second Coming
Edwin Arlington Robinson, Richard Cory
Paul Laurence Dunbar, We Wear the Mask
*Angelina Weld Grimké, El Beso
Robert Frost, After Apple-Picking
Robert Frost, The Road Not Taken
Robert Frost, Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
Ezra Pound, In a Station of the Metro
Ezra Pound, The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter
T. S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
Wallace Stevens, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird
Rainer Maria Rilke, Archaic Torso of Apollo
Marianne Moore, Poetry
Wilfred Owen, Dulce et Decorum Est
Langston Hughes, The Negro Speaks of Rivers
Langston Hughes, The Weary Blues
Langston Hughes, Theme for English B
Langston Hughes, Harlem
Claude McKay, America
E. E. Cummings, in Just-
E. E. Cummings, “next to of course god america i
Edna St. Vincent Millay, What lips my lips have kissed
William Carlos Williams, The Red Wheelbarrow
William Carlos Williams, This Is Just to Say
Pablo Neruda, Body of a Woman
Countee Cullen, Incident
W. H. Auden, Funeral Blues (Stop all the clocks)
*Julia de Burgos, To Julia de Burgos
Federico García Lorca, Dawn
Gwendolyn Brooks, the mother
Gwendolyn Brooks, We Real Cool
Czesław Miłosz, Dedication
Elizabeth Bishop, The Fish
Elizabeth Bishop, One Art
Theodore Roethke, My Papa’s Waltz
Dylan Thomas, Do not go gentle into that good night
Allen Ginsberg, A Supermarket in California
*Robert Hayden, Those Winter Sundays
Audre Lorde, Coal
Sylvia Plath, Daddy
William Stafford, Traveling through the Dark
Mahmoud Darwish, Identity Card
Seamus Heaney, Digging
Seamus Heaney, Mid-Term Break
Denise Levertov, The Ache of Marriage
Dudley Randall, Ballad of Birmingham
Adrienne Rich, Diving into the Wreck
*Adrienne Rich, Power
Muriel Rukeyser, Waiting for Icarus
Gary Soto, Moving Away
Lucille Clifton, homage to my hips
Lucille Clifton, at the cemetery, walnut grove plantation, south carolina, 1989
Galway Kinnell, After Making Love We Hear Footsteps
Joy Harjo, Fear Poem, or I Give You Back
Louise Erdrich, Indian Boarding School: The Runaways
Louise Glück, Mock Orange
*Edward Hirsch, Fast Break
*Etheridge Knight, Feeling Fucked Up
Li-Young Lee, Eating Alone
Sharon Olds, I Go Back to May 1937
Yusef Komunyakaa, Facing It
Linda Pastan, love poem
*Toi Derricotte, The Minks
Rita Dove, Fifth Grade Autobiography
*Charles Simic, My mother was a braid of black smoke
Robert Pinsky, Shirt
Billy Collins, Forgetfulness
Victor Hernández Cruz, Problems with Hurricanes
Philip Levine, What Work Is
Tony Hoagland, History of Desire
Bernadette Mayer, Sonnet (You jerk you didn’t call me up)
Judith Ortiz Cofer, The Latin Deli: An Ars Poetica
Richard Garcia, Why I Left the Church
*Carter Revard, In Oklahoma
*Eavan Boland, That the Science of Cartography Is Limited
Marilyn Chin, How I Got That Name
Mark Doty, A Display of Mackerel
Allison Joseph, On Being Told I Don’t Speak Like a Black Person
Jane Kenyon, Happiness
*Jack Agüeros, Sonnet: The History of Puerto Rico
Mary Ruefle, Rain Effect
*Martín Espada, My Name is Espada
Natasha Trethewey, History Lesson
Jorie Graham, Prayer
Taylor Mali, What Teachers Make
Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, Unidentified Female Student, Former Slave
Suji Kwock Kim, Occupation
Kim Addonizio, First Kiss
*Nick Carbó, Robo
*Mary Oliver, Wild Geese
Marilyn Nelson, Emmett Till’s name still catches in my throat,
Brian Turner, What Every Soldier Should Know
Terrance Hayes, Talk
*Terrance Hayes, American Sonnet to My Past and Future Assassin
*Wisława Szymborska, Photograph from September 11
C. K. Williams, On the Métro
Aracelis Girmay, Ode to the Watermelon
Naomi Shihab Nye, Gate A-4
*Lemn Sissay, Some Things I Like
W. S. Merwin, One of the Butterflies
Amit Majmudar, Arms and the Man
*Kay Ryan, Crib
*Solmaz Sharif, Reaching Guantánamo
*Evie Shockley, Tonight I Saw
Eduardo Corral, In Colorado My Father Scoured and Stacked Dishes
*Raphael Campo, Primary Care
Katy Didden, “Embrace Them All”
Ilya Kaminsky, We Lived Happily during the War
Tarfia Faizullah, En Route to Bangladesh, Another Crisis of Faith
*Gregory Pardlo, Wishing Well
Claudia Rankine, (“You are in the dark, in the car . . .”)
Danez Smith, alternate names for black boys
Ocean Vuong, Aubade with Burning City
Fatimah Asghar, Pluto Shits on the Universe
*Rick Barot, Cascades 501
Ross Gay, A Small Needful Fact
Ada Limón, How to Triumph Like a Girl
*Alberto Ríos, The Border: A Double Sonnet
Jericho Brown, Bullet Points
Mahogany L. Browne, Black Girl Magic
Carolyn Forché, The Boatman
Matthew Olzmann, Letter Beginning with Two Lines by Czesław Miłosz
*No’u Revilla, Smoke Screen
Kaveh Akbar, Portrait of the Alcoholic with Relapse Fantasy
Oliver de La Paz, Autism Screening Questionnaire — Speech and Language Delay
Jenny Johnson, Tail
Layli Long Soldier, 38
Maggie Smith, Good Bones
Javier Zamora, El Salvador
*Raymond Antrobus, Miami Airport
Noah Baldino, Passing
*Chen Chen, I Invite My Parents to a Dinner Party
Kathy Fish, Collective Nouns for Humans in the Wild
*David Tomas Martinez, Found Fragment on Ambition
Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Self-Portrait as Scallop
Jacob Saenz, Blue Line Incident
Tracy Smith, Declaration [erasure of the Declaration of Independence]
*Reginald Dwayne Betts, Ghazal
*Fatma Krouma, Other Banks
*Sawako Nakayasu, Girl Soup
*José Olivarez, Ars Poetica
*Carl Phillips, Something to Believe In
*Kayleb Rae Candrilli, My Future Husband-Wife and I Make a Blood Pact to Become the Fathers We Always Needed
*Victoria Chang, My Mother’s Lungs
*Natalie Diaz, Manhattan is a Lenape Word
*Alex Dimitrov, Love
*Grace Schulman, Because
*John Keene, Words
*Jason Koo, The Rest is Silence
*Diane Seuss, The sonnet, like poverty, teaches you what you can do
*Adrienne Su, My Life in Peaches
*Richie Hofmann, Things That Are Rare
*John Lee Clark, Slateku
*Paisley Rekdal, Have Knowledge
PART FOUR: Drama
*Sophocles, Oedipus the King (Translated by David Kovacs)
*William Shakespeare, As You Like It
Henrik Ibsen, A Doll House (Translated by R. Farquharson Sharp)
Susan Glaspell, Trifles
*Alice Childress, Trouble in Mind
*Luis Valdez, Zoot Suit
August Wilson, Fences
Lynn Nottage, Sweat
*James Ijames, Fat Ham
Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms
Index of Authors, Titles, and First Lines