Point taken
if people really want to avoid things on the course prescription list we'd better note the other texts on this list that are prescribed.
- A Beautiful Mind (Standard, Mod B)
- Rime of the Ancient Mariner (EE1, Mod B)
- 2001: A Space Odyssey (EE1, Mod A; ESL, AOS)
- Gulliver's Travels (EE1, Mod A)
For poetry it's damn hard to avoid all of the course prescriptions across Standard, Advanced and EE1. It means you're avoiding the better part of the greatest poems of TS Eliot, Frost, Plath, Barrett Browning, Dickinson, Yeats, Heaney, Hughes, Auden, Lowell, Coleridge and Wordsworth (among other less prominent poets). Their collective works make up close to the entirety of the English poetic canon. But if you're really set on not doing a prescribed, there are of course other poets you can choose from. You're just precluding yourself from studying most of the 'classics' of poetry (which isn't necessarily a bad thing! Less well known poets may make your marker more interested. Besides, great poets such as Ezra Pound aren't prescribed, and many more modern poets aren't either.)
Also, going through the new course prescription list I only just realised how badass they've made mod a for Advanced this year. Wish they'd done it one year earlier, it's easily the best module there now! Wish I could have done Heaney/Dubliners