Howls and Love Songs: Twentieth Century American Poetry

Catalog description

Our focus in this course will be on the vibrantly varied body of poetry produced in the United States during the 20th century. Encompassing strains of worldly celebration and prophetic rage, visionary ecstasy and minute attention to ordinary life, this poetry breaks new ground in every decade, mixing formal and stylistic innovation with a continuously expanding sense of the national landscape in all its demographic and cultural diversity. Poets to be studied include Robert Frost, Gertrude Stein, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, Langston Hughes, Elizabeth Bishop, Gwendolyn Brooks, Allen Ginsberg, A. R. Ammons, Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich, and others. (ENGL-LOA, ENGL-PST)