Twentieth Century Poetry and Poetics

Catalog description

This course will explore British, Irish and American poetry of the twentieth century, with an emphasis on the modernist movement, in which poets attempted to “make new” both the technical elements of poetry (metrical and syntactical rhythm, sound and rhyme, line and stanza organization) and its subject matter. Topics to be discussed include poetry’s approach to mass (or popular) culture, its exploration of the idea of the object, its connections to performance and recitation, and, above all, its fascination with history and temporality. In taking account of the vast transformations of the period—-two world wars, rapid urbanization, nascent decolonization movements, ever-increasing commodification—we will also necessarily attend to the shifting geographies of modernism. We will address modernist poetry’s deliberate difficulty, perceived elitism and failure to engage with material social relations (or outright reactionary-seeming politics). At the end of the course we will also explore some poetry from the later twentieth century, associated with L*A*N*G*U*A*G*E poetry and its aftermath. Works to be explored include those of Yeats, Eliot, Pound, Lewis, Williams, Stevens, Cummings, HD, Stein, Moore, Hughes, Zukovsky, Oppen, Auden, Ashbery, Bernstein, Armantrout and others. We will read not only poems, but poetic statements and criticism written both by poets and critics based in universities.