Module description
The aim of this course is to introduce students to the extraordinary range of American poetry in the first half of the twentieth century, which includes, for example, the radical experiments of Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, Mina Loy and William Carlos Williams; the conservative modernism of Robert Frost; the European-oriented neo-classicism of T.S. Eliot and H.D.; the cerebral playfulness of Marianne Moore and Wallace Stevens; the political daring and earnestness of Muriel Rukeyser; the marriage of avant-garde irreverence with a democratic openness to popular culture (cinema, jazz) represented by Langston Hughes; or the subtle social, sexual and racial awareness to be found in the work of Gwendolyn Brooks.
Seminars will be organized around careful close-reading of the poetry, in conjunction with the poets’ own essays and polemics, and an eye to the different kinds of social and cultural phenomena that might have influenced them—on the one hand painting, movies, music; on the other, economic hardship and ideological and military conflict.
Assessment details
1 x 4000 word essay
Educational aims & objectives
The aim of this course is to introduce students to the extraordinary range of American poetry in the first half of the twentieth century and to evaluate some of the most influential figures of the period.
Learning outcomes
Students who take this module will acquire a very good knowledge of American poetry during the first half of the twentieth century; they will learn how to read individual poets; to understand their relations with one another and with other artists; and to appreciate their relationship to the history and culture of the period.
Teaching pattern
Weekly two-hour seminar
Suggested reading list
The best preliminary reading is to read as much of the poets as possible, including their critical prose or letters. Charles Altieri’s The Art of Twentieth-Century American Poetry: Modernism and After (2006) is a good introductory critical survey, as is Christopher Beach, The Cambridge Introduction to Twentieth-Century American Poetry (2003). Frank Lentricchia’s Modernist Quartet (1984) is an entertaining read, with chapters on Eliot, Stevens, Pound and Frost. See also The Cambridge Companion to Modern American Poetry (2015), ed. Walter Kalaidjian. The Cambridge Companion to Modernist Poetry (2007), eds. Alex Davis and Lee M. Jenkins, also contains several useful essays. Reading anything by Altieri, Hugh Kenner, Marjorie Perloff, Frank Kermode, James Longenbach or Helen Vendler will be time well spent.