ENG 2024 20TH CENTURY POETRY
This course is designed to introduce students to some of the most stylistically inventive and cognitively ambitious English-language poets of the 20th century, with a primary focus on poets writing from 1900 to 1960. We will discuss some of the common themes and strategies taken up by a wide range poets while also seeking to understand the fractious internal controversies-both formal and ideological-in which these figures participated. In other words, we will strive to understand how these poets jointly saw themselves as breaking with the poetry of the 19th century while often coming to violent disagreements amongst themselves about what qualities defined a "modern" poet or poem. Attention to poetic form and theories of poetics will be emphasized throughout, in an effort to familiarize students with major 20th century poetic techniques-irony, impersonality, personae, disjointed syntax, ellipsis, allusion-and intellectual and artistic movements- symbolism, imagism, objectivism, regionalism, precisionism, Cubism-important to this century. This course is organized as a thematic rather than a chronological survey. As such, we will attend to common stylistic and intellectual preoccupations that cut across national borders, historical generations, and poetic schools. Some poets may appear more than once within the following thematic units: "Sincerity and Artifice" (Eliot, Plath, Ashbery, O'Hara, Hughes, Brooks), "Description and Analysis" (Williams, Moore, Bishop, Hass, Graham), "The Power and Limits of Imagination" (Yeats, Stevens, Auden, Rich), "Work and Play" (Yeats, Frost, Williams, O'Hara, Ashbery).
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