EL 408.02 Modern Poetry
2016/ II Fortuny
Course Description
This is an intensive reading course in twentieth-century American and British poetry and
poetics. We will study the works of selected modernist, postmodernist and contemporary
poets with attention to the formal transformations that corroborate and resist these categories.
Our close readings will engage cultural, intellectual, socio-political and historical narratives
that interact with poetic form.
Requirements
Discussion Participation and Attendance: 15%
Announced Reading Response papers (approximately 6 one-page papers): 20%
Midterm: 25%
Final Exam or Final 10-page term paper (your choice): 40%
Syllabus
February
Week I: 9th-12th
Terry Eagleton, “The Functions of Criticism.”
Week II: 16th-19th
W.B. Yeats (1865-1939 ) “The Circus Animals Desertion”
W.H. Auden (1907-1973) “In Memory of W.B. Yeats”
Ezra Pound (1885-1972)
“A Pact,” “In a Station of the Metro,” “Hugh Selwyn Mauberly,”
from The Cantos, XLV “With Usura”
Week III: 23rd-26th Pound continued
T.S. Eliot (1888-1965) The Wasteland
March
Week IV: 1st-4th
Eliot cont.
Week V: 8th-11th
Wallace Stevens (1879-1955)
Poems: “Sunday Morning,” “The Idea of Order a at Key West,” “The
Snow Man,” “The Emperor of Ice Creme,” “Anecdote of the Jar.”
Essay: “The Nobel Rider and the Sound of Words”
Week VI: 15th-18th William Carlos Williams (1883-1932)
“Queen Anne’s Lace,” “Spring and All,” “A Sort of Dance,” “The
Dance” (1944), “The Dance” (1962)
Marianne Moore (1887-1972)
“Poetry,” “To a Snail”
Week VII: 22nd-25th W.H. Auden (1907-1973) from The Dyer’s Hand, “Reading”
Midterm
April
Week VIII: March 29th- April 1st
James Longenbach “Modern Poetry After Postmodernism”
Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979)
“Questions of Travel,” “The Armadillo,” “The Moose”
Week IX: 5th-8th
Bishop cont.
Robert Lowell (1917-1977)
“Skunk Hour,” “For the Union Dead”
Week X: 12th-15th
Frank O'Hara (1926-1966)
“Why I Am Not a Painter,” “In Memory of My Feelings: I,”
“A Step Away From Them”
Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997)
“Howl: I,” “A Supermarket in California”
SPRING BREAK
(April 18th-22nd)
Week XI: 26th-29th Sylvia Plath (1932-1963)
“Daddy,” “Purday”
Adrienne Rich (1929-2012)
“I am in Danger—Sir--,” “Diving into the Wreck”
Charles Simic (1938-)
“The Tiger,” “A Book Full of Pictures”
May
Week XII: 3rd-6th
Michael Harper (1938-)
“Dear John, Dear Coltrane,” “”Bird Live”: Charles Parker in St. Louis”
Louise Glück (1943-)
“Appearances,” “Vespers”
Jorie Graham (1950-)
“The Geese,” “At Luca Signorelli’s Resurrection of the Body”
Week XIII: 10th-13th Graham cont.
Li-Young Lee (1957-)
“Eating Alone,” “Mnemonic,” “This Room and Everything in It”
Catch-up