MA PATHWAY IN MODERN AND CONTEMPORARY POETRY: PRELIMINARY READING
There are three course units within the MA programme dedicated to the study of modern and
contemporary poetry: British Poetry: 1900-1945; British Poetry: 1945- Present; and Twentieth-Century
American Poetry. Most weekly seminars will focus on a single author, using as a starting point a
particular volume or a range of designated poems from a career-spanning collection. The poets’ works
will be considered in relation to evolving poetic traditions and to established lines of critical interpretation.
Some seminars may be more thematic, exploring poems by a group of authors.
The syllabus for these units is altered year-on-year. At the outset of each course unit, students will
receive a week-to-week reading programme, identifying particular poems within Selected or Collected
volumes of a poet’s verse to focus on for seminars, as well as suggestions for further reading. An
extensive list of general, critical and contextual works, plus relevant anthologies and journals, will also
be provided at the start of the academic year. Students will not be required to purchase secondary
material (the university library is well stocked with critical works on twentieth-century poetry), but you
may wish to invest a few pounds in a paperback copy of a very useful reference book: The Oxford
Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry in English, edited by Ian Hamilton (Oxford and New York:
Oxford University Press, 1994). Cheap copies are available from Abebooks.com and Amazon.com.
The list below itemizes some of the many general critical studies and surveys on modern and
contemporary poetry, any of which may prove useful during the course. While you are not required to
read any specific works before the MA programme commences, you are recommended to dip into a few
of the following in order to gain an overview of the period and some of the key issues and movements to
be encountered. (The works are listed alphabetically, rather than in terms of perceived importance.)
Copies of all of these are held in Bristol University’s Arts and Social Sciences Library, and many should
be available in other good academic libraries.
Acheson, James, and Romana Huk, eds, Contemporary British Poetry: Essays in Theory and Criticism
(New York: State University of New York Press, 1996)
Altieri, Charles, The Art of Twentieth-Century American Poetry: Modernism and After (Oxford: Blackwell,
2005)
Ashton, Jennifer, From Modernism to Postmodernism: American Poetry and Theory in the Twentieth
Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006)
Beach, Christopher, The Cambridge Introduction to Twentieth-Century American Poetry (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2003)
Blanton, C. D., and Nigel Alderman, eds, A Concise Companion to Post-War British and Irish Poetry
(Oxford: Blackwell, 2006)
Broom, Sarah, Contemporary British and Irish Poetry: An Introduction (Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2007)
Campbell, Matthew, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Contemporary Irish Poetry (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2003)
Cook, Eleanor, Against Coercion: Games Poets Play (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998)
Cook, Jon, ed., Poetry in Theory: An Anthology 1900-2000 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004)
Corcoran, Neil, English Poetry Since 1940 (London and New York: Longman, 1993)
Corcoran, Neil, ed, The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-Century English Poetry (2007)
Crawford, Robert, Identifying Poets: Self and Territory in Twentieth-Century Poetry (Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 1993)
Dowson, Jane, and Alice Entwistle, A History of Twentieth-Century British Women’s Poetry (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2005)
Draper, R. P., An Introduction to Twentieth-Century Poetry in English (Macmillan, 1996)
Falck, Colin, American and British Verse of the Twentieth Century: The Poetry that Matters (Aldershot:
Ashgate, 2003)
Fredman, Stephen, ed., A Concise Companion to Twentieth-Century American Poetry (Oxford:
Blackwell, 2005)
Gray, Richard, American Poetry of the Twentieth Century (London and New York: Longman, 1990)
Hamburger, Michael, The Truth of Poetry: Tensions in Modern Poetry from Baudelaire to the 1960s (1969)
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972)
Herbert, W. N. and Matthew Hollis, eds, Strong Words: Modern Poets on Modern Poetry (Tarset:
Bloodaxe, 2000)
Hooker, Jeremy, The Presence of the Past: Essays on Modern British and American Poetry (Bridgend:
Poetry Wales Press, 1987)
Kendall, Tim, ed, The Oxford Handbook of British and Irish War Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2007)
Longley, Edna, Poetry in the Wars (Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe Books, 1986)
McDonald, Peter, Mistaken Identities: Essays on Poetry and Northern Ireland (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1997)
McDonald, Peter, Serious Poetry: Form and Authority from Yeats to Hill (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002)
O'Brien, Sean, The Deregulated Muse: Essays on Contemporary British and Irish Poetry (Newcastle upon
Tyne: Bloodaxe, 1998)
Perkins, David, A History of Modern Poetry: Modernism and After (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1987)
Raban, Jonathan, The Society of the Poem (London: Harrap, 1971)
Roberts, Neil, ed., A Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001)
Robinson, Alan, Instabilities in Contemporary British Poetry (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988)
Robinson, Peter, In the Circumstances: About Poems and Poets (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992)
Robinson, Peter, Poets, Poems, Readers: Making Things Happen (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002)
Robinson, Peter, Twentieth-Century Poetry: Selves and Situations (OUP, 2005)
Rosenthal, M. L., The New Poets: American and British Poetry Since World War II (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1967)
Schmidt, Michael, ed., The Great Modern Poets (London: Quercus, 2006)
Schmidt, Michael, Reading Modern Poetry (London: Routledge, 1990)
Smith, Stan, Inviolable Voice: History and Twentieth-Century Poetry (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1982)
Trotter, David, The Making of the Reader: Language and Subjectivity in Modern American, English and
Irish Poetry (London: Macmillan, 1984)
Vendler, Helen, Part of Nature, Part of Us: Modern American Poets (Cambridge, MA & London: Harvard
University Press, 1980)
Vendler, Helen, The Music of What Happens: Poems, Poets, Critics (Cambridge, MA, and London:
Harvard University Press, 1988)
Williamson, Alan, Introspection and Contemporary Poetry (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard
University Press, 1984)