Poetry in English since 1945
Some essay questions. These can be treated as suggestions on which you can improve,
and you are of course invited to formulate your own titles (please check them with a
course tutor). Except where otherwise indicated, the titles below can be referred to
any poet studied in the course.
1
Discuss the legacy of Ezra Pound OR T. S. Eliot OR W. H. Auden to poetry in
English in the later twentieth century.
2
“It has been said that a poem should not mean but be. This is not quite
accurate. In a poem, as distinct from many other kinds of verbal societies, meaning
and being are identical.” (W. H. Auden) Discuss, with reference to any twentieth
century poet of your choice.
3
Writing to Marianne Moore in 1944, William Carlos Williams observed of his
own poems: “There is too often no convincing form [...]” Examine the formal
problems facing AT LEAST TWO twentieth century writers of free verse, and assess
their success.
4
It is 1972. Ezra Pound’s funeral has just taken place in Venice. You have been
asked to contribute to a time capsule a sample of American poetry representing U.S.
poetry of the 1950s and 1960s. Make the case for AT MOST THREE poets to be
saved for a future audience. Select AT MOST six poems in all and give an informed
reading of them that will indicate their cultural context, their representative status,
their poetic strategies and their aesthetic value.
5
Consider the interplay between personal expression and political intervention
in the oeuvres of any two US poets writing between 1945 and 1985.
6
John Ashbery’s ‘The Skaters’ sets itself the challenge of the “long poem”
taken up earlier by such Modernists as Eliot, Pound and Williams. What strategies
does Ashbery adopt for meeting this challenge, and how does the poem differ from
those of his predecessors?
7
In ‘The Day Lady Died’, ‘A Step Away from Them’ and ‘Ode: Salute to the
French Negro Poets’, Frank O’Hara offers a poetics based on both identification
across racial lines and acknowledgment of racial difference. How do you read the
presence of racial awareness in O’Hara’s work of the 1950s?
8
John Wilkinson writes that the “sustaining and silly paradox” of poetry is that
“the most idiosyncratic and inadmissible is the most deeply shared”. Discuss, with
reference to a critical examination of such categories as the personal, the particular,
the local, and so on.
9
“There is no passport to this country / it exists as a quality of the language.”
(W. N. Herbert) In what sense is the concept and expression of the “democratic voice”
a key aspect of twentieth century Scottish poetry?
10
Examine the representation of nation and nationalism in twentieth century
Scottish poetry.
11
“My contention is that of course ‘we’ can, and some of us do, possess the land
imaginatively in very much the Aboriginal way.” (Les Murray) Discuss the
understanding of and engagement with Aboriginal life in Les Murray’s poetry.
12
“It would be as myopic to regard Mr Murray as an Australian poet as to call
Yeats an Irishman.” (Joseph Brodsky) Discuss.
13
To what extent does the consciousness of being “young” societies, with their
(white) pioneer periods still in their recent national memories, enter into the poetry of
Australia AND/ORNew Zealand?
14
Examine the religious/philosophical fabric of Allen Curnow’s poetic language.
15
To what extent has the poetic evolution of the Caribbean AND/OR India
AND/OR Australia AND/OR New Zealand AND/OR Canada over the past century
been defined in contradistinction from the poetries of the twin centres in the UK and
the US?
16
“Religion, courage, philosophy, drink, the routines of work and leisure—all
these are regarded by Larkin as placebos,” Seamus Heaney wrote of Philip Larkin’s
confrontation of death in the poem ‘Aubade’. Discuss Larkin’s poem and place it in
relation to at least two other poems that deal with death or mortality.
17
Ted Hughes wrote that “Most writers of verse have several different
personalities. The ideal is to find a style or a method that includes them all.” Discuss
this observation with reference EITHER to Hughes OR to any other poet studied on
the course.
18
Are “schools of poetry” real or fictitious? Illustrate your answer using at least
two named examples of “schools of poetry” in poetry in English since 1945.
19
Examine the ways in which England is represented in the poetry of Charles
Tomlinson or Carol Ann Duffy or Simon Armitage.
20
Discuss issues of social and class awareness and division in any poet of your
choice.
21
Drawing on the writing of AT LEAST two poets, examine the presentation of
the natural world in recent poetry.
22
Examine the use of metrical composition by any poet of your choice.
23
Discuss the forms the sonnet has taken in the poetry of recent decades.
24
Examine the tensions between the rational and the irrational in any poet(s) of
your choice.
25
“The open text is one which both acknowledges the vastness of the world and
is formally differentiating. It is the form that opens it.” (Denise Levertov) Discuss.
26
In 1986 the critic Harold Bloom stated, “Strong poetry is always difficult, and
Geoffrey Hill is the strongest British poet now active, though his reputation in the
English-speaking world is somewhat less advanced than that of several of his
contemporaries”. To what extent do you agree or dispute with any part of this
statement twenty-one years later?
27
Writing on Tony Harrison’s sequences about working class life in Leeds,
Jeffrey Wainwright stated, ‘Some critics have been impatient with the experience
Harrison described, as though he is guilty of special pleading which exaggerates in the
interest of representing himself as a victim’ (Jeffrey Wainwright, ‘Something to
Believe In’, Tony Harrison ed. Neil Astley, Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe Books,
1991). Discuss.
28
Write a comparative critical analysis of the following statements and examine
the significance of these Canadian poets’ attitudes to their craft:
From : Gwendolyn MacEwen, "You Can Study it if You Want" (1987)
The question is Why do You Write.
…
You know the answer and I still have to say it:
Poetry has got nothing to do with poetry.
Poetry is how the air goes green before thunder,
is the sound you make when you come, and
why you live and how you bleed, and
The sound you make or don't make when you die.
From Leonard Cohen, “How to Speak Poetry” (1978)
Do not make so much of the word…the word butterfly is merely data. It is not
an opportunity for you to hover, soar, befriend flowers, symbolize beauty and
frailty, or in anyway impersonate a butterfly. Do not act out words. Never act
out words.…This is an interior landscape, it is inside. It is private. Respect the
privacy of the material. These pieces were written in silence. The courage of
the play is to speak them.”
In your analysis you are encouraged to draw from the range of essays on poetics (Al
Purdy, Daphne Marlatt and Don McKay) and poems which we studied on the
module.
29
Discuss the use of myth and the everyday in the work of any two of the
African writers read on this module.
30
Explore Derek Walcott’s conception of the epic poem with reference to ‘The
Schooner Flight’ and Omeros.
31
Discuss the proposition that Kamau Brathwaite’s use of new musical forms
and unconventional typography (his “Sycorax Video Style”) both extends and
redeems Pound’s injunction that poets should “make it new”.
32
Derek Walcott is the Caribbean region’s best-known poet, yet the
experimental later poetry of Kamau Brathwaite makes a better influence for young
poets writing today. Discuss, giving reasons for your answer.