MA IN POETRY 2012/13
SET TEXT; semester 1:
The Norton Anthology of Poetry, 5th edition, ed. Margaret Ferguson, Mary Jo Salter and Jon
Stallworthy. (Norton: 2004)
You will find it useful to read as widely as possible from the Norton anthology in preparation
for the MA programme. Particular poets whose work will be considered in the first semester
core course include: W.B.Yeats, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, T.S.Eliot, William
Empson, W.H.Auden, Louis MacNeice, Philip Larkin, Sylvia Plath, Patrick Kavanagh,
Seamus Heaney, Wallace Stevens, Randall Jarrell, Robert Frost. Additional material will be
supplied for the MA core course on Poetry and Criticism 1880-2005, and the bibliography
below offers an initial guide to secondary resources for the MA programme generally.
GENERAL BIBLIOGRAPHY FOR CORE COURSE AND MA
Acheson, James and Romana Huk, eds. Contemporary British Poetry: Essays in Theory and
Criticism. Albany NY: SUNY Press, 1996.
Altieri, Charles. Painterly Abstraction in Modernist American Poetry. Cambridge: CUP,
1989.
--------. The Art of Twentieth-Century American Poetry. Oxford: Blackwell, 2006.
Alvarez, A. Beyond All This Fiddle: Essays 1955-1967. London: Allen Lane, 1968.
---------. The Savage God. London: Penguin, 1971.
Auden, W.H. The English Auden: Poems, Essays and Dramatic Writings 1927-1939. Ed.
Edward Mendelson. London: Faber, 1977.
--------. The Dyer’s Hand and other essays. London: Faber, 1963.
Bloom, Harold. Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate. New York: Cornell University
Press, 1980.
Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble. London: Routledge, 1999.
Caplan, David. Questions of Possibility: Contemporary Poetry and Poetic Form. Oxford:
OUP, 2005.
Corcoran, Neil. English Poetry Since 1940. Harlow: Longman, 1993.
---------, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-Century English Poetry. Cambridge:
CUP, 2007.
--------- , ed. The Chosen Ground: Essays on the Contemporary Poetry of Northern Ireland.
Bridgend: Seren, 1992.
----------. The Poetry of Seamus Heaney: A Critical Study. London: Faber, 1998.
Culler, Jonathan. Structuralist Poetics. London: Routledge, 1975.
Curtis, Tony. Ed. How Poets Work. Bridgend: Seren, 1996.
Davie, Donald. Purity of Diction in English Verse and Articulate Energy. [1952, 1955].
Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992.
---------. Thomas Hardy and British Poetry. London: Routledge, 1973.
Easthope, Antony. Poetry as Discourse. London: Methuen, 1983.
----------, and John O. Thompson, eds. Contemporary Poetry Meets Modern Theory. Hemel
Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991.
Eliot, T.S. The Sacred Wood [1920]. London: Methuen, 1953.
-----------. The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism [1933]. London: Faber, 1964.
-----------. Selected Prose. Ed. Frank Kermode. London: Faber, 1975.
Empson, William,. Seven Types of Ambiguity [1930]. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965.
Forrest-Thomson, Veronica. Poetic Artifice: A Theory of Twentieth-Century Poetry.
Manchester: MUP, 1978.
Fussell, Paul. Poetic Meter and Poetic Form. 2nd Edition. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1979.
Gelpi, Albert, ed. A Coherent Splendour: The American Poetic Renaissance, 1910-1950.
Cambridge: CUP, 1988.
----------. Wallace Stevens: the Poetics of Modernism. Cambridge: CUP, 1990.
Goodby, John, Irish Poetry Since 1950: From Stillness into History. Manchester and New
York: MUP, 2000.
Graves, Robert, and Laura Riding, A Survey of Modernist Poetry. London: Heinemann, 1927.
Graves, Robert, Collected Writings on Poetry, ed. Paul O’Prey. Manchester: Carcanet, 1995.
Gregson, Ian. Poetry and Postmodernism: Dialogue and Estrangement. Basingstoke:
Macmillan, 1996.
Heaney, Seamus. Preoccupations: Selected Prose 1968-1978. London: Faber and
Heinemann, 1927.
---------. The Government of the Tongue: The 1986 T.S. Eliot Memorial Lectures and Other
Critical Writings. London: Faber and Faber, 1988.
Hynes, Samuel. The Auden Generation. London: Bodley Head, 1976.
Jarrell, Randall. The Third Book of Criticism. New York and London: Faber and Faber, 1975.
---------. Kipling, Auden & Co. Essays and Reviews 1945-1964. New York: Farrar, Straus and
Giroux, 1981.
Kennedy, David. New Relations: The Refashioning of British Poetry 1980-1994. Bridgend:
Seren, 1996.
Kermode, Frank. Romantic Image [1957]. London: Routledge, 2002.
Larrissy, Edward. Reading Twentieth-Century Poetry: The Language of Gender and Objects.
Oxford: Blackwell, 1990.
Leader, Zachary, ed. The Movement Reconsidered: Essays on Larkin, Amis, Gunn, Davie.
Oxford: OUP, 2009.
Leavis, F.R. New Bearings in English Poetry [1932]. London: Faber, 2008.
Leighton, Angela. On Form: Poetry, Aestheticism, and the Legacy of a Word. Oxford: OUP,
2007.
Lentricchia, Frank. Modernist Quartet. Cambridge: CUP, 1994.
Longley, Edna. Poetry and Posterity. Tarset: Bloodaxe, 2000.
MacGowan, Christopher. Twentieth-Century American Poetry. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004.
MacNeice, Louis. Modern Poetry: A Personal Essay. London: OUP, 1938.
---------. The Poetry of W.B.Yeats. London: Faber, 1941.
McDiarmid, Lucy, 1984. Saving Civilization: Yeats, Eliot, and Auden Between the Wars.
Cambridge.
McDonald, Peter, Serious Poetry: Form and Authority from Yeats to Hill. Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 2002.
Morrison, Blake. The Movement: English Poetry and Fiction of the 1950s. 2nd edn. London:
Methuen, 1986.
Mulhern, Francis. The Moment of “Scrutiny”. London: New Left Books, 1979.
Nicholls, Peter. Modernisms: A Literary Guide. London: Macmillan, 1995.
O’Donoghue, Bernard, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Seamus Heaney. Cambridge: CUP,
2009.
Perkins, David. History of Modern Poetry, 2 vols: I, From the 1890s to the High Modernist;
II, Modernism and After. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1976, 1987..
Pound, Ezra, Literary Essays of Ezra Pound. Ed T.S.Eliot. London: Faber, 1954.
Rees-Jones, Deryn, Consorting with Angels: Essays on Modern Women Poets. Tarset:
Bloodaxe, 2005.
Roberts, Neil, ed. A Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry. Oxford: Blackwell, 2001.
Robinson, Alan. Instabilities in Contemporary British Poetry. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988.
Smith, Stan. Inviolable Voice: History and Twentieth Century Poetry. London: Gill and
Macmillan, 1992.
Stead, C.K., The New Poetic: Yeats to Eliot. London: Hutchinson, 1964
Stevens, Wallace. The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination. New
----------. Opus Posthumous. New York: Random House, 1957.
Tomlinson, Charles. “The Middlebrow Muse.” Essays in Criticism 7:2 (1957), 208-17.
Trotter, David. The Making of the Reader: Language and Subjectivity in Modern American,
English and Irish Poetry. London: Macmillan, 1984.
Vendler, Helen. On Extended Wings: Wallace Stevens’ Longer Poems. Harvard: Harvard
University Press, 1970.
----------. Seamus Heaney. London: Harper Collins, 1998.
Williams, William Carlos. In The American Grain: Essays by William Carlos Williams. New
York: New Directions, 1956.
Wills, Clair. Improprieties: Politics and Sexuality in Northern Irish Poetry. Oxford: OUP,
1993.
Wilson, Edmund, 2004. Axel's Castle: A Study of the Imaginative Literature of 1870-1930
[1931]. New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2004.
Wimsatt, W.K., and Monroe C. Beardsley. The Verbal Icon. Lexington KY: University Press
of Kentucky, 1954.
Yeats, W.B. Early Essays. Ed. Richard J. Finneran and George Bornstein. New York and
London: Scribners, 2007.