Overview: Professor Hammer introduces students to the material that will be covered in the course of the semester. Course readings and requirements are also addressed. Early publications of poems are discussed as they appeared in small magazines such as Blast, Broom, and The Criterion. Book publication of the same poems and other poetry collections are then discussed in contrast. A number of modern English poets are presented such as Eliot, Hughes, Moore, Yeats, and photographs are shown in order to introduce students to the major poets of the early twentieth century.

1. Introduction to Modern English Poetry
2. The Poetry and Life of Robert Frost
3. Robert Frost: Birches, Home Burial, "Provide, Provide" and DIrective
4. William Butler Yeats' Early Poetry
5. William Butler Yeats' Middle Period
6. William Butler Yeats' Late Poetry
7. World War I Poetry in England
8. Imagism: Doolittle and Pound
9. The Poetry of Ezra Pound
10. T.S. Eliot's Early Poetry
11. T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"
12. T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land
13. Hart Crane's Early Poetry
14. Hart Crane's "The Bridge"
15. Langston Hughes
16. William Carlos Williams
17. Marianne Moore
18. Analysis of Marianne Moore's poems
19. Wallace Stevens' works
20. Wallace Stevens' "The Auroras of Autumn"
21. Wallace Stevens' Late Poetry
22. W.H. Auden's Early Poetry
23. Analysis of W.H. Auden's poems
24. Elizabeth Bishop's early poetry
25. Elizabeth Bishop's modernist work

This course covers the body of modern poetry, its characteristic techniques, concerns, and major practitioners. The authors discussed range from Yeats, Eliot, and Pound, to Stevens, Moore, Bishop, and Frost with additional lectures on the poetry of World War One, Imagism, and the Harlem Renaissance. Diverse methods of literary criticism are employed, such as historical, biographical, and gender criticism.