Lecture Description
Overview: The late poetry of Wallace Stevens is presented and analyzed. Stevens's conception of the poet as reader and the world as a text to be read and translated is considered in "Large Red Man Reading" and "The Poem that Took the Place of a Mountain." The poet's preoccupation with natural cycles and sensory experience is exhibited in "The Plain Sense of Things." Finally, "A Primitive Like an Orb" is interpreted as Stevens's final vision of ceaseless change and transition in the world, in which the poet's verbal play participates.
Course Index
- Introduction to Modern English Poetry
- The Poetry and Life of Robert Frost
- Robert Frost: Birches, Home Burial, "Provide, Provide" and DIrective
- William Butler Yeats' Early Poetry
- William Butler Yeats' Middle Period
- William Butler Yeats' Late Poetry
- World War I Poetry in England
- Imagism: Doolittle and Pound
- The Poetry of Ezra Pound
- T.S. Eliot's Early Poetry
- T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"
- T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land
- Hart Crane's Early Poetry
- Hart Crane's "The Bridge"
- Langston Hughes
- William Carlos Williams
- Marianne Moore
- Analysis of Marianne Moore's poems
- Wallace Stevens' works
- Wallace Stevens' "The Auroras of Autumn"
- Wallace Stevens' Late Poetry
- W.H. Auden's Early Poetry
- Analysis of W.H. Auden's poems
- Elizabeth Bishop's early poetry
- Elizabeth Bishop's modernist work
Course Description
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.