Lecture Description
Overview: A representative sample of English poetry of World War One is surveyed. War rhetoric and propaganda are examined and challenged in Wilfred Owen's "Dulce et Decorum Est" and "Strange Meeting." The relationship between home front and battle front is explored in Thomas Hardy's "Channel Firing," "In the Time of 'the Breaking of Nations,'" and "I Looked up From My Writing"; Edward Thomas's "Adlestrop"; and Siegfried Sassoon's "'Blighters.'" Isaac Rosenberg's "Louse Hunting" is discussed as a poem of ordinary experience in the trenches.
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.