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Description: |
We’ll be looking closely at some poets writing in the the early and mid-twentieth century who changed how poetry is made—changed it in ways that continue to shape the work of poets in the twenty-first century. The list will include Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, T. S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, and Hart Crane. These are all poets who searched for a language more naked and more subtle, a language more open to the wildly shifting nature of experience in the historical world and in also our minds, conscious and unconscious. In their poems, a shocking plainness combines often with a challenging difficulty, a fierce and seductive strangeness, a wild sense of play. The personal and the impersonal intertwine in remarkable ways. We’ll also look at work of later poets touched by these moderns, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Haydon, John Ashbery, and others. Counts for the post-1800 requirement for the English major. Relevant clusters: “Modern and Contemporary Literature” (1ENG008), “Great Books, Great Authors” (H1ENG010), and “Poems, Poetry, and Poetics” (H1ENG012). |