English: Modern Poetry

Poetry from beginning of modern period to end of WWII, emphasizing Yeats, Eliot, Stevens, Auden, Frost, Williams. Prerequisites: Three hours in English numbered 1010 to 1990; minimum Sophomore standing.

Prereqs: 3 hrs ENGL between 1010- 1990; Minimum Sophomore standing PACE students by permission and override

Taking Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and Robert Browning as the most important poetic precursors of the poetry of the Modernist period—that is, of the first fifty years of the twentieth century—and Gerard Manley Hopkins and Thomas Hardy as key pioneers of the modern, our survey of modern poetry extends from the mid-nineteenth century into the first two decades of the second half of the last century. While we will emphasize six canonical poets—William Butler Yeats, T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, and W. H. Auden—we will read a wide range of other poets in the course of the semester, including Ezra Pound, Wilfred Owen, Isaac Rosenberg, H.D., Amy Lowell, Gertrude Stein, Marianne Moore, Langston Hughes, D. H. Lawrence, Elizabeth Bishop, Gwendolyn Brooks, Dylan Thomas, and Philip Larkin, among many others.

Regular attendance, on-time completion of all assigned reading, and participation in discussion are expected. Students will complete a series of short out-of-class reading-response papers, periodic in-class study questions, and a single final paper of 2,000 to 2,500 words.

The components of the final grade are class participation, 20% (includes completion and assessment of in-class study questions); average of grades on reading-response papers, 40%; final paper, 40%.