English: Modern Poetry (A)

About ENGL 2160 A

Study of poetry as a genre. Specific sections may focus on a particular theme, author, or time period. May repeat for credit with different content. Topics vary by offering; periodic offering at intervals that may exceed four years. Prerequisites: Three hours in English numbered 1010 to 1990; minimum Sophomore standing.

Notes

Prerequisites: Three hours in English numbered 1010 to 1990; Minimum Sophomore standing. PACE students by permission and override

Section Description

This course traces the development of modern poetry in America and England through close examination of exemplary poems, beginning with nineteenth-century precursors (Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Gerard Manley Hopkins) and focusing on major poetry from the early twentieth century through the end of World War II. Writers, artists, and musicians in the first half of the twentieth century not only found themselves trying to respond to and represent human experience in a time of revolutionary change, but also often felt a strong need—codified in aesthetic and ideological programs—to break decisively with what seemed to them outworn modes of thought, to create, in their own works, an unmistakable rupture or break from their predecessors. This impulse to break through to new forms of expression, thought, and feeling led to such radical experiments as the cubism of Picasso and Braque; the wildly dissonant and atonal musical compositions of Igor Stravinsky and Arnold Schoenberg; artistic movements such as futurism, surrealism, and Dadaism; and the technical and linguistic pyrotechnics of writers as diverse as Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and William Faulkner. In poetry, the radical breaks with traditional form and prosody initiated by precursors of the modern like Whitman, Dickinson, and Hopkins accelerated in the twentieth-century, given programmatic point by Ezra Pound’s ringing call to poets—including poets he personally mentored, such as William Butler Yeats, Robert Frost, H.D., Amy Lowell, and T.S. Eliot—to “Make it new!” Historically marginalized groups, including women, people of color, and Jews, began by the second decade of the twentieth century to play major roles in literary cultures that had long been largely male, phallocentric preserves, as witness such writers on our syllabus as H.D., Amy Lowell, Gertrude Stein, Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, and Gwendolyn Brooks. Other major poets we will read include Thomas Hardy, D. H. Lawrence, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, W. H. Auden, Dylan Thomas, Theodore Roethke, and a selection of poets of the two world wars.

Section Expectation

Students are expected to complete all readings as assigned and to attend class regularly. There will be two short papers (600 to 1000 words) and midterm and final examinations.

Evaluation

Relative weights factored into final grade: short papers, 40% (20% each); midterm exam, 25%; final exam, 35%.

Important Dates

Note: These dates may change before registration begins.

Courses may be cancelled due to low enrollment. Show your interest by enrolling.

Resources

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• PACE Course Pricing
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