Modern Poetry I

Course content

This course will explore the shifting meanings of modern and British within poetic practice, charting a literary history from the late nineteenth to the late twentieth century. The first several weeks of the course will treat some of the currents that gave rise to modernist poetry in Britain, including movements such as Imagism and Vorticism, and the new kinds of experience brought about by World War I. The middle part of the course will be centrally concerned with two major figures of high modernism, T.S. Eliot and W.B. Yeats. The final part of the course will deal largely with responses to and articulations within the terms set out by modernist poetry: for example, W.H. Auden’s diagnosis of English culture between the wars; Irish, Scots, Welsh poets negotiation of minority cultures within British modernity; and Philip Larkins hostility toward modernism’s experimentalism and cosmopolitanism. The student will identify and explain the social, religious, philosophical and economic forces of the period and read and identify modernist poets.