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Course Description

Summary

In the first half of the twentieth century, mainly between the two world wars, Modernist poets broke from Romantic and Victorian poetic traditions. The poets during this time used deeply various aesthetic strategies, yet some similarities can be discovered—Modernists privileged difficulty over clarity, the imagination over realism, skepticism over conviction, and fragmentation over coherence. While the poets of the Harlem Renaissance and some feminist poets shared these tactics, many rooted their work in political realities and chose clarity over abstraction. We will also read from the Objectivists, inheritors of Modernism and transitional figures to Post-Modernism. We will read a poet a week, often with the poet's own critical writing, focusing our attention on learning how to read a poem and write about it accurately and insightfully.