ENG5077 American Poetry
The primary aim of this seminar is to help you understand and appreciate some of the most intellectually innovative, formally challenging, and emotionally exciting American poetry of the late 19th and 20th centuries. In particular, we will focus on the following questions: What were some of the aesthetic and historical pressures that led 20th century poets to write the way they did? What consequences might this history have for poets and readers in the present? What is (or was) Modernism and Postmodernism? How well do traditional definitions of the field (by period, community, or style) capture the rich variety of 20th c. verse? As a result of taking this course, students will improve their close reading skills and gain the historical background necessary to appreciate many varieties of twentieth-century poetry; creative writers will encounter powerful literary models that can expand one's sense of what poetry can be and do.