English 432 Modern Poetry

This course covers the major characteristics, concerns, techniques, and practitioners of modern poetry. One unifying approach is to trace the two central currents of modern poetry: traditional and modernistic. The poets discussed will include Yeats, Eliot, Pound, Stevens, Moore, Bishop, and Frost with some focus on the poetry of World War One, Imagism, and the Harlem Renaissance. The course will also focus on other defining aspects of Modern poetry: free verse, symbolism, realism, metaphysics, allusion, Diverse methods of literary criticism are employed, such as historical, biographical, and gender criticism.

Course objectives:
 

1. Demonstrate a knowledge of some of the literary, critical, social and ideological preoccupations of early 20th century poetry 

2. Relate their comprehension of poetry to the role and relativity of the reader’s own discursive context 

3. Learn to read and write about poetry 

4. Evaluate poems critically 

5. Analyze, evaluate and interpret a variety of types of evidence in a critical manner