The below is a course sketch, not a fully realized syllabus. It provides information about the pedagogical approach and primary texts the course would propose to cover.
This seminar for advanced undergraduates avoids the typical ways of organizing a course on poetry-chronologically or by coterie-by examining poets in pairs, in which the former was a significant influence on the latter. Although this relationship of influence will not wholly demarcate the conversations that take place in the course, the problem of influence in this history of poetry will be a theoretical as well as a practical object of interest. Our conversations on influence would not be so reductive as to merely look at aesthetic continuities, but rather will probe what kinds of mutual influences, cultural and literary, produced an affinity between the work of two poets.
Weeks 1-3: Ezra Pound & Charles Olson
Pisan Cantos
Maximus Poems
Selections from Harold Bloom’s Anxiety of Influence
“The contradiction I am in here was exhibited all the time yesterday. Whenever Pound remained on the level of intellect and the creative he was dead right…But wrong with a stink of death on all to do with politics and society.” [Olson on Pound]
Weeks 4-6: Marianne Moore & Elizabeth Bishop
What Are Years?
Geography III
Selections from Gilbert and Gubar’s No Man’s Land
Selections from Joanne Diehl’s Elizabeth Bishop and Marianne Moore: The Psychodynamics of Creativity
“Meticulous attention, a method of escaping from intolerable pain…[is] something I’ve just begun to realize myself-although I did take it in about Marianne Moore long ago. (It is her way of controlling what almost amounts to paranoia, I believe-although I handle these words ineptly.)” [Bishop on Moore]
Weeks 7-9: Wallace Stevens & John Ashbery
Harmonium
Some Trees
A “profound impulse received toward another artist must work itself out in the sincerest form of flattery before the business of self-discovery can begin.” [Ashbery]
Weeks 10-12: Langston Hughes & Amiri Baraka
The Weary Blues
Black Magic
“Well, no. I think my most useful poetic influence is Langston Hughes.” [Baraka, in response to an interviewer's insistence on Charles Olson's influence on his work.]
Weeks 13-15: Emily Dickinson & Susan Howe
Dickinson’s Selected Poems
My Emily Dickinson
“Emily Dickinson is my emblematical Concord River.” [Howe on Dickinson]