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 survey of U.S. modernist poetries, will emphasize poets whose work was influential not only in its own time, but also on later generations of poets. A class that did the opposite-looking at poets who were influential in their own time but were subsequently rejected by later poets and critics-would likewise make for an interesting course. However, it is logical to use a survey to introduce writers and works that have, for various reasons, “stayed news.” This syllabus also emphasizes, to the extent that is possible, specific books or projects rather than cherry-picking poems from throughout a poet’s career. In so doing, I sacrifice introducing the breadth of a poet’s work in order to make time to explore in significant detail the most ambitious poetic projects of the period. In an author-organized study, approaching multiple poems from a given book or series give a student gets a richer idea of the texture of a poet’s work that can be had from reading the poets “greatest hits.”
Week 1: Origins and Introduction to reading verse
Week 2-3: Ezra Pound
“A Few Don’ts for an Imagist”
Poems from Blast
Cathay
Week 3-5: T.S. Eliot
“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”
“Tradition and the Individual Talent”
The Waste Land
Weeks 6-7: William Carlos Williams
Spring and All
Week 8: Gertrude Stein
Tender Buttons
Week 9-10: Hart Crane
The Bridge
Week 11-12: Wallace Stevens
“Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” “The Idea of Order at Key West,” Notes Towards a Supreme Fiction
Week 13: Muriel Rukeyser
The Book of the Dead
Week 14: Louis Zukofsky
Selections from A
Week 15-16: Langston Hughes
The Weary Blues