Some useful resources for studying poetry

Here are some basic study questions for analyzing poetry:  "How to make sense of a poem"

Looking for larger issues: doing a "contextual analysis" of a poem (or any document) twill help you determine how that poem relates to its author, its audiences, and the circumstances of its creation.

Here is a different set of questions — called "Readers and Texts" — that will help you to think more clearly about the relations among individual authors, their poems, and their readers — both at the time of the poem's composition and publication and today.

Literary Resources — Twentieth-Century British, Irish, and Commonwealth. This is an extensive list of links to information (and other websites) about 20th-century authors; it includes both poets and novelists.

Twentieth-Century Poetry in English. This is a set of links to information and additional websites about some of the major poets writing in English during the last century. At the bottom of the page there is a link to an additional, even larger collection of links and other study resources.

Modern American Poetry. This is a useful multimedia companion to Anthology of Modern American Poetry (Oxford University Press, 2000) edited by Cary Nelson. Includes 140+ poet websites, all with multiple resources for further study. Contains American poets only.

Finally, here is a link to The Voice of the Shuttle. If you don't know about this website, you should! This link will take you to the "Modern British and American" section of this vast website. The enormous and fully searchable site contains entries for all areas and periods of literature, but it also includes all areas of the Humanities generally, including Art, Architecture, History, Philosophy, Theatre, and many other disciplines. Not all the entries and links are up to date, but this should become one of your first resources for any on-line research project. You can go directly to the main search page (and home page) of The Voice of the Shuttle by following this link.

And some resources for Modern(ist) art

This is a good, nicely illustrated site for the Modernist movement in the fine and decorative arts and in archtecture: it's called, simply enough:  MODERNISM.

A good launching site for modern art and artists will be found at Modernism -- Modernist Artists: A Web Directory.

And then there is always the Art and Art History page(s) on Voice of the Shuttle, linked here.

Stephen C. Behrendt, Spring 2009