English 4/802: Modernist Poetry in English
Spring 2009
English 4/802:
Modernist Poetry in English
Spring 2009
Stephen C. Behrendt
319 Andrews; 472-1806
Office: 11 -12 TR
and by appointment
Email Dr. Behrendt
Kazimir Malevich, Still Life (1913)
Tentative Schedule
All readings are from The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, Volume 1, unless otherwise noted.
Names and terms that appear below in an alternative color are active links to websites with supplementary information and additional links about those poets and topics.
Jan 13 T
Introduction to Modernism
Jan 15 R
“Introduction” (pp. xxxvii - lix), “Paul Peppis, “Schools, movements, manifestos,” and “Introduction” (pp. 1-34) from Modernism (posted on Blackboard as “Davis-Jenkins Intro” and “Introduction Modernism”)
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Jan 20 T
Last day to DROP this course and receive a 100% refund
Turn-of-the Century: Hardy and Yeats
Thomas Hardy: “Hap,” “Neutral Tones,” “I Look into My Glass,” “In Tenebris,” “Drummer Hodge,” “The Darkling Thrush,” “A Broken Appointment,” “The Self-Unseeing,” “Bereft,” “Shut Out That Moon,” “New Year’s Eve,” “Channel Firing,” “The Convergence of the Twain,” “The Going,” “Your Last Drive,” “I Found Her Out There,” “The Voice,” “A Poet,” “In the Moonlight,” “The Oxen,” “For Life I Had Never Cared Greatly,” “I Looked Up from My Writing,” “Afterwards,” “Going and Staying,” “Nobody Comes”
Jan 22 R
William Butler Yeats: “The Lake Isle of Innisfree,” “The Sorrow of Love,” “When You Are Old,” “The Song of Wandering Aengus,” “The Cap and Bells,” “Adam’s Curse,” “The Fascination of What’s Difficult,” “A Coat,” “September 1913,” “The Magi,” “The Symbolism of Poetry” (pp. 877-83)
Jan 23 F Last day to DROP this course and receive a 75% refund
Jan 24 S All course withdrawals noted with a “W” on academic record (Jan 24 – April 17)
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Jan 27 T
Yeats: “Easter, 1916,” “The Wild Swans at Coole,” “In Memory of Major Robert Gregory,” “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death,” “The Second Coming,” “A Prayer for My Daughter,” “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen,” “Sailing to Byzantium,” “Among School Children”
Jan 29 R
finish Yeats
Jan 30 F Last day to DROP this course and receive a 50% refund
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Feb 3 T
Marinetti and the Futurist manifestos (see readings posted on Blackboard as “Marinetti etc” and “Futurism etc” )
Feb 5 R
Gertrude Stein: Tender Buttons, “Susie Asado,” Preciosilla,” “Sacred Emily,” “Idem the Same: A Valentine to Sherwood Anderson,” “George Hugnet,” “Stanzas in Meditation: Stanza LXXXIII”
Feb 6 F Last day to DROP this course and receive a 25% refund
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Feb 10 T
Ezra Pound: “Portrait d’une Femme,” “The Return,” “A Pact,” “The Rest,” “In a Station of the Metro,” “The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter,” “Lament of the Frontier Guard,” “The Temperaments,” “A Retrospect” (pp. 929-38), selection from How to Read (pp. 939-41)
Feb 12 R
Pound: Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, “1920 (Mauberley),” “A Retrospect” (p. 929)
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Feb 17 T
Vorticism
selections from BLAST (pp. 897- 921)
Feb 19 R
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Feb 24 Catching up
Imagism
Amy Lowell: “ ”Preface to Some Imagist Poets” (pp. 926-27), “The Pike,” “Venus Transiens,” “A Decade,” “Shore Grass,” “New Heavens for Old,” “Patterns” (posted on Blackboard as “Lowell Patterns”)
Edith Sitwell: “Aubade,” “Country Dance”
Edna St. Vincent Millay: “First Fig,” “Recuerdo,” “Grown-Up,“ Spring,” “[I, Being Born a Woman and Distressed],” “[Gazing upon Him Now, Severe and Dead]”
Feb 26 R ?Midterm Exam?
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Mar 3 T Modernism and Feminism
“Gender, Sexuality, and the Modernist Poem” (posted on Blackboard as “Miller, Gender”)
Mina Loy: “Feminist Manifesto” (pp. 921-25), selections from Songs to Joannes, “Brancusi’s Golden Bird,” “Der Blinde Junge,” “English Rose,” “Gertrude Stein” “The Widow’s Jazz”
Mar 5 R Loy and Feminism, continued
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Mar 10 T The War Poets
A. E. Housman: “Eight O’Clock,” “Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries,” “[They Say My Verse is Sad]”
Wilfred Owen: “Anthem for Doomed Youth,” “Apologia pro Poemate Meo,” “Miners,” “Dulce et Decorum Est,” “Strange Meeting,” “Futility,” “S. I. W.,” ‘Mental Cases,” “Disabled,” “Exposure,” “Preface” (pp. 928-29)
Edward Thomas: “Adlestrop,” “The Gypsy,” “The Owl,” “Rain,” “February Afternoon,” “The Green Roads,” “The Gallows”
Mar 12 R
war poets, continued
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16-20 SPRING BREAK — STUDENT HOLIDAY
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Mar 24 T William Carlos Williams
William Carlos Williams: Spring and All (posted on Blackboard), “The Young Housewife,” “Tract,” “Danse Russe,” “Sympathetic Portrait of a Child,” “Portrait of a Lady,” “Queen-Ann’s-Lace,” “The Widow’s Lament in Springtime,” “The Great Figure,” “Spring and All,” “The Farmer,” “The Red Wheelbarrow,” “This Is Just to Say,” “Death,” “The Botticellian Trees,” “The Yachts,” selection from “Prologue to Kora in Hell” (pp. 954-59)
Mar 26 R Williams, continued
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Mar 31 T Another Imagism: H. D.
H. D.: “Oread,” “The Pool,” “Sea Rose,” “Mid-Day,” “Garden,” “Sea Violent,” “Helen,” “Fragment Sixty-Eight,”“Epitaph”
April 1 R A Different American Original
Marianne Moore: “To a Steam Roller,” “Critics and Connoisseurs,” “Black Earth,” “the Fish,” “In the Days of Prismatic Color,” “Poetry,” “England,” “A Grave,” “An Octopus,” “The Pangolin,” “Humility, Concentration, and Gusto” (pp. 994-1000)
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Apr 7 T Even more original
e. e. cummings: “[in just-],” “[Buffalo Bill’s],” “[O sweet spontaneous],” “[the cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls],” “[I was sitting in mcsorley’s],” “[next to of course god america I],” “[my sweet old etcetera],” “[r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r],” “[anyone lived in a pretty how town],”
Apr 9 R cummings, continued
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Apr 14 T The Insurance Man
Wallace Stevens: “Sunday Morning,” “Peter Quince at the Clavier,” “Disillusionment of Ten O’Clock,” “Domination of Black,” “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” selections from Adagia (pp. 972- 75)
Apr 16 R
Stevens: “The Death of a Soldier,” Anecdote of the Jar,” “The Snow Man,” “Tea at the Palaz of Hoon,” “The Emperor of Ice Cream,” “The Idea of Order at Key West”
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Apr 21 T T. S. Eliot
T. S. Eliot: “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (pp. 941-47), “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” “Preludes,” “Sweeney among the Nightingales”
Apr 23 R Eliot: The Waste Land
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Apr 28 T A week of conclusions and concludings
30 R
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May 7 (Thursday): Final Exam scheduled for 10:00 – 12:00 noon