English 4/802:

Modernist Poetry in English


            Spring 2017

Stephen C. Behrendt
319 Andrews; 472-1806
Office: 1:00 - 3:00 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 10 T
Introduction to Modernism

Jan 12 R
“Introduction” (pp. xxxvii - lix), “Paul Peppis, “Schools, movements, manifestos” (pp. 28-50),from The Cambridge Companion to Modernist Poetry [online PDF files in "Cambridge Modernism Essays"] and “Introduction/Modernism (pp. 1-34) [online PDF file: "Introduction Modernism"]
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Jan 17 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 19 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 20 F Last day to DROP this course and receive a 75% refund
Jan 21 S All course withdrawals noted with a “W” on academic record (Jan 21 – April 14)
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Jan 24 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 26 R
finish Yeats
Jan 27 F Last day to DROP this course and receive a 50% refund
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Jan 31 T
Marinetti and the Futurist manifestos [online PDF: “Marinetti etc”] and [online PDF: Mina Loy, "Aphorisms on Futurism"]
         Read also [online PDF: Barbara Tuchman, The Proud Tower, Chapter 2: "The Idea and the Deed"]

Feb   2 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”
         See [online file: full text of Stein, Tender Buttons ]
Feb   3 F Last day to DROP this course and receive a 25% refund
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Feb    7 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    9 R
Pound: Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, “1920 (Mauberley),” “A Retrospect” (p. 929)
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Feb 14 T
Vorticism
selections from BLAST (pp. 897- 921)

Feb 16 R Catching up
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Feb 21
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 23 R ?Midterm Exam?
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Feb 28 T Modernism and Feminism
“Gender, Sexuality, and the Modernist Poem” [online PDF file:  "Cambridge Modernism essays,") pp. 68-84]

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   2 R Loy and Feminism, continued
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Mar   7 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   9 R
war poets, continued
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Mar 14 T William Carlos Williams
William Carlos Williams: Spring and All [online PDF file: Spring and All], “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 16 R Williams, continued
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16-20 SPRING BREAK — STUDENT HOLIDAY
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Mar 28 T Another Imagism: H. D.
H. D.: “Oread,” “The Pool,” “Sea Rose,” “Mid-Day,” “Garden,” “Sea Violent,” “Helen,” “Fragment Sixty-Eight,”“Epitaph”

Mar 30 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  4 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  6 R cummings, continued
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Apr 11 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 13 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 18 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 20 R Eliot: The Waste Land
               Graduate Papers and Undergraduate Research Portfolios due IN CLASS today
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Apr 25 T A week of conclusions and concludings
Apr 27 R
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May 4 (Thursday): Final Exam scheduled for 3:30 – 5:30 p.m.

 

 

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