ENGH 337: British Poetry after 1900

ENGH 337-001: British Poetry after 1900
(Spring 2015)

12:00 PM to 01:15 PM MW

Section Information for Spring 2015

for god's 
sake 
stay open 
to your time 
what's done 
is  --Tom Raworth

What does it mean to be modern? For Americans, this has never been a particular problem: we imagine ourselves as distinctively, exceptionally and perpetually new.  For the British, whose United Kingdom was forged from traditions (some of them real, some of them imaginary), the question has always proved to be harder to answer. In this course, we will look at the ambivalent way English, Irish, Scottish and Welsh poets over the past century have approached the past, the present and the future. We will look at the usual Modernist suspects. Then we'll go on to consider those post-War poets for whom Modernism itself had become a tradition. Poets will probably include Eliot (who liked to pretend he was English), Yeats and Auden, Lawrence, Stevie Smith, Dylan Thomas, Hugh MacDiarmid, Seamus Heaney, Geoffrey Hill and Tom Raworth. And, if we must (as I assume we must), we'll read some Philip Larkin. 

Course Information from the University Catalog