LIT 5038

This course will provide graduate students with a firm grounding in modernism and modern American poetry. We will engage in a comprehensive investigation of the major figures, movements, and innovative styles in modernist American poetry within the context of international modernism and the avant-garde. The course will pay special attention to ongoing debates within "the new modernist studies" about the definition and nature of "modernism" and will investigate various theories of modernism. We will also situate the poetry within its cultural and historical context, focus on issues of gender, sexuality, race, and the dialogue between politics and poetry, and explore modern poetry's relationship with other developments in the arts, especially modern painting. Poets we will study include many of the most influential American poets, including Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, Gertrude Stein, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Mina Loy, Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, Jean Toomer, Countee Cullen, and Robert Frost.