LIT 4034 Epstein Fall 2021

This course will provide students with a firm grounding in the major figures, movements, and innovations in American poetry since World War II. We will pay special attention to the rich period from the 1950s to the 1980s, as we focus on such topics as the postwar reaction to modernism and to the New Criticism, the conflict between closed and open forms, the turn to the self, the development of a poetics of everyday life, and the tension between individuals and literary movements. We will discuss how contemporary poetry grapples with issues related to gender, race, and the dialogue between poetry and politics, and will situate the poetry within the cultural climate and politics of Cold War America, the 1960s and beyond.

As we trace the roots and development of postmodernist American poetry, we will investigate the relationship between poetry and such developments as: the unprecedented historical calamities of World War II, the Holocaust, and Hiroshima; the Cold War era’s culture of economic expansion, conformity, repression, and paranoia; the rapidly changing values and circumstances of American society during the 1960s and the nation’s experience with Vietnam, the counterculture, and Watergate; the increasing omnipresence of the media and popular culture (TV, rock music) and the blurring of distinctions between high and low culture. Throughout the semester, we will explore how and why these poets invent new, unconventional literary methods to address changing ideas about the nature of the self, language and literature, racial and sexual identity, and America itself, in a world undergoing dramatic transformations.

Poets discussed will likely include Allen Ginsberg, Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, Robert Hayden, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Amiri Baraka, Gwendolyn Brooks, Adrienne Rich, Carolyn Forché, and Yusef Komunyakaa.

This course fulfills the Genre requirement for the LMC track.