ENGL 373-01, Contemporary American Poetry, Fall 1998

Abstract

The twentieth-century has been a period of both change and continuity for the art of poetry, especially so for those poets considered American. Every American poet of the latter half of the century knows that he/she writes after Eliot’s The Waste Land, Pound’s The Cantos, H.D.’s Trilogy, Williams’s Paterson, as well as the magnificence of Frost, Moore, Crane, and Stevens. Reactions to and interactions with this legacy, the impact of literatures from other languages, social and political ruptures, the introduction of continental critical theory, wars, and the changing topographies of American ethnicity and culture have all contributed to a vibrant new literature. In this course, we will study how contemporary American poetry has developed over the last five decades in relation to these subjects and others.