2:30P-3:45P TR (30) 3 cr

This course will be organized around a central tension in British
poetry of the 20th century, a tension between two concepts of the
poet's relationship to society and between two concepts of the
relation between poetic language and ordinary speech.  This
tension might be summed up as a tension between a concept of the
poet as seer or visionary and a concept of the poet as bard or
spokesperson for a culture.  The concept of poet as visionary
emphasizes the poet's individual perspective and tends to treat
the poet as an outsider, an outlaw, or at best as marginal in
relation to society; the visionary poet's language is understood
as different in kind from ordinary speech.  In contrast, the
concept of the poet as bard emphasizes the poet's role within
society, as its spokesperson, and therefore values more generally
accessible forms of poetic language.  This tension also often
appears within the work of individual poets, such as W.B. Yeats,
the author with whom we will begin the course.

We will read examples of both modernist and contemporary British
poetry, with a focus on both exemplary authors and important
schools or movements.  The readings will probably consist of some
combination of anthologies and individual books by important
poets.  Our readings will be chosen from authors such as Yeats,
H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), T.S. Eliot, Mina Loy, Edith Sitwell,
Dylan Thomas, W.H. Auden, Philip Larkin, Ted Hughes, Seamus
Heaney, Tony Harrison, Penelope Shuttle, Mebdh McGuckian, Douglas
Dunn, and Craig Raine.  We will also discuss these authors and
others in terms of schools and movements, such as the
experimental women writers, Auden's circle of political poets in
the 1930s, British surrealism, the Movement poets associated with
Larkin who rejected modernist experimentation, and possibly
Anglophone poetry written in the British colonies, especially the
Caribbean.  =20
The overall focus of the class, however, will be on the
relationship between the two different conceptions of poetry and
of what is valuable in poetry:  individual vision and originality
or civility and public intelligibility.

Assignments for the course will probably include one shorter
interpretive essay, one longer research paper, a midterm, and a
final exam.