ENGL 359
Twentieth-Century Poetry Fall 2009
Division I Writing Skills
This is not the current course catalog

This tutorial focuses on poems by W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, W. H. Auden, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell and Derek Walcott. We will examine connections among the poets, questions of influence, the significance of tradition and kinds of formal innovations, the meanings of “modernism” and its aftermath. Our emphasis will be on individual poems, including some longer poems such as Eliot’s Four Quartets, Walcott’s Omeros, and Stevens’s “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction.” Supplementary reading includes essays by these writers on the conception and practice of poetry, as well as literary criticism of particular poets or poems.