English 361-001
The Development of Poetry: Six Modernist Poets
Instr: Puskar, Jason
Office: CRT 585; 229-4517
e-mail: puskar@uwm.edu
Office hours: TBA
Course Information: MW; 2:00-3:15pm; CRT 368
Course Description
This course is an intensive introduction to six modernist poets, all of whom were most active between roughly 1910 and 1955: Robert Frost, Langston Hughes, T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, and Elizabeth Bishop. The course will combine intensive close reading of individual poems with a more general consideration of historical and cultural issues related to each poet. These include Hughes's involvement in the "Harlem Renaissance," Moore's interest in modern science, and Stevens's debt to American philosophical pragmatism. The course also will train students in the fundamentals of poetic composition, including versification, meter, and common figures of poetic speech. By the end of the semester, students will have gained skills and techniques for reading all poetry, a fuller sense of the development of modernist poetics in the first half of the twentieth century, and detailed knowledge of six influential writers.
