Wasley, Aidan
TR 2 :20 PM
Park Hall 144
Twentieth Century British & Irish Poetry
Course Description: In this course we’ll examine the work of poets who both map the continuities of poetic tradition across the twentieth century and illuminate the various plural, parallel traditions into which British and Irish poetry can be seen to have expanded. Through the study in particular of transatlantic poets who challenge easy assumptions about the relation between artistic and national identity, we will chart connections and divergences between English, Irish, and North American poetic traditions and interrogate the notion of an emergent “post-national” English-language poetics in the late 20th century. Along the way, we’ll also address the poetry’s implication in its historical and cultural moment, in particular its relation to the two World Wars and the subsequent decline of British global power, the legacy of Irish emigration and independence, the Modernist inheritance of radical experimentation and difficulty, and the rise of multicultural Britain. Possible poets studied may include Thomas Hardy, W.B. Yeats, Wilfred Owen, Isaac Rosenberg, Hope Mirrlees, T.S. Eliot, Mina Loy, W.H. Auden, Keith Douglas, Philip Larkin, Stevie Smith, Seamus Heaney, Kamau Brathwaite, Carol Ann Duffy, Eavan Boland, and Paul Muldoon, among others.