Ford, Michael
MWF 9:10 AM
Park Hall 144
ENGL 4770: Twentieth-Century American Poetry
This class will cover the great variety of poetry written in the United States during the twentieth century.
We will read works written in each decade of the twentieth century, paying attention to the changing forms of poetry as well as poetry’s changing role in American culture.
We will address the questions poets struggled to answer, both in the their poems and the statements they made about poetry: What should a line of poetry sound like? How should a poem be presented on the page? What kinds of texts can be considered poetry? What is poetry’s relationship to the life, mind, and voice of the poet? What is poetry’s relationship to history and literary traditions? Should poets endeavor to write poems that are distinctly American? If so, what features distinguish a poem as American?
We will also study twentieth-century print culture. We will use UGA library resources to investigate some of the physical books, magazines, and anthologies in which many of the poems we will study first appeared, and we will discuss how changing technology affected not only the printing and distribution of poetry but also at times the forms of poetry itself.
We will likely read five or six full books of poetry as well as numerous individual poems from electronic sources such as JSTOR and the Poetry Foundation’s website. I hope to give you an overview of the work of not only some of the best-remembered poets of the twentieth century but also some poets who were once quite popular but are no longer widely read and a few whose work was only published in print runs of a few hundred copies but perhaps deserve a wider audience.
We will read works by Edgar Lee Masters, Carl Sandburg, Gertrude Stein, H. D., Robert Frost, T. S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Edna St Vincent Millay, Muriel Rukeyser, Lorine Niedecker, Gwendolyn Brooks, Allen Ginsberg, Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell, Frank O’Hara, Jack Spicer, Larry Eigner, Elizabeth Bishop, Anne Sexton, Joy Harjo, W. S. Merwin, Simon Ortiz, Nikki Giovanni, James Merrill, N. H. Pritchard, Alice Notley, Jimmy Santiago Baca, Lyn Hejinian, Yusef Komunyakaa, Louise Glück, Reginald Shepherd, and Linda Hogan. Most (if not all) of these poets will be represented on the final syllabus, along with a few stragglers I have forgotten to add.