21L.487
Modern Poetry
Study of major poems and manifestos from the late 19th century through the early 21st century. Examines works written in English, with some attention to Modernist texts from other cultures and other languages as well. Poems by T. S. Eliot, W. C. Williams, Langston Hughes, Robert Frost, Pablo Neruda, Hilda Doolittle, Charles Baudelaire, Anna Akhmatova, Bertolt Brecht, Rabindranath Tagore, and others. Comprised primarily of discussions, short papers, and a final project. May be repeated for credit with permission of instructor if content differs.
Spring 2002
Topics
- Introductions
- Origins of Modernism II
- Origins of Modernism: III
- Modernism and Orientalism
- The Modern Image and Sculpture
- Montage and Film-history
- The Psychology of Self-revelation
- The “Mythic Method” and History
- The Status of Allusion
- Williams: “Waste Land” as the “Great Catastrophe”
- Words as Things
- Harlem Renaissance
- Woolf
- Woolf (cont.)
- Yeats
- Yeats (cont.)
- Stevens (cont.)
- Student Presentations
Readings
- Woolf, Virginia. Mrs. Dalloway.
- Ellman, Richard, ed. Modern Poems. 2nd ed. Edited by Richard Ellmann, Robert O’Clair, and O’Clair Ellmann, New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1989. ISBN: 0393959074.
- The pages referenced in the table below refer to texts from Modern Poems .
- SES#: 15 · TOPICS: Woolf · READINGS: Woolf, Virginia. To the Lighthouse. (Section 1).
- SES#: 16 · TOPICS: Woolf (cont.) · READINGS: Woolf, Virginia. To the Lighthouse. (Sections 2 and 3).
- Yeats. “Easter 1916.” (40).
- SES#: 19 · TOPICS: Yeats (cont.) · READINGS: Yeats. “Sailing to Byzantium.” Pay special attention to Stanzas 3-4: What’s the direction in which to look for the solution? What images suggest a solution?
- SES#: 21 · TOPICS: Stevens (cont.) · READINGS: Stevens. “Sunday Morning.” Pay special attention to Stanzas 3-4: Displaced Spirituality and Modernist Compensation
- SES#: 22 · TOPICS: Stevens (cont.) · READINGS: Stevens. “Sunday Morning.” Pay special attention to the final Stanzas and to the Neo-gapnist images at the end: we’ll compare this ending to the conclusions of Keat’s “To Autumn” and to the version of the poem as it first appeared, with the Stanzas renumbered and reorganized, in Poetry magazine
- SES#: 23-25 · TOPICS: Student Presentations · READINGS: None
Prerequisites & course information
Prereq: None U (Spring) 3-0-9 units. HASS-H Can be repeated for credit.
Sources
- Course catalogue ↗2026–2027
- MIT OpenCourseWare ↗Spring 2002
- MIT OCW readings ↗
- MIT OCW calendar ↗
- MIT OCW syllabus ↗
- Historical MIT OpenCourseWare offering. Named reading entries and schedule topics are automatically extracted from the linked source pages.