Poetry and its Publics, 1900 to Now

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

What happens when poetry goes public? What can poems do in the world? And how do matters of urgent public import - matters of race, gender, class, war, and environmental collapse - shape the patterns of feeling and thought that poems make possible in the private recesses of our hearts and minds? These are just some of the questions we'll take up in this survey of modern and contemporary American poetry. Our goal is to explore the past 120 years in verse by framing poems as performative, contagious, sometimes clamorous, always thoroughly social things: textual objects produced in and for particular communities of readers, built to travel on the tongue and in a variety of media, and often tasked with vital public work. From the modernist scandals of Dada New York to Amanda Gorman's celebrated inaugural poem in 2021, our inquiry will pivot around key moments in U.S. literary history when poets transfixed and transformed public audiences. Central figures are likely to include T. S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, Marianne Moore, Langston Hughes, George Oppen, Gwendolyn Brooks, Frank O'Hara, Adrienne Rich, Claudia Rankine, and Layli Long Soldier, but we'll read widely (and closely) across movements, schools, styles, and forms. As we wrestle with popular narratives about poetry's cultural position in the U.S. (from handwringing concerns about poetry's obsolescence to recent hype over the flourishing of poetry in digital spaces), we'll also engage landmark statements from a variety of critical perspectives on the social life of poetry. Ultimately and together, though, we'l come to our own conclusions about why poems matter, and where poetry is headed in the twenty-first century.