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2011/2 Provisional Module Catalogue - UNDER CONSTRUCTION & SUBJECT TO CHANGE
 Module Code: ELI2006 Module Title: POETRY IN ENGLISH FROM 1909
Module Provider: English Short Name: ELI2006
Level: HE2 Module Co-ordinator: ASHFORD DM Dr (English)
Number of credits: 20 Number of ECTS credits: 10
 
Module Availability
Semester 2
Assessment Pattern

Assessment Pattern

 

Unit(s) of Assessment

 

Weighting Towards Module Mark( %)

 

Essay 3000 words

 

70%

 

Presentation / Debate

 

30%

 

Student-led discussion on ULearn / Participation in class: formative

 

0%

 

Module Overview

This option offers students the opportunity to deepen their knowledge and understanding of a specific form of writing – to consider poetry in relation to the modern world.

 

 

This option focuses on the extraordinary tradition of innovation on the part of Modernist poets over the past century, enabling students to engage with some of the landmark poems of the twentieth century, and in relation to the key critical and historical issues that have preoccupied each wave of new writing.

 

 

In so doing, students build a memory-map that provides a means of better understanding twentieth-century culture as a whole, providing scope for inventive application of the core skills and theoretical insights acquired from previous modules.

 

 

Though offering students a strong and compelling narrative the module has been designed to permit maximum flexibility, the opportunity for students to tailor the content of the course through an inventive approach to teaching and assessment, in order to pursue their own  personal lines of enquiry, to modify the chart provided, to make the history of C20-century poetry their own.

Prerequisites/Co-requisites
None
Module Aims

Develop students’ understanding of key periods and key ideas in modern poetry in English, from the advent of Modernism, through the various traditions that emerged in the and the British Isles over the following 60 years, to the emergence of an international poetry scene in the era of globalisation.

 

Provide enabling knowledge for students wishing to undertake a more detailed study of major twentieth-century writing; or the writing of poetry themselves.

 

Help students situate the main strands of C20th poetry in relation to earlier models.

 

Provide a sense of the craft of poetry as adapted to the needs of modern writing.

 

Develop self-reflexive thinking about poetry: to apply critical thinking to this context.

 

Develop skills in group & independent work.

 

Give students the ability to undertake oral presentation & written work.

 

Develop IT skills & time-management via ULearn activities.

Learning Outcomes

Extensive knowledge of the main phases & figures in modern poetry from 1909.

 

Good understanding of the major critical & theoretical influences & accompanying critical vocabulary that helped to shape the development of contemporary poetic forms.

 

Strong sense of how poets have responded to & interrogated the rapid social & political changes of their times & the strains & challenges these have involved.

 

Concentrated thought to the difficult questions arising in analysing & assessing literature of the recent past.

 

Ability to think critically & in a self-reflexive manner about poetry & its analysis.

 

Skills in group & independent work.

 

Skills in oral presentation, written work, IT writing & time management.

Module Content

Week 1. 

 

 

MATRIX OF THE MODERN

 

 

The creation of the Eiffel Tower Group in London in 1909 by the philosopher T.E. Hulme marked the beginning of the first organised modernist literary-movement. Inspired by Ancient Greek and Far Eastern forms, poets in London and Chicago called for an innovative poetry of physical sensation – breaking with outworn poetic convention, in order to achieve an epiphanic presentation of the thing itself – whether internal or external. With this “Doctrine of the Image” the Imagists set out the ontological basis for much of the poetry produced over the next half-century; and with their talk of the “complex” – their new emphasis on the psychological and subjective processes that underpin creative thought – the Imagists anticipated the current paradigm that poets today must either write within or against.  

 

 

Podium Slot:  A Lecture on Imagism

 

 

Seminar Text:  Peter Jones, ed. Imagist Poetry (2002).

 

 

 

Week 2.

 

 

WAR IN ARCADIA

 

 

The Great War saw the European Imperial States applying industrial processes of mass-production to the slaughter of enemy populations. In this crisis, the last Romantic poets found their traditional idiom, with its emphasis on the “poetical”, terribly inadequate to convey anything meaningful about the conflict and strove toward a harder form of words that would be above all other things “truthful”, its only Poetry in the “pity” of what it described. These sessions look at poetry produced by leading soldier-poets, in conjunction with official war paintings produced by modern artists such as Vorticist Impresario Wyndham Lewis: “You’ll be astonished to find how like art is to war”, wrote Lewis, “I mean ‘modern’ art”.    

 

 

 

Podium Slot: Poetry Wars 1

 

 

The first of three student debates in which two teams contest some of the most hotly contested issues in contemporary poetry criticism. In 2009 the late-modernist poet Jeremy Prynne presented a highly controversial paper on the merits of the representation of WWI in the prose memoirs which became very successful many years before the poetry that is now inextricably associated with that conflict. The topic for this first debate picks up where that lecture left off – This House Believes that the late-Romantic poetry synonymous with WWI is an inadequate vehicle for representation of that conflict.

 

 

 

Seminar Text:  Poems by Isaac Rosenberg (photocopies provided)

 

 

 

Week 3.

 

 

THE RITES OF SPRING.

 

 

“Whether Stravinsky’s music be permanent or ephemeral I do not know; but it did seem to transform the rhythm of the steppes into the scream of the motor horn, the rattle of machinery, the grind of wheels, the beating of iron and steel, the roar of the underground railway, and the other barbaric cries of modern life; and to transform these despairing noises into music.” – T.S. Eliot on Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, 1921.

 

 

In the wake of the Great War, modernist writers sought to exorcise the horrors of the recent past; to find some method that might make a brutal & insane modernity possible for art. These sessions consider the recourse on the part of many poets to “primitivist” art, to bricolage and to ritual, and asks if there are clear differences in the procedures followed by poets operating in the Old and New World .

 

 

 

Podium Slot: Mythologies 1

 

 

The first of two student colloquiums in which four students (or four pairs of students) each present ten minute introductions to a poem of their choice from one of the landmark modernist publications listed below. Each presentation must address the use of mythic-method / recourse to “primitivist” music and art on the part of the poet.

 

 

 

Seminar Text:  As yet there is no Set Text. The student presentation that convinces the audience that the topic they have talked on deserves the attention of the seminar will determine the Set Text. (Photocopies will be provided.)

 

 

 

Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons (1914)

 

T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land (1922),

 

William Carlos Williams, Spring and All (1923),

 

D.H. Lawrence, Birds, Beasts and Flowers (1923),

 

e.e. cummings, Tulips & Chimneys (1923),

 

Wallace Stevens, Harmonium (1923),

 

Marianne Moore, Observations (1924),

 

Langston Hughes, The Weary Blues (1926),

 

Hugh MacDiarmid, A Drunk Man Looks at a Thistle (1926),

 

W.B. Yeats, The Tower (1928),

 

Edith Sitwell, Gold Coast Customs (1929),

 

Ezra Pound, A Draft of XXX Cantos (1930)

 

 

 

Week 4.

 

 

IN THE NIGHTMARE OF THE DARK

 

 

Poetry of the thirties is usually discussed in political terms and often from a specifically Marxist standpoint. But this approach finds no place for much that is apparently frivolous in important material produced in this period by W.H. Auden, and finds no place for poetry by Stevie Smith and David Gascoyne, often classified as Surrealist. This session takes a broader view, suggesting that the Auden School can be fruitfully read as manifestations of a broader left-wing faith in the radical play of the irrational against totalitarian systems of control. This lecture looks at an overlooked and enormously important long-poem by Auden, reading ostensibly Marxist poetry through Freud and the poetry of Surrealists as politically-inflected, encouraging a fresh approach to poetry of a period in which monsters of the mind took on a new reality in the ruins of Europe .

 

 

 

Podium Slot:  A lecture on Surrealism

 

 

Seminar Text:  Poems by WH Auden (photocopies provided)

 

 

 

Week 5. 

 

 

VISIONS OF THE LAND

 

 

The republication of the experimental late-Victorian poet G.M. Hopkins by Charles Williams in 1930 saw a renewal of interest in the possibilities of an innovative modern poetry in the British Romantic Tradition. Often characterised by muscular, forceful rhythm, this new poetry of passion, nature and the eternal was a far cry from the limpid Romantic poetry of the late-nineteenth century, darkened by the knowledge of political oppression abroad, and by each poet’s personal experience of Total War, heralded by the onset of the Blitz in the winter of 1940. In these conditions the Nature revered by the British Romantics became a savage and inhumane White Goddess; while the complacent Christian faith of the Victorian period was utterly transformed and electrified by existentialist angst. In this session students explore the curious relationship that emerges between poetry and nature, religion and nationality, in a body of material that manages to reaffirm a positive and transcendent vision of the Land (, , , or Europe as a whole) in the face of a prevailing and characteristic atmosphere of overwhelming isolation or evil.

 

 

 

Podium Slot:  A lecture on Neo-Romanticism

 

 

Seminar Text:  Lynette Roberts, Gods with Stainless Ears (1951)

 

 

 

 

Week 6. 

 

 

INTERNATIONAL MODERN

 

 

The Festival of Britain in 1951 saw the triumph of the state-managed (and romantic-modernist) reinvention of the nation. In the years that followed, as architecture unveiled on the South Bank was reiterated in provincial cities across the , a new generation questioned the assumptions underlying modernism, calling for a return to tradition.

 

 

This week’s lecture starts with the Movement Poets that rejected and participated in the modernist project as manifested in writing and in the built environment. But if the Movement has preoccupied the perspective of English poets and critics, the key development in this period internationally is not the rejection of Modernism, but the fresh impetus the modernist trajectory receives from poets Basil Bunting and Roy Fisher in the UK, Robert Lowell, Charles Olson and Elizabeth Bishop in the US, and veterans Ezra Pound, H.D., Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams and Louis Zukofsky. It will be seen that these poets all engage with the modernist legacy of the interwar period, in order to “Make It New”.

 

 

In this they are representative. The 50s represented the high watermark of International Modernism across the arts. The triumph of American Abstract in New York put that city for the first time at the centre of the art-world. And in the field of architecture, the International Style developed by Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe provided the template for the gleaming new air-ports and the corporate high-rise of the American Era.   

 

 

 

Podium Slot:  A lecture on International Modern

 

 

Seminar Text:  Charles Olson, The Kingfishers (1949)

 

 

 

Week 7. 

 

 

SONG OF MYSELF

 

 

If the rediscovery of G.M. Hopkins provided a catalyst for the emergence of neo-Romanticism in the British Isles , the hugely inventive poetry of nineteenth-century pioneer Walt Whitman played a similar role in the development of an experimental modern poetry faithful to the American Romantic Tradition. “Song of Myself” is an epic of the individual, expressing the poet’s faith in the universal significance of each particular selfhood, which inspired later American poets to produce their own epics of the ego, even as Whitman’s healthy faith in the transcendental nature of each individual became ever harder to reassert in an period that had witnessed the Holocaust, and feared a Third World War.

 

 

In seminar students examine the relationship between poetry and self-expression, the individual and the universal, in the New American Poetry that emerged in this era, from the Objectivists and the Black Mountain School, to the Beat Poets, the Confessionals and the New York School, tracing the ghost of Whitman in these new epics of fragmented and ruined, but resilient, selfhood.   

 

 

Podium Slot: Poetry Wars 2

 

 

The second of three student debates in which two teams contest some of the most hotly contested issues in contemporary poetry criticism. In this session students interrogate the perceived shift from Modernism post-war – attempting to ascertain 1) the extent to which new poets represent a break with that trajectory, and 2) how much (if anything) post-war poetry in the UK had in common with the New American Poetry.

 

 

The topic for this week: – This House Believes British Poetry lost its way in an American Century.

 

 

 

Seminar Text: 

 

Allen Ginsberg, Howl and Other Poems (1956).

 

 

 

Week 8. 

 

 

BLOODWORT

 

 

In 1962, critic A. Alvarez called for a break with the parochialism of post-war poetry in . Hailing American confessional poetries pioneered by Lowell, Sexton and Berryman, Alvarez cited the horrors of modernity that had already taken place, the ever present threat of extinction posed by the superpowers, and the impending environmental catastrophe caused by human exploitation of the natural world – issuing a call for British poets to fulfil their responsibility to bear witness. . . .

 

 

Over subsequent decades poets from the , from , , the , and the West Indies have produced challenging poetry that exposed the violence underlying the cold-war world, often with recourse to a bloody mythic past. This week students look at the link between poetry and blood, considering some of the key collections of the sixties and seventies, and their use of African, Celtic, Norse, Indian and Classical myth.

 

 

Podium Slot: Mythologies 2

 

 

The second of two student colloquiums in which four students (or four pairs of students) present ten minute introductions to a poem of their choice from one of the landmark post-war editions listed below. Each presentation must address the use of mythology to engage with violence underlying the society of the period.

 

 

Seminar Text:  As yet there is no Set Text. The student presentation that convinces the audience that the topic they have talked on deserves the attention of the seminar will determine the Set Text. (Photocopies will be provided.)

 

 

Margaret Atwood, Double Persephone (1961)

 

Sylvia Plath, Ariel (1965)

 

Wole Soyinka, Idanre and Other Poems (1967)

 

Geoffrey Hill, King Log (1968)

 

Ted Hughes, Crow (1970)

 

Denise Levertov, To Stay Alive (1971)

 

(Edward) Kamau Braithwaite, The Arrivants: A New World Trilogy (1973)

 

Seamus Heaney, North (1975)

 

Iain Sinclair, Suicide Bridge (1979)

 

Christopher Logue, War Music (1981)

 

Derek Walcott, Omeros (1990)

 

A. K. Ramanujan, Collected Poems (2010)

 

 

 

Week 9. 

 

 

A DEFENCE AGAINST THE DARK ARTS

 

 

This lecture looks at the process of canon-reformation that has been taking place recently following the publication of R. Stevenson’s Last of England. The Secret History of the British Poetry Revival, following Ginsberg’s Albert Hall Poetry Incarnation of 1965, has for many decades been obscured for mainstream poetry-readers (ever since the savage attacks on the British Poetry Revival initiated by the Arts Council in 1971). Though long acclaimed internationally, some of the most interesting poetry produced in the post-war is only now starting to emerge - at last - from the underground.

 

 

 

 

Perhaps unsurprisingly the power of buried secrets emerges as a key theme in much of this verse; so too excavation, systematic subversion, trope of the archaeological dig. The seminar examines the link between poetry and secrecy; between the commitment to experiment in this Late Modernist Poetry and the conviction that submerged infrastructures of history, language, the city, nature and the mind must predetermine the fate of the individual. . . .

 

 

The faith in the body underpinning the poetry of identity that became popular in the sixties is shown to possess no point of autonomy: for the human body is now mapped, is itself part of the system that such poetry seeks to resist: the logic of late-Capitalism. The Late Modernist poet is provoked to an impossible political act – the poem. If poetry in English is to have a future in the twenty-first century it will surely derive its procedures and philosophy from this body of work straining beyond our current paradigm, pushing the future forward, reaching for what must appear the “Vanishing Point”.

 

 

Podium Slot:  David Ashford presents a talk on Late-Modernism

 

 

Seminar Text:  Poems by J.H. Prynne (photocopies provided)

 

 

 

----------------------------------------------------EASTER BREAK-------------------------------------------------------

 

 

Week 10. 

 

 

FIRE FOR THE BABYLON

 

 

As a newly-invigorated right-wing, committed to dismantling the post-war socialist economic consensus, took control of the , black and white working class poets tapped into the popular energies unleashed in the race riots and miner’s strikes to fashion new poetries of political dissent.

 

 

Far from marking the end of resistance to ‘Nomad Capitalism’, the eventual triumph of these new free-market policies across the world saw that opposition go global, inspiring a generation informed by neo-marxist, situationist, feminist, anti-racist, anti-imperialist, humanitarian and environmental movements to produce politically-inflected verse which roots its resistance in the local, but participates in a poetic project that is now, through the web, operating on a scale that is global and unprecedented.

 

 

Podium Slot:  A contemporary poet talks about the relationship between political activism and poetry in the era of globalisation and performs their some of their latest work.

 

 

Seminar Text:  Poems by the visiting poet.

 

 

 

Week 11. 

 

 

THE STATS ON INFINITY

 

 

Podium Slot: Poetry Wars 3

 

 

The last of three student debates in which two teams contest some of the most hotly contested issues in contemporary poetry criticism. The history of English-language poetry over the past century has been fraught with conflict & this remains the case today. Following the Poetry Reading in Week 10, students are invited to consider different approaches to writing politically-engaged poetry in the era of globalisation, embodied by some of the texts below, and to advocate poetry in the modernist trajectory charted in this module, or in the “mainstream” tradition familiar from GCSE and A-level.   

 

 

 

 

Tony Harrison, V (1985)

 

Peter Reading, Perduta Gente (1989)

 

Carol Anne Duffy, The World’s Wife (1999)

 

Benjamin Zephaniah, Too Black, Too Strong (2001)

 

Linton Kwesi Johnson, Mi Revalueshanary Fren (2002)

 

Les Murray, New Collected Poems (2003)

 

Drew Milne, The Damage: New and Selected Poems (2001)

 

Andrea Brady, Vacation of a Lifetime (2001)

 

Sean O’Brien, Cousin Coat (2002)

 

Catherine Daly, DaDaDa  (2003)

 

Sean Bonney, Blade Pitch Control Unit (2005)

 

Deborah Miranda, The Zen of La Llorona (2005)

 

Simon Armitage, Tyrannosaurus Rex versus the Corduroy Kid (2006)

 

Lionel Fogarty, Dha’lan Djani Mitti (2007)

 

Allison Adelle Hedge Coke, Blood Run (2007)

 

Keston Sutherland, Hot White Andy (2007).

 

 

 

The topic for this final debate – This House Believes that Poetry presented as “mainstream” is an ineffective means of engaging with, communicating, and challenging, political realities in the C21st.

 

 

 

Seminar Text:  There is no Set Text. This session is devoted to essay consultation and feedback.

 

 

Week 12

 

Revision

 

 

 

Weeks 13

 

Exams/Assessment

 

 

 

Weeks 14

 

Exams/Assessment

 

 

 

Weeks 15

 

Exams/Assessment

 

 

 

 

Assessment Deadlines:

 

 

Essay: 12pm Wednesday 25 May 2011

 

 

Presentation: Throughout year. Notes to be handed in on the Wednesday of the following week.

Methods of Teaching/Learning

Lectures / Seminar Discussion / Student Debates / Student Presentations / ULearn Discussion / Poetry Performance / Essay Consultation

 

Selected Texts/Journals
Essential Reading
 
H.D., Mina Loy, Amy Lowell, Ezra Pound, T.E. Hulme: in Peter Jones, ed. Imagist Poetry (2002).
Emily Dickinson, W.E. Henley, Stephen Crane: photocopied excerpts provided beforehand.
 
Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, Ivor Gurney, Isaac Rosenberg: in George Walter, ed., Penguin Book of First World War Poetry (2007).
Texts by Wyndham Lewis, Ezra Pound, W.B. Yeats: photocopied excerpts provided beforehand.
 
T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land (1922).
William Carlos Williams, Spring and All (1923): in The Collected Poems Vol. 1 1909-1939 (2000).
 
W.H. Auden, The Orators (1932): in The English Auden (2001): but it might be well to shop around: the first edition of The Orators can easily be found online for as little as £4.00!
 
W.S. Graham, The Nightfishing (1955)
Photocopied excerpts from other neo-Romantic poets provided beforehand.
 
Introduction to Robert Conquest, New Lines Anthology (1956): photocopies provided.
Poems by Phillip Larkin, Donald Davie, D.J. Enright, Thom Gunn (photocopies provided).
 
Allen Ginsberg, Howl and Other Poems (1956).
Poems by Anne Sexton: available online at The Poetry Foundation.
 
Introduction to A. Alvarez, The New Poetry (1962): photocopies provided.
Kamau Braithwaite, The Arrivants: A New World Trilogy (1973).
 
J.H. Prynne, Poems (2005): an expensive edition: copies can be bought cheap online secondhand.
 
Poems by Linton Kwesi Johnson, Peter Reading, Carol Anne Duffy & Andrea Brady (photocopied). 
Keston Sutherland, Hot White Andy (2007) at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SWMTted_5tA
 
 
Further Reading
 
Wyndham Lewis, BLAST (1915), Ezra Pound, Cathay(1915), W.B. Yeats, Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921), Edmund Blunden, Undertones of War (1928), Wyndham Lewis, Blasting and Bombardiering (1937).
 
D.H. Lawrence, Birds, Beasts and Flowers (1923), e.e. cummings, Tulips & Chimneys (1923), Wallace Stevens, Harmonium (1923), Marianne Moore, Observations (1924), Hugh MacDiarmid, A Drunk Man Looks at a Thistle (1926), Langston Hughes, The Weary Blues (1926), Edith Sitwell, Facades, W.B. Yeats, The Tower (1928), Ezra Pound, A Draft of XXX Cantos (1930)
 
W.H. Auden, The English Auden (1986), David Gascoyne, Man’s Life Is This Meat (1936), Stevie Smith, A Good Time Was Had By All (1937), W.B. Yeats, Last Poems (1939), Louis MacNeice, Autumn Journal (1939), William Empson, The Gathering Storm (1940), Ezra Pound, Pisan Cantos (1946) 
 
Charles Williams, ed. Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins (1930), Taliessin Through Logres (1938), Laura Riding, Collected Poems (1938), T.S. Eliot, Little Gidding (1945), Lynette Roberts, Gods with Stainless Ears (1951), Dylan Thomas, Collected Poems, 1934-1952 (1952), Naomi Mitchison, Cleansing of the Knife (1979), Robert Graves, The White Goddess (1948), David Jones, Anathemata (1952), R.S. Thomas, Song at the Year’s Turning (1955), Ted Hughes, Hawk in the Rain (1957).
 
William Carlos Williams, Paterson (1948-1963), Louis Zukofsky, A (1928-1974), Charles Olson, The Maximus Poems (1950-1970), Robert Lowell, Life Studies (1959), Anne Sexton, To Bedlam and Part the Way Back (1960), Live or Die (1970), Frank O’Hara, Lunch Poems (1964), John Berryman, The Dream Songs (1964-1969), John Ashbery, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975), Elizabeth Bishop, Geography III (1976).
 
A. Alvarez, The New Poetry (1962), Sylvia Plath, Ariel (1965), Ted Hughes, Crow (1970), Geoffrey Hill, King Log (1968), Mercian Hymns (1971), Seamus Heaney, North (1975), Christopher Logue, War Music (1981), Derek Walcott, Omeros (1990),
 
Roy Fisher, City (1962), Basil Bunting, Briggflats (1966), Tom Raworth, The Relation Ship (1966), Edwin Morgan, The Second Life (1968), Michael Horowitz, Children of Albion: Poetry of the Underground in Britain (1969), J.H. Prynne, Kitchen Poems (1968), High Pink on Chrome (1975), Veronica Forrest-Thomson, Selected Poems (1999), Iain Sinclair, Lud Heat (1975), Suicide Bridge (1979), Douglas Oliver, The Diagram Poems (1979); Peter Riley, Distant Points (1983), Denise Riley, Dry Air (1985), John Wilkinson, Proud Flesh (1986), Andrew Crozier and Tim Longville, ed., A Various Art : Anthology (1987), Iain Sinclair, ed., Conductors of Chaos (1996).
 
Paul Muldoon, Quoof (1983), Tony Harrison, V (1985), Peter Reading, Perduta Gente (1989), Carol Anne Duffy, The World’s Wife (1999), Michael Hulse, David Kennedy, David Morley, eds., The New Poetry (1993), Benjamin Zephaniah, Too Black, Too Strong (2001), Rod Mengham, Unsung (2001), Linton Kwesi Johnson, Mi Revalueshanary Fren: Collected (2002), Ulli Freer, Speakbright Leap Password (2004), Les Murray, New Collected Poems (2003), Douglas Oliver, Arrondissements (2003), John Kinsella, Doppler Effect (2004), Andrea Brady, Vacation of a Lifetime (2001), Rod Mengham and John Kinsella, Vanishing Points (2004), Sean Bonney, Blade Pitch Control Unit (2005), Deborah Miranda, The Zen of La Llorona (2005), Lionel Fogarty, Dha’lan Djani Mitti (2007), Allison Adelle Hedge Coke, Blood Run (2007), Keston Sutherland, Hot White Andy (2007).
 
 
Some Interesting Critical / Auto- / Biographical Material
 
Ackroyd, P., TS. Eliot. (1994)
Akers, Geoff, Beating for Light: The Story of Isaac Rosenberg (2006)
Alldritt, Keith, David Jones: A Life (2003)
Barry, Peter, Poetry Wars: British Poetry of the 1970s and the Battle of Earls Court (2006).
Bentley, Paul, The Poetry of Ted Hughes: Language, Illusion and Beyond (1998)
Blunden, E., Undertones of War, (1928; 1982)
Bradbury, M. & McFarlane, J. (eds), Modernism: a Guide to European Literature1890-1930, (1991)
Broom, Sarah, Contemporary British and Irish Poetry (2005)
Brown, K. (ed), Rethinking Lawrence (1990)
Bush, R. , T S Eliot: The Modernist in History (1991)
Bush, R., T S Eliot, a Study in Character and Style, (1984)
Connors, Kathleen and Sally Bayley (eds), Eye Rhymes: Sylvia Plath's Art of the Visual (2007)
Cookson, Linda and Bryan Loughrey (eds), Poems, Philip Larkin (Critical Essays) (1989)
Cooper, John, The Cambridge Introduction to T.S.Eliot (2006)
Corcoran, Neil, Seamus Heaney (London: Faber, 1986)
Curtis, Tony, The Art of Seamus Heaney (Cardiff: Poetry Wales, 1994)
Dekker, George, Donald Davie and the Responsibilities of Literature (1993)
Eliot, T. S., The Waste Land: a Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts including the Annotations of Ezra Pound (ed. Valerie Eliot), (1971)
Ellmann, Maud, The Poetics of Impersonality: T.S.Eliot and Ezra Pound (1987)
Ellmann, Richard, Yeats, the Man and the Masks (1978)
Feinstein, Elaine, Ted Hughes: The Life of a Poet (2003)
Fenton, J., An Introduction to English Poetry (2002)
Gelpi, Albert, Living in Time: The Poetry of C. Day Lewis (1998)
Hall, Jason, David, Seamus Heaney: Poet, Critic, Translator (London: Palgrave, 2007)
Hipp, Daniel, The Poetry of Shell Shock (2005)
Howarth, Peter, British Poetry in the Age of Modernism (2006)
Howes, Marjorie and John Kelly (eds), The Cambridge Companion to W. B. Yeats (2006)
Kendall, Tim, Sylvia Plath: A Critical Study (2001)
Kojecky, R., T. S. Eliot’s Social Criticism (1971)
Leeming, D., Stephen Spender: A Life in Modernism (1999)
Lennard, J., The Poetry Handbook (1996)
Lucas, J., Ivor Gurney (2001)
Marsack, Robyn, The Cave of Making: Poetry of Louis MacNeice (1985)
The Modern Word (http://www.themodernword.com/)
Moody, David, The Cambridge Companion to T S Eliot (1994)
Morgan, Christopher, R.S.Thomas (2003)
Motion, Andrew, Philip Larkin: A Writer's Life (1994)
Nadel, Ira, The Cambridge Introduction to Ezra Pound (2007) and The Cambridge Companion to Ezra Pound (1999)
O’Brien, Eugene, Seamus Heaney: Searches for Answers (London: Pluto, 2003)
Osborne, Charles, W.H.Auden: The Life of a Poet (1980)
The Poetry Archive (http://www.poetryarchive.org/)
The Poetry Archives (http://www.emule.com/poetry/)
Plath, Sylvia, The Journals of Sylvia Plath, 1950-1962 (2001)
Ricks, C. , T. S. Eliot and Prejudice (1994)
Rowland, Antony, Holocaust Poetry: Awkward Poetics in the Work of Sylvia Plath, Geoffrey Hill, Tony Harrison and Ted Hughes (2005)
Scammell, William, Keith Douglas: A Study (1988)
Severin, Laura, Stevie Smith's Resistant Antics (1997)
Sharpe, Tone, W. H. Auden (2006)
Smith, Stan, The Cambridge Companion to W. H. Auden (2005)
Spalding, Frances, Stevie Smith: A Critical Biography (1989)
Stallworthy, J., Wilfred Owen,(1974)
Stanford, Peter, C Day-Lewis (2007)
Sutherland, John, Stephen Spender: The Authorized Biography (2005)
Tae, Trudi, Modernism, History and the First World War (1998)
Tamplin, R., T. S. Eliot (1988)
Tate, A. (ed), T. S. Eliot: the Man and his Work (1967)
Twentieth-Century Poetry in English (http://www.lit.kobe-u.ac.jp/~hishika/20c_poet.htm)
Tuohy, F., Yeats (1967)
Wainwright, Jeffrey, Acceptable Words: Essays on the poetry of Geoffrey Hill (2005)
Weatherhead, A.K., Stephen Spender and the Thirties(1975)
Wilson, J M., Isaac Rosenberg: The Making Of A Great War Poet: A New Life: The Making of a Great War Poet (2008)
Wilkinson, John, The Lyric Touch: Essays on the Poetry of Excess (2007)
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

ESSENTIAL READING

 

 

Week 1

 

 

Peter Jones, ed. Imagist Poetry (2002).

 

 

Week 2

 

 

Poems by Isaac Rosenberg (photocopies provided)

 

 

Week 3

 

 

Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons (1914)

 

T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land (1922),

 

William Carlos Williams, Spring and All (1923),

 

D.H. Lawrence, Birds, Beasts and Flowers (1923),

 

e.e. cummings, Tulips & Chimneys (1923),

 

Wallace Stevens, Harmonium (1923),

 

Marianne Moore, Observations (1924),

 

Langston Hughes, The Weary Blues (1926),

 

Hugh MacDiarmid, A Drunk Man Looks at a Thistle (1926),

 

W.B. Yeats, The Tower (1928),

 

Edith Sitwell, Gold Coast Customs (1929),

 

Ezra Pound, A Draft of XXX Cantos (1930)

 

 

Week 4

 

 

Poems by WH Auden (photocopies provided)

 

 

Week 5

 

 

Lynette Roberts, Gods with Stainless Ears (1951)

 

 

Week 6

 

 

Charles Olson, The Kingfishers (1949)

 

 

Week 7

 

 

Allen Ginsberg, Howl and Other Poems (1956).

 

 

Week 8

 

 

Margaret Atwood, Double Persephone (1961)

 

Sylvia Plath, Ariel (1965)

 

Wole Soyinka, Idanre and Other Poems (1967)

 

Geoffrey Hill, King Log (1968)

 

Ted Hughes, Crow (1970)

 

Denise Levertov, To Stay Alive (1971)

 

(Edward) Kamau Braithwaite, The Arrivants: A New World Trilogy (1973)

 

Seamus Heaney, North (1975)

 

Iain Sinclair, Suicide Bridge (1979)

 

Christopher Logue, War Music (1981)

 

Derek Walcott, Omeros (1990)

 

A. K. Ramanujan, Collected Poems (2010)

 

 

 

Week 9

 

 

Poems by J.H. Prynne (photocopies provided)

 

 

Week 10

 

 

Poems by the visiting poet of Week 10.

 

 

 

 

 

PRIMARY TEXTS FOR DEBATES & COURSEWORK

 

 

 

Poetry Wars 1

 

 

Georgian Poets

 

 

Rupert Brooke, 1914 & Other Poems (1915)

 

Siegfried Sassoon, Counter-Attack and Other Poems (1918)

 

Wilfred Owen, Poems (1920)

 

Edward Thomas, Collected Poems (1920)

 

Robert Graves, Over the Brazier (1923)

 

 

Modernist Poets

 

 

Wyndham Lewis, BLAST: The War Number (1915)

 

Ezra Pound, Homage to Sextus Propertius (1915)  

 

Richard Aldington, War and Love (1919)

 

W.B. Yeats, Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921)

 

Isaac Rosenberg, Poems from the Trenches (1922)

 

 

Anthologies

 

 

George Walter, ed., Penguin Book of First World War Poetry (2007),

 

 

Prose Memoirs

 

 

Siegfried Sasson, Memoirs of a Fox Hunting Man (1929)

 

Edmund Blunden, Undertones of War (1928)

 

Robert Graves, Goodbye to All That (1929)

 

Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms (1929)

 

T.E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1935) 

 

Wyndham Lewis, Blasting and Bombardiering (1937)

 

 

 

Poetry of the Thirties

 

 

W.H. Auden, Poems (1933), The Orators (1932), Look, Stranger! (1936), Spain (1937), David Gascoyne, Man’s Life Is This Meat (1936), Stevie Smith, A Good Time Was Had By All (1937), W.B. Yeats, Last Poems (1939), Louis MacNeice, Autumn Journal (1939), William Empson, The Gathering Storm (1940), Robin Skelton, ed. Poetry of the Thirties (1964), Edward B. Germain, ed. Surrealist Poetry in English (1993)

 

 

 

 

 

 

Neo-Romanticism

 

 

Charles Williams, ed. Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins (1930), Taliessin Through Logres (1938), Laura Riding, Collected Poems (1938), T.S. Eliot, Little Gidding (1945), Lynette Roberts, Gods with Stainless Ears (1951), Dylan Thomas, Collected Poems, 1934-1952 (1952), Naomi Mitchison, Cleansing of the Knife (1979), Robert Graves, The White Goddess (1948), David Jones, Anathemata (1952), R.S. Thomas, Song at the Year’s Turning (1955), Ted Hughes, Hawk in the Rain (1957), Geoffrey Hill, For the Unfallen (1959)

 

 

 

International Modern

 

 

H.D, Trilogy (1944-1946), Ezra Pound, Pisan Cantos (1946), Rock-Drill (1955), Drafts & Fragments of Cantos (1969), William Carlos Williams, Paterson (1948-1963), Pictures from Brueghel (1962), Louis Zukofsky, A (1928-1974), Marianne Moore, Collected Poems (1951), Charles Olson, Maximus Poems (1950-1970), Robert Lowell, Lord Weary’s Castle (1946), Elizabeth Bishop, North & South / A Cold Spring (1955), Basil Bunting, Poems: 1950 (1950), Briggflats (1966), Roy Fisher, City (1962),

 

 

 

The Movement

 

 

D. J. Enright, The Laughing Hyena and Other Poems (1953), Robert Graves and the Decline of Modernism (1960), Donald Davie, Brides of Reason (1955), A Winter Talent and Other Poems (1957), Events and Wisdoms (1964), Ezra Pound: Poet as Sculptor (1965), Essex Poems (1969), Under Briggflats: Poetry in Great Britain 1960-1988 (1989), Thom Gunn, Fighting Terms (1954), The Sense of Movement (1957), My Sad Captains (1961), Touch (1967), Jack Straw’s Castle (1976), Philip Larkin, The Less Deceived (1955), Whitsun Weddings (1964), High Windows (1974)

 

 

Key Anthologies

 

 

Robert Conquest, New Lines: an Anthology (1956), New Lines–II Anthology (1963),

 

 

 

The New American Poetry

 

 

Allen Ginsberg, Howl and Other Poems (1956), Robert Lowell, Life Studies (1959), Anne Sexton, To Bedlam and Part the Way Back (1960), Live or Die (1970), Frank O’Hara, Lunch Poems (1964), John Berryman, The Dream Songs (1964-1969), Elizabeth Bishop, Questions of Travel (1965), Geography III (1976), John Ashbery, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975), Charles Bukowski, Love is a Dog from Hell (1977)

 

 

Key Anthologies

 

 

Donald Allen, ed. The New American Poetry 1945-1960 (1960), A. Alvarez, The New Poetry (1966)

 

 

 

British Poetry Revival

 

 

Tom Raworth, The Relation Ship (1966), Edwin Morgan, The Second Life (1968), J.H. Prynne, The White Stones (1969), High Pink on Chrome (1975), Not-You (1993), Triodes (1999), Blue Slides At Rest (2003), Veronica Forrest-Thomson, Selected Poems (1999), Iain Sinclair, Lud Heat (1975), Suicide Bridge (1979), Douglas Oliver, The Diagram Poems (1979), Arrondissements (2003), Peter Riley, Distant Points (1983), Denise Riley, Dry Air (1985), John Wilkinson, Proud Flesh (1986), Rod Mengham, Unsung (2001), Ulli Freer, Speakbright Leap Password (2004), John Kinsella, Doppler Effect (2004)

 

 

 

Key Anthologies

 

 

Michael Horowitz, Children of Albion: Poetry of the Underground in (1969)

 

Andrew Crozier and Tim Longville, ed., A Various Art : Anthology (1987)

 

Iain Sinclair, ed., Conductors of Chaos (1996)

 

Rod Mengham, John Kinsella, Vanishing Points (2004)

 

 

 

CRITICAL / AUTO- / BIOGRAPHICAL MATERIAL

 

 

 

Ackroyd, P., TS. Eliot. (1994)

 

Akers, Geoff, Beating for Light: The Story of Isaac Rosenberg (2006)

 

Alldritt, Keith, David Jones: A Life (2003)

 

Barry, Peter, Poetry Wars: British Poetry of the 1970s and the Battle of

Earls Court
(2006).

 

Bentley, Paul, The Poetry of Ted Hughes: Language, Illusion and Beyond (1998)

 

Blunden, E., Undertones of War, (1928; 1982)

 

Bradbury, M. & McFarlane, J. (eds), Modernism: a Guide to European Literature1890-1930, (1991)

 

Broom, Sarah, Contemporary British and Irish Poetry (2005)

 

Brown, K. (ed), Rethinking Lawrence (1990)

 

Bush, R. , T S Eliot: The Modernist in History (1991)

 

Bush, R., T S Eliot, a Study in Character and Style, (1984)

 

Connors, Kathleen and Sally Bayley (eds), Eye Rhymes: Sylvia Plath's Art of the Visual (2007)

 

Cookson, Linda and Bryan Loughrey (eds), Poems, Philip Larkin (Critical Essays) (1989)

 

Cooper, John, The Cambridge Introduction to T.S.Eliot (2006)

 

Corcoran, Neil, Seamus Heaney (London: Faber, 1986)

 

Curtis, Tony, The Art of Seamus Heaney (Cardiff: Poetry Wales, 1994)

 

Dekker, George, Donald Davie and the Responsibilities of Literature (1993)

 

Eliot, T. S., The Waste Land: a Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts including the Annotations of Ezra Pound (ed. Valerie Eliot), (1971)

 

Ellmann, Maud, The Poetics of Impersonality: T.S.Eliot and Ezra Pound (1987)

 

Ellmann, Richard, Yeats, the Man and the Masks (1978)

 

Feinstein, Elaine, Ted Hughes: The Life of a Poet (2003)

 

Fenton, J.,  An Introduction to English Poetry (2002)

 

Gelpi, Albert, Living in Time: The Poetry of C. Day Lewis (1998)

 

Hall, Jason, David, Seamus Heaney: Poet, Critic, Translator ( London : Palgrave, 2007)

 

Hipp, Daniel, The Poetry of Shell Shock (2005)

 

Howarth, Peter, British Poetry in the Age of Modernism (2006)

 

Howes, Marjorie and John Kelly (eds), The Cambridge Companion to W. B. Yeats (2006)

 

Kendall, Tim, Sylvia Plath: A Critical Study (2001)

 

Kojecky, R., T. S. Eliot’s Social Criticism (1971)

 

Leeming, D., Stephen Spender: A Life in Modernism (1999)

 

Lennard, J., The Poetry Handbook  (1996)

 

Lucas, J., Ivor Gurney (2001)

 

Marsack, Robyn, The Cave of Making : Poetry of Louis MacNeice (1985)

 

The Modern Word (http://www.themodernword.com/)

 

Moody, David, The Cambridge Companion to T S Eliot (1994)

 

Morgan, Christopher, R.S.Thomas (2003)

 

Motion, Andrew, Philip Larkin: A Writer's Life (1994)

 

Nadel, Ira, The Cambridge Introduction to Ezra Pound (2007) and The Cambridge Companion to Ezra Pound (1999)

 

O’Brien, Eugene, Seamus Heaney: Searches for Answers ( London : Pluto, 2003)

 

Osborne, Charles, W.H.Auden: The Life of a Poet (1980)

 

The Poetry Archive (http://www.poetryarchive.org/)

 

The Poetry Archives (http://www.emule.com/poetry/)

 

Plath, Sylvia, The Journals of Sylvia Plath, 1950-1962 (2001)

 

Ricks, C. , T. S. Eliot and Prejudice (1994)

 

Rowland, Antony , Holocaust Poetry: Awkward Poetics in the Work of Sylvia Plath, Geoffrey Hill, Tony Harrison and Ted Hughes (2005)

 

Scammell, William, Keith Douglas: A Study (1988)

 

Severin, Laura, Stevie Smith's Resistant Antics (1997)

 

Sharpe, Tone, W. H. Auden (2006)

 

Smith, Stan, The Cambridge Companion to W. H. Auden (2005)

 

Spalding, , Stevie Smith: A Critical Biography (1989)

 

Stallworthy, J., Wilfred Owen,(1974)

 

Stanford, Peter, C Day-Lewis (2007)

 

Sutherland, John, Stephen Spender: The Authorized Biography (2005)

 

Tae, Trudi,  Modernism, History and the First World War (1998)

 

Tamplin, R., T. S. Eliot (1988)

 

Tate, A. (ed), T. S. Eliot: the Man and his Work (1967)

 

Twentieth-Century Poetry in English (http://www.lit.kobe-u.ac.jp/~hishika/20c_poet.htm)

 

Tuohy, F., Yeats (1967)

 

Wainwright, Jeffrey, Acceptable Words: Essays on the poetry of Geoffrey Hill (2005)

 

Weatherhead, A.K., Stephen Spender and the Thirties(1975)

 

Wilson , J M., Isaac Rosenberg: The Making Of A Great War Poet: A New Life: The Making of a Great War Poet (2008)

 

Wilkinson, John, The Lyric Touch: Essays on the Poetry of Excess (2007)

 

Last Updated

5 July 2010 JG