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English 367a |
J. Ransom |
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T 7:30-10 |
HU III |
Central to the work of each of these three giants of American poetry during the first half of the Twentieth Century was a continuation of the project inherited from Walt Whitman: to give voice to the poetry inherent in life as it is lived within these United States. This was partly a question of pursuing American themes and largely a search for formal structures capable of giving to the English language a properly American voice. For each of these poets, this became a matter of intensely local engagement, attending to the particulars of place in both urban and rural settings, and to the detail of human lives as and where the people live. This seminar will trace the importance of the local, both with respect to places and to the people who inhabit them, in the work of each of our three poets, with special attention to their individual and collective search for forms adequate to the task of giving voice to the poetry of American life. We will be attentive to the ways in which each poet's work is aware of the work of the other two, constituting a kind of conversation about poetry in the United States from the years before the First World War well into the Cold War era. We will follow the intertwining work of our three poets in chronological fashion, beginning with the important early poems from the period from 1915 through the 1920's, moving on to the decade of economic depression and social unrest in the 1930's, World War II and its aftermath in the 1940's, and concluding with the major achievements of the 1950's. Throughout the semester, our primary focus will be on the close collective reading of individual poems.
This course will be conducted as a true seminar, with each student expected to take her or his share of the responsibility for the conduct of our class meetings. Each student will write three 6-8 page papers at roughly even intervals over the course of the semester, each of which will involve close analysis of a specific poem or set of poems assigned for a given seminar meeting. Students will be expected to play an especially active role in initiating discussions at the seminar meetings devoted to the texts on which they have written. Thus, each student will undertake some sort of formal (that is to say, prepared) presentation for three different seminar meetings over the course of the semester. There will be a final exam at the end of the term, covering the work of the entire semester.
This seminar has the standard English departmental prerequisite for 300-level courses of at least two courses in English at the 200-level and is recommended for juniors and seniors only. Our primary texts will include: Robert Frost, The Poetry of Robert Frost; Wallace Stevens, The Palm at the End of the Mind; William Carlos Williams, Selected Poems and Paterson.
Enrollment is limited to 15