–American Poetry From 1900-1950 Essay, Research Paper
Cary Nelson
Except as noted, all poems are in Anthology
of Modern American Poetry (Oxford). All authors have web sites on MAPS. Before each
class send a 1-2 page email to everyone commentating on the poetry and the MAPS analyses.
This course combines canonical and noncanonical poetry; it includes both weeks focused on
individual poets and weeks devoted to broad topics that compare and contrast the work of
different poets.
Week One: Cary
Nelson, Repression and Recovery: Modern American Poetry and the Politics of Cultural
Memory, 1910-1945
Week Two: ROBERT FROST:
"Mending Wall," "The Road Not Taken," "The Hill Wife,"
"The Witch of Coos," "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" and the
other poems from Anthology of Modern American Poetry.
Week Three: GENDER AND
MODERNITY, Part 1:
Ezra Pound, "Portrait d’une Femme,"
"The River Merchant’s Wife," Alternative Translations of "A River
Merchant’s Wife" (MAPS), "Pound on Gender (MAPS)
T. S. Eliot, "Portrait of a Lady" (MAPS)
William Carlos Williams, "The Young
Housewife"
Edwin Arlington Robinson, "The Tree in
Pamela’s Garden"
John Crowe Ransom, "Bells for John
Whiteside’s Daughter," "Dead Boy"
Claude McKay, "The Harlem Dancer"
Langston Hughes, "To the Dark
Mercedes of `El Palacio de Amor’"
Georgia Douglas Johnson,
""The Heart of a Woman," "Motherhood"
Alice Dunbar-Nelson, "I Sit and Sew"
Amy Lowell, "The Weather-Cock
Points South," "Madonna of the Evening Flowers," "The Sisters"
Genevieve Taggard, "Everyday
Alchemy," "With Child"
Lucia Trent, "Breed, Women
Breed"
Dorothy Parker, "Unfortunate
Coincidence," "One Perfect Rose"
Louise Bogan,
"Cassandra," "Women," "Medusa"
Week Four: GENDER AND
MODERNITY, Part 2:
Countee Cullen,
"Tableau"
Hart Crane, "Episode of
Hands"
H. D., "Eurydice,"
"Helen"
Edna St. Vincent Millay, "I Being Born a
Woman and Distressed," "Love is Not Blind," "Well, I Have Lost
You," "Sonnets from an Ungrafted Tree"
Marianne Moore,
"Marriage"
Mina Loy, "Songs to
Johannes"
Gertrude Stein, "Patriarchal
Poetry"
Week Five: T. S. ELIOT:
"The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," "Gerontion," The Waste Land,
"The Hollow Men," "Journey of the Magi," "Burnt Norton"
Week Six: WALLACE STEVENS:
"Sea Surface Full of Clouds," ""Thirteen Ways of Looking at a
Blackbird," "Anecdote of the Jar," "The Snow Man," "Peter
Quince at the Clavier," "Sunday Morning," "Mozart, 1935,"
"The Plain Sense of Things," "Of Mere Being," and the other poems in Anthology
of Modern American Poetry.
Week Seven: WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS:
"Portrait of a Lady," "The Great Figure," "Spring and All,"
"To Elsie," "The Red Wheelbarrow," "Young Sycamore," The
Descent of Winter, "Proletarian Portrait," "The Yachts,"
"Landscape with the Fall of Icarus"
Week Eight: RACE AND
MODERNITY, Part 1:
Paul Laurence Dunbar, "We Wear the Mask"
Carl Sandburg,
"Nigger," "Man the Man-Hunter," "Elizabeth Umpstead"
Vachel Lindsay, "The
Congo"
James Weldon Johnson, "The
White Witch"
Jean Toomer, "Portrait in
Georgia"
Anne Spencer, "White
Things"
Langston Hughes, "White Shadows"
Angelina Weld Grimke,
"Tenebris," "The Black Finger," "Fragment"
Claude McKay, "The White
City," "Lynching," "Outcast," "Mulatto," "To the
White Fiends"
Hart Crane, "Black
Tambourine"
Week Nine: RACE AND
MODERNITY, Part 2:
Kay Boyle, "A Communication
to Nancy Cunard"
Langston Hughes, "The Negro Speaks of
Rivers," "Negro," Mulatto," "The Negro Artist and the Racial
Mountain" (MAPS)
John Beecher, "Beaufort Tides"
Sterling A. Brown, "Scotty Has His Say,"
"Slim in Atlanta," "Slim in Hell," "Old Lem,"
"Sharecroppers," "Choices"
Sol Funaroff, "Goin Mah Own
Road"
Lucia Trent, "Black Men"
V. J. Jerome, "A Negro Mother
to Her Child"
Angel Island Poems
Melvin B. Tolson, "Dark
Symphony"
Week Ten: LANGSTON HUGHES:
"The Weary Blues," "The Cat and the Saxophone," "Justice,"
"Fire," "Three Songs about Lynching," "Goodbye Christ,"
"Park Bench," "The Bitter River," "Ku Klux,"
"Shakespeare in Harlem," "Madam and the Phone Bill,"
"Harlem," "The Backlash Blues"
Week Eleven: POETRY,
POLITICS, AND THE 1030s:
Background reading: "About
the Great Depression": MAPS
John Beecher, "Report to the
Stockholders"
Edwin Rolfe, "Asbestos,"
"Season of Death"
Joseph Kalar,
"Papermill"
Genevieve Taggard, "Up Street–Depression
Summer," Mill Town"
Langston Hughes, "Come to the
Waldorf-Astoria," "Let America Be America Again," "Ballad of
Roosevelt"
Richard Wright, "We of the
Streets"
Sol Funaroff, "The Man at the
Factory Gates"
Louis Zukofsky,
"Mantis"
Kenneth Fearing,
"Dirge," "Denoument,"
Tillie Olsen, " I Want You
Women Up North to Know"
Week Twelve: MURIEL RUKEYSER:
"The Book of the Dead," "The Minotaur," "To be a Jew in the
Twentieth Century," "Rite"
Week Thirteen: HART CRANE:
"October-November," "Chaplinesque," "Porphyro in Akron,"
"Voyages," "The Mango Tree," from The Bridge: "Proem: to
Brooklyn Bridge," "Ave Maria," "The River," "Cape
Hatteras," "Atlantis"
Week Fourteen: MARIANNE MOORE:
"Poetry," "The Fish," "Sojourn in the Whale," "A
Grave," "Silence," "An Octopus," "No Swan So Fine,"
"The Pangolin," "The Paper Nautilus," "Spenser’s Ireland"
Week Fifteen: EZRA POUND:
"A Pact," "In a Station of the Metro," from The Cantos:
"I, IX, XLV, LXXXI, CXVI, "Notes." Please be sure to read all entries on
MAPS, including "On Pound and Malatesta." Take the photo tour of Malatesta’s Tempio
on MAPS.
Week Sixteen: WORLD WAR II:
Background reading: "About
World War II": MAPS
Randall Jarrell, "The Death
of the Ball Turret Gunner," "A Front," "Losses," "Second Air
Force," "Protocols"
Joy Davidman, "For the
Nazis"
Edna St. Vincent Millay, "I
Forgot for a Moment"
Japanese American Concentration
Camp Haiku
Edwin Rolfe, "First Love" (Background:
"About the Spanish Civil War," MAPS)
Robinson Jeffers,
"Fantasy"
Thomas McGrath, "Crash
Report"
Gwendolyn Brooks, "Gay Chaps
at the Bar"
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