American Poetry from 1900-1950

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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