This course explores a range of British poetry of the twentieth century. We'll look intensively at the work of major poets such as W.B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot, and W.H. Auden, while also exploring a number of intersecting poetic communities and traditions. We'll begin with some poets who bridge the Victorian and Modern periods, such as Thomas Hardy, Gerard Manley Hopkins, A.E. Housman and Charlotte Mew, turning next to the furious lyric outpourings of World War I poets, including Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, Isaac Rosenberg and Rupert Brooke. In reading works (poetry but also perhaps Virginia Woolf's lyrical novel The Waves) that are generally categorized as examples of "Modernism," we'll seek to define this complicated term and significant literary period, studying what forces produced it, and what Modernism, as a comprehensive but fragmented movement, itself produced and influenced. The final part of the course will look at a diverse sampling of poets from the latter half of the twentieth-century, including the work of contemporary authors. These poets both question and extend the century's poetic probing of such issues as nationalism, class, and sexuality.

The course will attend closely to the pleasures of this often formally challenging poetry, making use of the many recordings we have of these poets reading their work. We'll seek together not only to understand self-consciously difficult poems, but also to understand the myriad purposes, for so many writers, of obscurity itself. We'll also address the controversies a number of poets continue to generate, exploring such issues as anti-Semitism in the work of T.S. Eliot and misogyny in the work of Philip Larkin.

Prerequisite: English 199; a 200-level literature course; or permission of the instructor. Requirements: active participation in class discussion, several medium-length papers, and a final exam.