This course will attempt to strike a balance between detailed study of the “central” or dominant poetic careers in twentieth-century Britain and Ireland and a survey of some other important poetic voices and visions that complement and compete with them. For our purposes (this time around - the canon is by no means fixed), we will define the mainstream by five major poets: W.B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden, Philip Larkin, and Seamus Heaney. Three of these poets won the Nobel Prize and all five have achieved that level of renown and influence we recognize by forming adjectival versions of their names (can we imagine calling the dour gray rationed dullness of postwar Britain anything other than Larkinesque?). Their poems have been praised, attacked, imitated, parodied, memorized, folded, spindled, and mutilated by all kinds of other poets, both among their contemporaries and in later generations. Some of those kinds include:

• radically experimental poets (Basil Bunting, Hugh MacDiarmid, J.H. Prynne, Peter Riley, Veronica Forrest-Thompson)
• regional and political poets (Tony Harrison, Ted Hughes, Eric Mottram, R.H. Thomas, W.S. Graham)
• minority and postcolonial poets (Derek Walcott, Edward Kamau Braithwaite, David Dabydeen)
• women poets (Carol Ann Duffy, Eavan Boland, Gillian Clarke, Jackie Kay).

We will read a variety of poems by some of these poets with an eye not only to their relationship with the mainstream but also in order to get a sense of how they enrich and complicate and renew British and Irish poetry.

The reading list will include:
Yeats, Selected Poems and Two Plays
Eliot, Four Quartets
Auden, The English Auden
Larkin, Collected Poems
Heaney, Selected Poems
A xerox reader will include selections by MacDiarmid, Riley, Harrison, Hughes, Thomas, Graham, Walcott, Braithwaite, Dabydeen, Duffy, Boland, Clarke, Kay, and others.

Written work: two short essays, a midterm exam and a final exam.

Prerequisite: English 200 or a college course in poetry or permission of the instructor.