This course has two (perhaps contradictory) aims. We will, on one hand, survey the various poetries produced and read in the United States during the first half of the twentieth century. At the same time, we will work in a sustained way to understand the difficult and complex projects of some poets whose influence during this period and after was especially important. To achieve both goals at once, we will vary our methods. On some days (indeed, during some weeks) we will read the works of individual poets at length and in detail. On others, we might more cursorily treat a few poems by a group of poets. My hope is that this combination will help us both to get some way up the literary-historical peaks of Frost, Pound, Eliot, and Stevens even as we sketch in the important, if less well-known, topographies of Marianne Moore, Mina Loy, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, Sterling Brown, Claude McKay, Hart Crane, Muriel Rukeyser, Edwin Rolfe, and others.

The textbook for the class is the Oxford Anthology of Modern American Poetry. Main course requirements are two papers (5-7 pages each), a midterm, and a final exam.