ENGL 310 - Lecture 22 - W. H. Auden

This lecture presents the early poetry of W.H. Auden. In “From the Very First Coming Down,” Auden’s relationship to the reader is considered, as well as the role of economy, truth, and morality in his poetics. The political Auden is examined in “Spain” and “September 1, 1939,” along with his later practice of revising controversial poems. Finally, his interest in traditional forms, his vision of love, and his characteristic perspectivism, are explored in “This Lunar Beauty” and “As I Walked Out One Evening.”

ENGL 310 - Lecture 21 - Wallace Stevens (cont.)

The late poetry of Wallace Stevens is presented and analyzed. Stevens’s conception of the poet as reader and the world as a text to be read and translated is considered in “Large Red Man Reading” and “The Poem that Took the Place of a Mountain.” The poet’s preoccupation with natural cycles and sensory experience is exhibited in “The Plain Sense of Things.” Finally, “A Primitive Like an Orb” is interpreted as Stevens’s final vision of ceaseless change and transition in the world, in which the poet’s verbal play participates.

ENGL 310 - Lecture 20 - Wallace Stevens (cont.)

Marie Borroff guest-lectures on Wallace Stevens’s late seasonal poem, “The Auroras of Autumn.” The poem is considered sequentially, beginning with Stevens’s mythology of the three serpents in section one and concluding with an examination of the beauty of the world, as Stevens conceives of it, in sections eight through ten. The poet’s optimism and fundamental belief in the power of imagination to divest death of its power is repeatedly demonstrated.

ENGL 310 - Lecture 19 - Wallace Stevens

Wallace Stevens is considered as an unapologetically Romantic poet of imagination. His search for meaning in a universe without religion in “Sunday Morning” is likened to Crane’s energetic quest for meaning and symbol. In “The Poems of Our Climate,” Stevens’s desire to reduce poetry to essential terms, and then his countering resistance to this impulse, are explored. Finally, “The Man on the Dump” is considered as a typically Stevensian search for truth in specifically linguistic terms.

ENGL 310 - Lecture 18 - Marianne Moore (cont.)

The previous lecture’s examination of “The Octopus” is continued, focusing on Moore’s innovative use of quotation. The poem “Silence” is read in connection with nineteenth-century poetry and the poet’s personal reticence. Selections from Elizabeth Bishop’s personal memoir of Moore are presented with special attention to Moore’s relationships with other modernists and male poets in particular.

ENGL 310 - Lecture 17 - Marianne Moore

The poetry of Marianne Moore is considered alongside its preoccupations with gender, American culture, and nature. The poem “A Grave” is presented as characteristic of the prose rhythms and discursive manner of Moore’s poems, including their use of expository language without meter or rhyme. The poem “England” is read as a defense of American culture, in opposition to the Eurocentricism of Eliot, Pound, and other modernists.

ENGL 310 - Lecture 16 - William Carlos Williams

The poetry of William Carlos Williams is presented and analyzed. His use of enjambment to surprise and transform is examined in order to highlight Williams’s interest in depicting creative and cognitive processes. The Imagist qualities of much of Williams’s poetry is considered alongside his engagement with modernist art–particularly the preoccupation of Duchamps and Cubist painters with the process of representing sensual perception.

ENGL 310 - Lecture 15 - Langston Hughes

The poetry of Langston Hughes is considered as a representation of the African-American experience. The distinctive concerns of Hughes’s poetic project are juxtaposed with the works of other modernists, such as Pound, Eliot, Frost, and Stevens.  Hughes’s interest in and innovative use of musical forms, such as blues and jazz, is explored with particular attention to their role in African-American culture, as well as their use by Hughes to forge an alternative to dominant modes of expression within the modernist canon.

ENGL 310 - Lecture 14 - Hart Crane (cont.)

Hart Crane’s masterwork The Bridge is positioned as a response to the modernist aesthetics of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. The visionary and specifically American aspects of the epic are stressed. Crane’s interest in myth and symbol, his inclusion and treatment of marginal figures, and his refiguring of the American hero are considered alongside his unique perspective on the role of imagination in the creation and shaping of history.

ENGL 310 - Lecture 13 - Hart Crane

The early poetry of Hart Crane is presented and analyzed. Crane’s self-characterization as a visionary, Romantic, and erotic poet, as well as the unique nature of his poetic project are considered as responses to Eliot’s Waste Land and in particular the section “Death by Water.” The poems “Legend,” “Voyages,” and “At Melville’s Tomb” are read with particular attention to Crane’s idiosyncratic use of language and neologism.  

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