Postgraduate Course: Poet-Critics: the Style of Modern Poetry (ENLI11052)
Course Outline
| School | School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures |
College | College of Humanities and Social Science |
| Credit level (Normal year taken) | SCQF Level 11 (Postgraduate) |
Availability | Not available to visiting students |
| SCQF Credits | 20 |
ECTS Credits | 10 |
| Summary | This course re-examines the aesthetics of canonical modern poets, including W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams and W. H. Auden. Most of the writers it explores did not just write influential verse, but also criticism. In their essays, letters, books and manifestoes, some of them rank amongst the most influential contributors to poetics in the twentieth-century. With a central interest in asking how modern poems work, we will read their poetry alongside and against their discursive ideas about art. We will engage in close readings of poems, asking how their manifestoes are manifested in their art. We will be interested in potential differences between the style of poems and discursive arguments about that style. And we will chart the various interconnections and differences between these poets, building-up a sense of their aesthetic contexts.
This is a recommended option for Creative Writing students. |
| Course description |
WEEK 1 INTRODUCTION
WEEK 2 W.B. YEATS
WEEK 3 T.S. ELIOT
WEEK 4 EZRA POUND
WEEK 5 ROBERT FROST
WEEK 6 WALLACE STEVENS
WEEK 7 WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS
WEEK 8 MARIANNE MOORE
WEEK 9 W.H. AUDEN
WEEK 10 LOUIS MACNEICE
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Entry Requirements (not applicable to Visiting Students)
| Pre-requisites |
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Co-requisites | |
| Prohibited Combinations | |
Other requirements | None |
| Additional Costs | Essential course texts. |
Course Delivery Information
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| Academic year 2015/16, Not available to visiting students (SS1)
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Quota: 15 |
| Course Start |
Semester 1 |
Timetable |
Timetable |
| Learning and Teaching activities (Further Info) |
Please contact the School directly for a breakdown of Learning and Teaching Activities |
| Assessment (Further Info) |
Please contact the School directly for a breakdown of Assessment Methods
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| Additional Information (Assessment) |
1 essay of 4,000 words |
| Feedback |
Not entered |
| No Exam Information |
Learning Outcomes
Students successfully completing the course will develop:
- a familiarity with both the poetic and the critical writings of a range of influential 20th century poets
- an ability to assess the relationship between the critical thinking of the writers concerned and their own poetic output
- an understanding of the aesthetic and intellectual contexts in which these writers worked, their interconnections and differences
- an awareness of the significance of these writers' work for the development of critical thinking about poetry in the twentieth and twenty first centuries
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Reading List
Core Texts:
Auden, W. H., Selected Poems. Rev ed. London: Faber, 2010.
Eliot, T. S., Collected Poems 1909-1962. London: Faber, 1974.
Frost, Robert, The Poetry of Robert Frost. London: Vintage, 2001.
MacNeice, Louis, Selected Poems. London: Faber, 2007.
Moore, Marianne, The Poems of Marianne Moore. New York: Penguin, 2005.
Pound, Ezra, Selected Poems and Translations 1908-1969. London: Faber, 2011.
Stevens, Wallace. Selected Poems. New York: Knopf, 2009.
Williams, William Carlos. Selected Poems. London: Penguin, 2000.
Yeats, W. B. Yeats, W. B. Yeats¿s Poetry, Drama and Prose. James Pethica (ed). Norton Critical Ed. New York: Norton, 2001.
Recommended Reading:
Auden, W. H., The Dyer¿s Hand and Other Essays (Faber and Faber, 1975).
______, Collected Poems (Faber and Faber. 2004).
Cook, Jon (ed). Poetry in Theory: An Anthology 1900-2000 (London: Blackwell. 2004).
Eliot, T. S., Selected Prose of T S. Eliot (Faber and Faber, 1975).
Frost, Robert, Frost: Collected Poems, Prose, and Plays (Library of America, 1995).
MacNeice, Louis, Modern Poetry, Oxford: OUP, 1938.
______, The Poetry of W.B. Yeats (1941), 2nd ed., London: Faber, 1967.
______, Selected Literary Criticism of Louis MacNeice. Oxford: Clarendon, 1987.
______, Selected Prose of Louis MacNeice. Oxford: Clarendon, 1993.
Moore, Marianne, The Complete Prose (Faber and Faber, 1987).
______, The Selected Letters (Alfred A. Knopf, 1997).
Pound, Ezra, Literary Essays of Ezra Pound (New Directions, 1968).
______, The Cantos of Ezra Pound (W. W. Norton & Co Ltd, 1996).
______, Pound: Poems and Translations (Library of America, 2003).
Ramazani, Jahan, Richard Ellmann, and Robert O¿Clair (eds.), The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry (3rd ed). New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2003.
Stevens, Wallace. Stevens: Collected Poetry and Prose (Library of America, 1997).
______, The Letters of Wallace Steven's (University of California Press, 1997).
Williams, W. C.. Paterson (New Directions, 1963).
______, Imaginations: Five Experimental Prose Pieces (New Directions, 1971).
______, Collected Poems, Vols. I and 2 (Carcanet, 2000).
Yeats, W. B., The Letters of W.B. Yeats, ed. Allan Wade (New York: Macmillan, 1955).
______, Essays and Introductions (Macmillan, 1962).
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Additional Information
| Graduate Attributes and Skills |
Not entered |
| Keywords | PC |
Contacts
| Course organiser | Dr Alan Gillis
Tel: (0131 6)50 3050
Email: |
Course secretary | Miss Kara Mccormack
Tel: (0131 6)50 3030
Email: |
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