English 408: American Poetry Dr. John Edward Martin Spring 2008 This is a course for people who love (or want to love) poetry! You will read poetry, hear poetry, and see poetry performed. You’ll analyze poems, research & write about poets, and you may well write a verse or two yourself (if the Muse strikes). The goal of the course is to give you the full experience of American poetry as it has grown and evolved from the meditative religious verses of the Puritans, to the rapturous lyrics of the Romantics, the avant-garde experiments of the Modernists to the deeply personal & political poems of the 1960s, and even to the powerful linguistic performances of today’s slam poets. You needn’t have a background in American literature, but you should come prepared to read closely (and aloud), think critically, and engage in a spirited discussion of the language, ideas, and effects of great poetry. Texts: The Oxford Book of American Poetry. Ed. David Lehman. ISBN: 9780195162516 The American Heritage Dictionary: 4^thEd. ISBN: 0440237017 E-reserve essays: Emerson, “The Poet”; Poe, “The Philosophy of Composition”; Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent”; Olson, “Projective Verse”; Rich, “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-vision”; others Films: “Sylvia,” “Slam Nation: The Sport of Spoken Word”

Week 1: Colonial Poets

Bradstreet, Taylor, Freneau, Wheatley

Week 2: Early American Poets

The “Fireside Poets”: Bryant, Longfellow, Whittier, J. R. Lowell

Transcendental & Gothic: Emerson , Poe, Melville

e-Reserve: Emerson, “The Poet”; Poe “The Philosophy of Composition”

Week 3: Whitman & Dickinson

Whitman: “Song of Myself,” “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” “I Saw in Louisiana a Live Oak Growing,” “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,” “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” “A Noiseless Patient Spider”

Dickinson: all in the book

Week 4: Modern Voices

Masters, Robinson, Stephen Crane

J.W. Johnson, Dunbar, Grimke

Frost, A. Lowell, Stein

e-Reserve: Frost, “The Figure a Poem Makes”; Lowell, “Preface to Some Imagist Poems”

Week 5: “High” Modernism

Stevens, Pound, Eliot, H.D., Moore

e-Reserve: Eliot, “Tradition & the Individual Talent”

Week 6: Other Modernisms

Williams, Cummings, Millay, Hart Crane

Harlem Renaissance: McKay, Bessie Smith, Toomer, Hughes, Cullen

Fugitive Poets: Ransom, Tate, Warren

e-Reserve: Williams, “The Poem as a Field of Action”; Hughes, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain”

Week 7: Depression and WWII

Auden, Roethke, Bishop

Jarrell, Wilbur, Ammons

Robert Johnson, Hayden, Brooks

e-Reserve: Jarrell, “The Obscurity of the Poet”; Brooks, “The New Black”

Week 8: Confessionalism (1950s & ‘60s)

R. Lowell, Berryman, Snodgrass

Sexton, Plath, Rich

e-Reserve: Rich, “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-vision”

Film: “Sylvia”

Week 9: The “New American Poetry” (1950s-1970s)

San Francisco Renaissance: Rexroth, Spicer, Ginsberg, Snyder

Black Mountain Poets: Olson, Duncan, Creeley, Levertov

The New York School: Koch, O’Hara, Ashbery

e-Reserve: Rexroth, “Disengagement: The Art of the Beat Generation”; Olson, “Projective Verse”

Week 10: Contemporary Voices

Levine, Simic, Pinsky, Collins

Olds, Gluck, Dove, Rios

E-reserve: Pinsky, “Responsibilities of the Poet”

Recording: Dylan, “Desolation Row”

Film: “Slam Nation: The Sport of Spoken Word”