Mar 29, 2024  
2018-2019 Catalogue 
    
2018-2019 Catalogue [ARCHIVED CATALOG]

ENGL 23012 - Poetry Since World War II

Course Credit: 1
(CMLT)
POETRY SINCE WORLD WAR II During his acceptance speech for the 1970 National Book Award for Poetry, Robert Lowell characterized the state of American poetry as involving a schism between the raw and the cooked, a division between poets (and readers of poetry) who expected new poetry to follow the fixed forms of the past, and those who thought this new poetry should be free. A major focus of this course on American, British and other English-speaking poetries in the years after World War II will be to consider this tension, looking at the early fractures between the New Critics and the Beats, the rise of organic verse in the 1960s, the Neo-formalist poetry of the 1980s, and the rise of rap-connected poetry in the 1990s. We will also explore how these spats within poetry might reflect wider cultural dynamics, be they ones influenced by the Cold War, by mass media, or by changing perspectives on what constitutes artistic tradition and authority. We will also explore the boundaries of the genre, looking at prose-poetry, spoken word poetry, song and rap lyrics as well as the presence of poetry in advertising and film. [AH]