Syllabus–American Poetry From 1900-1950 Essay, Research Paper

Cary Nelson

Except as noted, all poems are in Anthology

of Modern American Poetry (Oxford). All authors have web sites on MAPS. Before each

class send a 1-2 page email to everyone commentating on the poetry and the MAPS analyses.

This course combines canonical and noncanonical poetry; it includes both weeks focused on

individual poets and weeks devoted to broad topics that compare and contrast the work of

different poets.

Week One: Cary

Nelson, Repression and Recovery: Modern American Poetry and the Politics of Cultural

Memory, 1910-1945

Week Two: ROBERT FROST:

"Mending Wall," "The Road Not Taken," "The Hill Wife,"

"The Witch of Coos," "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" and the

other poems from Anthology of Modern American Poetry.

Week Three: GENDER AND

MODERNITY, Part 1:

Ezra Pound, "Portrait d’une Femme,"

"The River Merchant’s Wife," Alternative Translations of "A River

Merchant’s Wife" (MAPS), "Pound on Gender (MAPS)

T. S. Eliot, "Portrait of a Lady" (MAPS)

William Carlos Williams, "The Young

Housewife"

Edwin Arlington Robinson, "The Tree in

Pamela’s Garden"

John Crowe Ransom, "Bells for John

Whiteside’s Daughter," "Dead Boy"

Claude McKay, "The Harlem Dancer"

Langston Hughes, "To the Dark

Mercedes of `El Palacio de Amor’"

Georgia Douglas Johnson,

""The Heart of a Woman," "Motherhood"

Alice Dunbar-Nelson, "I Sit and Sew"

Amy Lowell, "The Weather-Cock

Points South," "Madonna of the Evening Flowers," "The Sisters"

Genevieve Taggard, "Everyday

Alchemy," "With Child"

Lucia Trent, "Breed, Women

Breed"

Dorothy Parker, "Unfortunate

Coincidence," "One Perfect Rose"

Louise Bogan,

"Cassandra," "Women," "Medusa"

Week Four: GENDER AND

MODERNITY, Part 2:

Countee Cullen,

"Tableau"

Hart Crane, "Episode of

Hands"

H. D., "Eurydice,"

"Helen"

Edna St. Vincent Millay, "I Being Born a

Woman and Distressed," "Love is Not Blind," "Well, I Have Lost

You," "Sonnets from an Ungrafted Tree"

Marianne Moore,

"Marriage"

Mina Loy, "Songs to

Johannes"

Gertrude Stein, "Patriarchal

Poetry"

Week Five: T. S. ELIOT:

"The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," "Gerontion," The Waste Land,

"The Hollow Men," "Journey of the Magi," "Burnt Norton"

Week Six: WALLACE STEVENS:

"Sea Surface Full of Clouds," ""Thirteen Ways of Looking at a

Blackbird," "Anecdote of the Jar," "The Snow Man," "Peter

Quince at the Clavier," "Sunday Morning," "Mozart, 1935,"

"The Plain Sense of Things," "Of Mere Being," and the other poems in Anthology

of Modern American Poetry.

Week Seven: WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS:

"Portrait of a Lady," "The Great Figure," "Spring and All,"

"To Elsie," "The Red Wheelbarrow," "Young Sycamore," The

Descent of Winter, "Proletarian Portrait," "The Yachts,"

"Landscape with the Fall of Icarus"

Week Eight: RACE AND

MODERNITY, Part 1:

Paul Laurence Dunbar, "We Wear the Mask"

Carl Sandburg,

"Nigger," "Man the Man-Hunter," "Elizabeth Umpstead"

Vachel Lindsay, "The

Congo"

James Weldon Johnson, "The

White Witch"

Jean Toomer, "Portrait in

Georgia"

Anne Spencer, "White

Things"

Langston Hughes, "White Shadows"

Angelina Weld Grimke,

"Tenebris," "The Black Finger," "Fragment"

Claude McKay, "The White

City," "Lynching," "Outcast," "Mulatto," "To the

White Fiends"

Hart Crane, "Black

Tambourine"

Week Nine: RACE AND

MODERNITY, Part 2:

Kay Boyle, "A Communication

to Nancy Cunard"

Langston Hughes, "The Negro Speaks of

Rivers," "Negro," Mulatto," "The Negro Artist and the Racial

Mountain" (MAPS)

John Beecher, "Beaufort Tides"

Sterling A. Brown, "Scotty Has His Say,"

"Slim in Atlanta," "Slim in Hell," "Old Lem,"

"Sharecroppers," "Choices"

Sol Funaroff, "Goin Mah Own

Road"

Lucia Trent, "Black Men"

V. J. Jerome, "A Negro Mother

to Her Child"

Angel Island Poems

Melvin B. Tolson, "Dark

Symphony"

Week Ten: LANGSTON HUGHES:

"The Weary Blues," "The Cat and the Saxophone," "Justice,"

"Fire," "Three Songs about Lynching," "Goodbye Christ,"

"Park Bench," "The Bitter River," "Ku Klux,"

"Shakespeare in Harlem," "Madam and the Phone Bill,"

"Harlem," "The Backlash Blues"

Week Eleven: POETRY,

POLITICS, AND THE 1030s:

Background reading: "About

the Great Depression": MAPS

John Beecher, "Report to the

Stockholders"

Edwin Rolfe, "Asbestos,"

"Season of Death"

Joseph Kalar,

"Papermill"

Genevieve Taggard, "Up Street–Depression

Summer," Mill Town"

Langston Hughes, "Come to the

Waldorf-Astoria," "Let America Be America Again," "Ballad of

Roosevelt"

Richard Wright, "We of the

Streets"

Sol Funaroff, "The Man at the

Factory Gates"

Louis Zukofsky,

"Mantis"

Kenneth Fearing,

"Dirge," "Denoument,"

Tillie Olsen, " I Want You

Women Up North to Know"

Week Twelve: MURIEL RUKEYSER:

"The Book of the Dead," "The Minotaur," "To be a Jew in the

Twentieth Century," "Rite"

Week Thirteen: HART CRANE:

"October-November," "Chaplinesque," "Porphyro in Akron,"

"Voyages," "The Mango Tree," from The Bridge: "Proem: to

Brooklyn Bridge," "Ave Maria," "The River," "Cape

Hatteras," "Atlantis"

Week Fourteen: MARIANNE MOORE:

"Poetry," "The Fish," "Sojourn in the Whale," "A

Grave," "Silence," "An Octopus," "No Swan So Fine,"

"The Pangolin," "The Paper Nautilus," "Spenser’s Ireland"

Week Fifteen: EZRA POUND:

"A Pact," "In a Station of the Metro," from The Cantos:

"I, IX, XLV, LXXXI, CXVI, "Notes." Please be sure to read all entries on

MAPS, including "On Pound and Malatesta." Take the photo tour of Malatesta’s Tempio

on MAPS.

Week Sixteen: WORLD WAR II:

Background reading: "About

World War II": MAPS

Randall Jarrell, "The Death

of the Ball Turret Gunner," "A Front," "Losses," "Second Air

Force," "Protocols"

Joy Davidman, "For the

Nazis"

Edna St. Vincent Millay, "I

Forgot for a Moment"

Japanese American Concentration

Camp Haiku

Edwin Rolfe, "First Love" (Background:

"About the Spanish Civil War," MAPS)

Robinson Jeffers,

"Fantasy"

Thomas McGrath, "Crash

Report"

Gwendolyn Brooks, "Gay Chaps

at the Bar"

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