Department of English

This course will consider innovations in modern American poetry. We will begin with the two contrasting figureheads of modern American verse: Walt Whitman, with his open and capacious lines, and Emily Dickinson, with her incisive and sharpened verse. With these foundational poles in mind, we will read a range of poetic voices: modernist instigations and the forms of the Harlem Renaissance from the first part of the twentieth century; in midcentury, the beats and confessional verse; and more recent cultural and experimental turns.