Nine American Poets

American poetry has multiple origins and a vast array of modes and variations. We will begin our readings for this course with Whitman and Dickinson, the two most influential 19th-century American poets, before turning our attention to at least seven modern American poets, including Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, T. S. Eliot, Hart Crane, Elizabeth Bishop, and John Ashbery. We will pay considerable attention to the different versions of modernism that emerge in 20th-century American poetry and to the complexity of intergenerational poetic influence. Our study of literary influence and affinity will be in the service, however, of our central task, which is to appreciate and articulate the unique qualities of each of the poets—and poems—that we encounter through close, imaginative readings and informed speculation.