Undergraduate Course: Poet-Critics: the Style of Modern Poetry (ENLI10257)
Course Outline
| School | School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures |
College | College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences |
| Credit level (Normal year taken) | SCQF Level 10 (Year 4 Undergraduate) |
Availability | Not available to visiting students |
| SCQF Credits | 20 |
ECTS Credits | 10 |
| Summary | This course re-examines the aesthetics of canonical modern poets, with a predominant focus on their work during the years 1899-1939. The writers it explores did not just write influential verse, but also criticism. In their essays, letters, books and manifestoes, they rank as some of the most influential contributors to poetics in the twentieth-century. We will read their poetry alongside and against their discursive ideas about art, building-up a sense of their aesthetic contexts, and of their various interconnections and differences. We will also discuss their relevance today; and use their work to discuss the idea of poetic form and of formalist criticism. |
| Course description |
Students will be asked to read a selection of key poems alongside some key statements about poetry and poetics, on a weekly basis, supplemented by a manageable and curated reading list of secondary material.
Class will be based upon close reading of poems, discussion of poetic theory, and consideration of the relationship between poems and poetics. Broader contexts relating to modernism and modernity will feature, with a focus on how elements of poetic form and style mediate cultural contexts and historical pressures.
Students will be asked to form autonomous learning groups and to work continuously and independently, contributing to class discussion on a weekly basis.
The course will be assessed through the completion of one 2,000 word coursework essay (30%) and one 3,000 word final essay (70%).
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Course Delivery Information
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| Academic year 2025/26, Not available to visiting students (SS1)
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Quota: 8 |
| Course Start |
Semester 2 |
Timetable |
Timetable |
| Learning and Teaching activities (Further Info) |
Total Hours:
200
(
Lecture Hours 22,
Programme Level Learning and Teaching Hours 4,
Directed Learning and Independent Learning Hours
174 )
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| Assessment (Further Info) |
Written Exam
0 %,
Coursework
100 %,
Practical Exam
0 %
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| Additional Information (Assessment) |
100% coursework:
30% 2,000 word course essay
70% 3,000 word final essay
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| Feedback |
Not entered |
| No Exam Information |
Learning Outcomes
On completion of this course, the student will be able to:
- Give informed close readings of modern poems, demonstrating an awareness of how formal and stylistic characteristics generate meaning and affect; [COURSE ESSAY]
- Demonstrate knowledge of the poetic and critical writings of a range of influential 20th century poets; [COURSE AND FINAL ESSAY]
- Assess the relationship between the poems and poetics or critical thinking of major modern poets; [COURSE AND FINAL ESSAY]
- Demonstrate knowledge of how poems mediate the aesthetic and intellectual contexts in which these writers worked; [FINAL ESSAY]
- Orally present the results of research undertaken individually and as part of a small group, respond judiciously to such research undertaken by others, and critically evaluate the importance of such material for an understanding of the chief themes of the course. [NOT SPECIFIC TO EITHER ELEMENT OF FINAL ASSESSMENT, BUT GENERALISED AND RELATED TO WEEKLY ENGAGEMENT]
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Reading List
Indicative reading list for 2025/26
Week 1: Introduction
Week 2: W. B. Yeats
Week 3: Ezra Pound
Week 4: T. S. Eliot
Week 5: Robert Frost and D. H. Lawrence
Week 7: Mina Loy and H.D. (Hilda Doolittle)
Week 8: Wallace Stevens
Week 9: William Carlos Williams
Week 10: Marianne Moore
Week 11: Langston Hughes
GENERAL READING;
Ayers, David. Modernism; A Short Introduction. Oxford; Blackwell, 2004.
Bell, Michael. Literature, Modernism and Myth. Cambridge; Cambridge University Press, 1998.
Bradbury, Malcolm, and J. McFarlane (eds.). Modernism 1890-1930 (2nd ed.). London; Penguin,
1991.
Bradshaw, David and Kevin J. H. Dettmar (eds.). A Companion to Modernist Literature and Culture.
Oxford; Blackwell, 2006.
Calinescu, Matei. Five Faces of Modernity; Modernism, Avant-Garde, Decadence, Kitsch,
Postmodernism. Durham NC: Duke University Press, 1987.
Chinitz, David E. and Gail McDonald (eds.). A Companion to Modernist Poetry. Oxford; Blackwell,
2014.
Cook, Jon (ed.). Poetry in Theory; An Anthology 1900-2000. Oxford; Blackwell, 2004.
Davis, Alex, and Lee M. Jenkins (eds.). The Cambridge Companion to Modernist Poetry. Cambridge;
Cambridge University Press, 2007.
Davis, Alex, and Lee M. Jenkins (eds.). A History of Modernist Poetry. Cambridge; Cambridge
University Press, 2015.
Emig, Rainer. Modernism in Poetry; Motivations, Structures and Limits. London; Longman, 1995.
Felski, Rita. The Gender of Modernity. Harvard UP, 1996.
Howarth, Peter. The Cambridge Introduction to Modernist Poetry. Cambridge; Cambridge University
Press, 2012.
Kenner, Hugh. The Pound Era. London; Faber, 1972.
Kern, Stephen. The Culture of Time and Space 1880-1918. Harvard University Press, 1983.
Kolocotroni, Vassiliki, Jane Goldman and Olga Taxidou (eds.). Modernism; An Anthology of Sources
and Documents. Edinburgh; Edinburgh University Press, 1998.
Levenson, Michael. A Genealogy of Modernism; A Study of English Literary Doctrine 1880-1922. Cambridge; Cambridge University Press, 1984.
Levenson, Michael (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to Modernism. 2nd ed. Cambridge; Cambridge
University Press, 2011.
Longenbach, James. Stone Cottage; Pound, Yeats and Modernism. Oxford; OUP, 1988.
Miller, J. Hillis. Poets of Reality; Six 20th Century Writers. Harvard University Press, 1966.
Nicholls, Peter. Modernisms; A Literary Guide. Basingstoke; Macmillan, 1995.
Perkins, David. A History of Modern Poetry, Vol 1; From the 1890s to the High Modernist Mode.
Boston; Harvard University Press, 1976.
Perloff, Marjorie. The Poetics of Indeterminancy; Rimbaud to Cage. Princeton; Princeton University
Press, 1981.
Rainey, Lawrence. Institutions of Modernism; Literary Elites and Public Culture. Connecticut; Yale
University Press, 1998.
Rainey, Lawrence (ed.). Modernism; An Anthology. Oxford; Blackwell, 2005.
Ramazani, Jahan (ed.). The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry. Vol 1; Modern
Poetry. 3rd ed. New York; W. W. Norton & Co., 2003.
Scott, Bonnie Kime and Mary Lynn Broe (eds.) The Gender of Modernism; A Critical Anthology.
Bloomington; Indiana University Press, 1990.
Stead, C. K. Pound, Yeats, Eliot and the Modernist Movement. Basingstoke; Macmillan, 1986. |
Additional Information
| Graduate Attributes and Skills |
Not entered |
| Special Arrangements |
Numbers are limited and students taking degrees not involving English or Scottish literature need the written approval of the head of English Literature. |
| Additional Class Delivery Information |
2 hour(s) per week for 11 week(s). Plus 1 hour a week attendance at Autonomous Learning Group - times to be arranged |
| Keywords | Not entered |
Contacts
| Course organiser | Dr Alan Gillis
Tel: (0131 6)50 3050
Email: Alan.Gillis@ed.ac.uk |
Course secretary | Ms June Cahongo
Tel: (0131 6)50 3620
Email: J.Cahongo@ed.ac.uk |
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