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HarvardX: AmPoX.6 Poetry in America: Modernism

Modernism Module - Resources

I. Books

Relevant Books by Module 6 Guest Discussants

Counter-revolution of the Word: The Conservative Attack on Modern Poetry, 1945-1960 by Alan Filreis

Modernism from Right to Left: Wallace Stevens, the Thirties, & Literary Radicalism (Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture) by Alan Filreis

Wallace Stevens and the Actual World (Princeton Legacy Library) by Alan Filreis

The Broken Tower: A Life of Hart Crane by Paul Mariani

William Carlos Williams: A New World Naked by Paul Mariani

The Whole Harmonium: The Life of Wallace Stevens by Paul Mariani

Robert Frost: A Life by Jay Parini

Kenneth Fearing: Selected Poems (American Poets Project) by Robert Polito

More Books on Modernism and American Modernist Poets

Quantum Poetics: Yeats, Pound, Eliot, and the Science of Modernism by Daniel Albright

Putting Modernism Together: Literature, Music, and Painting, 1872–1927 by Daniel Albright

The Art of Twentieth-Century American Poetry: Modernism and After by Charles Altieri

Painterly Abstraction in Modernist American Poetry: The Contemporaneity of Modernism by Charles Altieri

Wallace Stevens and the Demand of Modernity: Towards a Phenomenology of Value by Charles Altieri

Modernism: A Very Short Introduction by Christopher Butler

Marianne Moore: Imaginary Possessions by Bonnie Costello

Shifting Ground: Reinventing Ground in Modern American Poetry by Bonnie Costello [Chapters 1-3]

Planets on Tables: Poetry, Still Life, and the Turning World by Bonnie Costello [Chapters 1-2]

Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s by Ann Douglas

Rhythm and Race in Modernist Poetry and Science: Pound, Yeats, Williams, and Modern Sciences of Rhythm by Michael Golston

Hart Crane and Allen Tate: Janus-Facus Modernism by Langdon Hammer

Art in Theory: 1900-2000, ed. Harrison and Wood

A Homemade World: The American Modernist Writers by Hugh Kenner

The Pound Era by Hugh Kenner

Modernist Quartet by Frank Lentricchia

A Genealogy of Modernism by Michael H. Levenson

The Poetics of Transition: Emerson, Pragmatism, and American Literary Modernism (New Americanists) by Jonathan Levin

Cambridge Introduction to Modernism by Pericles Lewis

Stone Cottage: Pound, Yeats, and Modernism by James Longenbach

Modernist Poetics of History: Pound, Eliot, and the Sense of the Past by James Longenbach

Wallace Stevens: The Plain Sense of Things by James Longenbach

Solid Objects: Modernism and the Test of Production by Douglas Mao

Poets of Reality by J. Hillis Miller

The Trouble with Genius: Reading Pound, Joyce, Stein, and Zukofsky by Bob Perelman

Institutions of Modernism: Literary Elites and Public Cultureby Lawrence Rainey

T. S. Eliot and Prejudice by Christopher Ricks

American Moderns by Christine Stansell

Made in America: Science, Technology, and American Modernist Poets by Lisa M. Steinman

Wallace Stevens: Words Chosen Out of Desire by Helen Vendler

Harriet Monroe and the Poetry Renaissance by Ellen Williams

Cambridge History of American Literature (Vol. V), by Andrew Dubois, Frank Lentricchia, Irene Ramalho Santos, William Cain

Modernism and Copyright (Modernist Literature and Culture) by Paul K. Saint-Amour

II. Online Resources

Cambridge Companions Online


Modern American Poetry Site (MAPS)

  • This website contains more than 30,000 pages of biographies, essays, syllabuses, and images relating to numerous Modernist poets. You can look for further information on Modernist poets in a number of ways: alphabetically, chronologically, by race/ethnicity, and by school of poetry.


The Modernist Journals Project (a joint project of Brown University and the University of Tulsa)

  • This Project, "a major resource for the study of modernism in the English-speaking world" contains a selection of digitized periodicals from the years spanning 1890-1922.


The Voices and Visions Series

  • This series contains hour-long videos about 13 American poets--8 of whom we'll cover in this module. You can view full episodes and access additional resources on Hart Crane, T.S. Eliot, Robert Frost, Langston Hughes, Marianne Moore, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, and William Carlos Williams.


The Modernism Lab at Yale University

  • This "virtual space dedicated to collaborative research into the roots of literary modernism" contains a helpful timeline, a digital archive and further resources on Modernist writers worldwide.


Modern & Contemporary American Poetry (ModPo) with Professor Alan Filreis

    • This popular online course, taught by Professor Alan Filreis of the University of Pennsylvania (who appears in this module to discuss the poetry of Wallace Stevens with us!), surveys a range of American poetry, beginning with "proto-modernists Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman and ending with 21st-century conceptual poetics." Thus, many of the Modernists whom we'll study in this module are also covered in ModPo. The next run of ModPo will open on September 10, 2016, and we encourage you to enroll.


English 310: Modern Poetry with Professor Langdon Hammer, an Open Yale Course

      • This is an online version of a lecture course taught by Professor Langdon Hammer at Yale. Video, audio, and transcripts of lectures are available on the course website. The course covers Robert Frost, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Hart Crane, Langston Hughes, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, and Wallace Stevens, among others.

III. Resources to Help You Read Closely

Dictionaries

The Oxford English Dictionary

  • Many libraries will have this dictionary in print or via institutional subscription. The OED is the authoritative historical dictionary for the English language: word entries includes extensive etymologies, definitions past and present, and quotations demonstrating how a word has been used over time. Additional features of the online edition include a Timeline, Historical Thesaurus, and a “Categories” tool that allows you to browse words by subject, usage, region, or origin.


The American Heritage Dictionary

For Literary Terms and Genres

Resources for Expanding What You've Read: Finding More Poems, Online or in Your Local Library

There are several wonderful web portals dedicated to poetry and also poetry audio:

To find poetry (or any materials) in a library near you, try WorldCat. If you are outside of the United States, inquire at your local library about a union catalog that might be more helpful in locating resources near you.

To find full text online, try one of these sites:

Resources To Help You Understand the Context of What You Read

The Poetry Foundation has excellent biographies on many of the poets whose works we've assigned in Poetry in America: Modernism. Use the search box to find the poet you’re interested in.

The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA), the Library of Congress, and many other libraries and institutions have web tools for exploring particular topic. Many feature digitized content. When you explore the web for portals like these, always look for an “about” page that explains who publishes and maintains the website.

American National Biographies Online is another great resources for finding biographical information on the poets covered in this module.

Harvard in the 17th and 18th Centuries, a Harvard University Archives research guide, offers background introductions with links to subject-based bibliographies, digitized materials, and much more.

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is a wonderful and freely available online resource for the history of thought.

If you’re looking for an introduction or an overview in a library catalog, try adding one of these words to a broad keyword search: encyclopedias, handbooks,companion, introduction, overview, casebook.