Poetry in America: Modernism
AmPoX.6 § HarvardX § Spring 2016
COURSE TEAM
INSTRUCTOR
Elisa New, Ph.D., Powell M. Cabot Professor of Literature, Harvard University
POETRY TEAM MEMBERS
Caitlin Ballotta Rajagopalan, HarvardX Content Lead
Marissa Grunes, PhD candidate in English, Harvard University
Christopher Spaide, PhD candidate in English, Harvard University
Emmy Waldman, PhD candidate in English, Harvard University
Aaron Blanton, HarvardX Creative Lead
UNDERGRADUATE TEAM MEMBERS
Lauren Claus, Undergraduate Assistant
Colin Criss, Undergraduate Assistant
ABOUT THIS COURSE
This course, the sixth installment in the Poetry in America series, explores a diverse array of American Modernist poets and poems. While “Modernism” is notoriously difficult to define, the movement spanned the decades from the 1910s to the mid-1940s, and the poetry of this period marked a clear break from past traditions and past forms.
Throughout this module, we will encounter such poets as Robert Frost, T.S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, Langston Hughes, William Carlos Williams, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Claude McKay, Dorothy Parker, and Wallace Stevens. We will study how these poets employed the language of rejection and revolution, of making and remaking, of artistic appropriation and cultural emancipation, in creating an American poetic tradition that was new and different. Traveling to the homes and workplaces of Robert Frost and Wallace Stevens; to the Poetry Foundation in Chicago, where the institution of American Modernism was born; and even exploring the River Thames in the London of Eliot's The Waste Land, we will see the sites that witnessed—and cultivated—the rise of American Modernism.
Led by Harvard Professor Elisa New, the Poetry in America series surveys nearly 400 years of American poetry. Through video lectures, archival images and texts, expeditions to historic sites, interpretive seminars with large and small groups, interviews with poets and scholars, and conversations about poems with distinguished Americans, Poetry in America takes learners on a journey through the literature of a nation. Along the way, distinguished guests including Elena Kagan, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Eve Ensler, John McCain, Andrea Mitchell, Michael Pollan, Drew Faust, Tony Kushner, and Nas, among others, bring fresh perspectives to the study of American poetry.
COURSE/CERTIFICATE EXPECTATIONS
This course will run for eight weeks, from April 8, 2016, to June 3, 2016.
Many of you have expressed an interest in taking this course for a certificate. We want to explain clearly the standards for receiving a certificate from edX. Students who complete 75 percent or more of their Coursework Portfolio can receive certificates. However, you must be on the ID track to get a certificate. As you saw when you signed up for the course, there is no certificate on the audit track. To accumulate credit toward a certificate, students must complete readings, view course videos, post twice per week in the Discussion Forum, and complete the Open Response and annotation exercises. Students may, of course, participate in all of these activities without submitting them for portfolio credit, but those who are working toward a certificate must submit their work for credit at the end of each exercise in order for the assignment to be recorded in their portfolios.
It is difficult for a course in which learning occurs through reading, listening, writing, and discussion to render this sort of participation into a score. Rest assured that the teaching staff—Professor New, members of the Poetry Team, and our group of Community TA's—will be reading through your comments with great interest and responding to as many of them as possible. We also encourage you to engage with one another’s responses. These assessments are designed to spark conversations about American poetry, and so we want you to talk to each other, as well as to us!
Students who are unable to complete all of the course materials and assignments are welcome and encouraged to audit this class by engaging with the course materials to the extent that they can.
All content for a given week will be released by 12:00 PM Eastern Standard Time (EST)—or 16:00 Coordinated Universal Time (UTC)—on the date indicated on the syllabus.
READINGS
For more detailed information about the course structure, certificates, and additional resources, we invite you to visit the FAQ tab HERE and to visit the RESOURCES tab HERE. You have access to many of the poems being covered in this module via the HOME tab of the course platform. Many of the poems are downloadable as PDFs for those students who wish to print them. Due to copyright restrictions, we are unable to provide you with the text of some copyrighted poems (generally, poems first published in the United States after 1923): when possible, we have linked out to reliable versions of the poems; when no reliable online version exists, we invite you to consult your local library for access to the text.
You will notice that the reading load varies from section to section: the number and the length of poems covered fluctuates from week to week. The list of poems to be covered throughout this module will be available to you throughout the duration of the module, and so we invite you to read ahead if you like.
QUESTIONS
All questions should be asked on the FAQ thread in the Discussion Forum. We will do our best to respond quickly!
ACADEMIC ETHICS
Everything you post in the discussion forums must be your work and your work only. You must explicitly cite your sources if you use ideas, text, or images that are not your own. Whether you are quoting directly from other sources or simply borrowing their ideas, you must always indicate when you are drawing from the work of others. There is zero tolerance for plagiarism and other forms of academic malpractice.
Any content that the course administrators deem malicious in nature or insulting toward people of a certain ethnicity, race, socioeconomic status, sexual orientation, religion, ability, or other identity will be removed immediately. The forum administrators reserve the right to determine what is and is not acceptable content.
The HarvardX honor code is as follows: HarvardX requires individuals who enroll in its courses on edX to abide by the terms of the edX honor code. HarvardX will take appropriate corrective action in response to violations of the edX honor code, which may include dismissal from the HarvardX course; revocation of any certificates received for the HarvardX course; or other remedies as circumstances warrant. No refunds will be issued in the case of corrective action for such violations. Enrollees who are taking HarvardX courses as part of another program will also be governed by the academic policies of those programs.
TITLE IX AND GENDER-BASED DISCRIMINATION
Harvard University and HarvardX are committed to maintaining a safe and healthy educational and work environment in which no member of the community is excluded from participation in, denied the benefits of, or subjected to discrimination or harassment in our program. All members of the HarvardX community are expected to abide by Harvard policies on nondiscrimination, including sexual harassment, and the edX Terms of Service. If you have any questions or concerns, please contact harvardx@harvard.edu and/or report your experience through the edX contact form.
MODULE 6 SCHEDULE OF READINGS
Week 1: Introduction to Poetry in America: Dickinson—releases April 8, 12 PM EST
“In a Station of the Metro” by Ezra Pound
Week 2: Robert Frost—releases April 15, 12 PM EST
“The Pasture” by Robert Frost
“After Apple-Picking” by Robert Frost
“Out, Out—“ by Robert Frost
“Birches” by Robert Frost
“Mending Wall” by Robert Frost
“The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost
“For Once, Then, Something” by Robert Frost
“The Silken Tent” by Robert Frost
Recommended Further Reading:
“Dust of Snow” by Robert Frost
“Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” by Robert Frost
*An online edition of Frost’s poems can be accessed HERE. See Frost, Robert. The Poems of Robert Frost. New York: Random House, Inc., 1946. Web.
Week 3: The Modernism of Chicago and the Midwest—releases April 22, 12 PM EST
“Mrs. Kessler” by Edgar Lee Masters
“Aner Clute” by Edgar Lee Masters
“Chicago” by Carl Sandburg
“Mamie” by Carl Sandburg
“Skyscraper” by Carl Sandburg
“To Whistler, American” by Ezra Pound
“The Open Door” by Harriet Monroe”
“St. Agnes’ Eve” by Kenneth Fearing
Recommended Further Reading:
“Green Light” by Kenneth Fearing
“Portrait of a Cog” by Kenneth Fearing
*An online edition of Spoon River Anthology can be accessed HERE. See Masters, Edgar Lee. Spoon River Anthology. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1921. Web.
Week 4: T.S. Eliot: An American Modernist Abroad—releases April 29, 12 PM EST
“Nocturne” by T.S. Eliot
“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” by T.S. Eliot
The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot
Recommended Further Reading
“Tradition and the Individual Talent” by T.S. Eliot (an example of his critical writing)
Week 5: New York Modernism: Exuberance, Emancipation, and Imagination—releases May 6, 12 PM EST
Editorial Statement, The Masses, by Max Eastman
“If I should learn, in some quite casual way” (Sonnet V, Renascence and Other Poems) by Edna St. Vincent Millay
“Four Sonnets” by Edna St. Vincent Millay
“Your Little Day” (song) by Natalia Zukerman
“Recuerdo” by Edna St. Vincent Millay
“Thursday” by Edna St. Vincent Millay
“First Fig” by Edna St. Vincent Millay
“Grown-Up” by Edna St. Vincent Millay
“The Red Dress” by Dorothy Parker
“To Brooklyn Bridge” (from The Bridge) by Hart Crane
“Chaplinesque” by Hart Crane
“Eighty-Six-Storied Pomp” by MacKinlay Kantor
“New York” by Marianne Moore
Recommended Further Reading
“Operating Room” by John Reed
“Isadora Duncan” by Max Eastman
Week 6: Scientific Rigor, Poetic Art: Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, Gertrude Stein—releases May 13, 12 PM EST
“Poetry” [original version] by Marianne Moore
“Poetry” [revised version] by Marianne Moore
“He ‘Digesteth Harde Yron’” by Marianne Moore
“No Swan So Fine” by Marianne Moore
Spring and All “[By the road to the contagious hospital]” by William Carlos Williams
“St. Francis Einstein of the Daffodils” by William Carlos Williams
“Overture to a Dance of Locomotives” by William Carlos Williams
“The Great Figure” by William Carlos Williams
“[Rapid Transit]” by William Carlos Williams
“If I Told Him: A Completed Portrait of Picasso” by Gertrude Stein
Recommended Further Reading
“Silence” by Marianne Moore
“The Fish” by Marianne Moore
“To a Snail” by Marianne Moore
“The Poem as a Field of Action” by William Carlos Williams (a talk given in 1948)
Week 7: The Harlem Renaissance and the Blues—releases May 20, 12 PM EST
“Harlem” by Langston Hughes
“Juke Box Love Song” by Langston Hughes
“Juke Box Love Song” (song from “Harlem, 1951”) by Chad Cannon
“The Weary Blues” by Langston Hughes
“The Negro Speaks of Rivers” by Langston Hughes
“To Certain Critics” by Countee Cullen
“Yet Do I Marvel” by Countee Cullen
“Atlantic City Waiter” by Countee Cullen
“Her Lips Are Copper Wire” by Jean Toomer
“The White City” by Claude McKay
“Flame-Heart” by Claude McKay
“Quashie to Buccra” by Claude McKay
“My Mountain Home” by Claude McKay
“Subway Wind” by Claude McKay
“Empty Bed Blues,” song recorded by Bessie Smith and written by Alphonso Johnson
“I Got It Bad (and That Ain’t Good),” song by Duke Ellington (music) and Paul Francis Webster (lyrics)
Recommended Further Reading
“Heritage” by Countee Cullen
“To John Keats, Poet. At Spring Time” by Countee Cullen
“Incident” by Countee Cullen
Week 8: William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, and Leaving Modernism—releases May 27, 12 PM EST
“To a Poor Old Woman” by William Carlos Williams
“Nantucket” by William Carlos Williams
“This Is Just To Say” by William Carlos Williams
“Study of Two Pears” by Wallace Stevens
“Anecdote of the Jar” by Wallace Stevens
“The Plain Sense of Things” by Wallace Stevens
“The Emperor of Ice-Cream” by Wallace Stevens
“The Man on the Dump” by Wallace Stevens
“Of Hartford in a Purple Light” by Wallace Stevens
“Vacancy in the Park” by Wallace Stevens
*All dates and poems listed on this syllabus and in the course platform are subject to change.