Module Code - Title:
EH6032
-
ISSUES IN MODERN AND CONTEMPORARY POETRY
Year Last Offered:
2025/6
Hours Per Week:
Grading Type:
Prerequisite Modules:
Rationale and Purpose of the Module:
This module will engage with prominent issues in the academic study of twentieth- and twenty-first-century poetry and poetics. Questions of how poetry is to be defined and regarded will recur, as will issues such as the relation between written and oral production/performance, poetry in the public sphere, form and meaning, and poetic movements. Reading will be weighted toward contemporary English-language poetry but may well include some examples of British romantic poetry, nineteenth-century American poetry, signal modernists, and poetry-in-translation, as well as ballads, manifesti, and essays. On successful completion of this module, students will be able to apply a critical and cogent awareness of methodological and epistemological concerns pertaining to poetry and poetics; formal and structural phenomena and ways of interpreting them; multiple historical and political perspectives; formulating analytical arguments about poetry and poetics.
Syllabus:
This module will serve as an introduction to the study of contemporary poetry and poetics at a postgraduate level. It will be organized around theoretical, historical, and practical problems that have been critical to the field in the last century, such as
1) the challenge of the shifting subject and the lyric voice;
2) the reaction to and explosion of form;
3) changes to the field emanating from women, majority world poets, and poets of colour;
4) orality or shadow orality in verse, including issues to do with the digital revolution. Poetry to be examined in detail may include works by such poets as Lucille Clifton, Caroline Forche, Joy Harjo, Seamus Heaney, Susan Howe, Medbh McGuckian, Czeslaw Milosz, Sinead Morrissey, Tom Pickard, Adrienne Rich, Natasha Tretheway, and C. K. Williams.
Learning Outcomes:
Cognitive (Knowledge, Understanding, Application, Analysis, Evaluation, Synthesis)
To know key terms, figures, schools or movements in the field of modern and contemporary poetry; To understand the theoretical and technical debates pertaining to the field, as well as issues arising from issues of publication, circulation, and communication; To apply the skills learned in order to produce nuanced, contextually sensitive readings of contemporary poetry, in both written and oral forms; To analyze individual poems, larger issues as they apply to groups of poems, and begin to participate in dynamic analysis of the field as a whole.
Affective (Attitudes and Values)
To gain confidence in evaluating contemporary poetry, a notoriously difficult activity.
Psychomotor (Physical Skills)
N/A
How the Module will be Taught and what will be the Learning Experiences of the Students:
This module will be taught as a seminar, with all students expected to engage actively in every meeting, whether the discussion is a debate of theoretical issues or a collaborative close reading of a single poem. To the degree possible, the module will require attendance at poetry readings. Students will learn to listen to poetry and each other, to participate in rigorous discussion of issues confronting both the field of contemporary poetics and the readers of contemporary poetry. The major written requirement will be a research paper, which will enable students to compose extended arguments on complex topics, managing the needs of documented, evidence-based writing and creative analysis.
Research Findings Incorporated in to the Syllabus (If Relevant):
Prime Texts:
Corcoran, Neil. (2007)
The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-Century English Poetry
, Cambridge University Press
Davis, Alex, and Lee M. Jenkins (2007)
The Cambridge Companion to Modernist Poetry and Poetics
, Cambridge University Press.
Finch, Annie (1993)
The Ghost of Meter: Culture and Prosody in American Free Verse
, University of Michigan Press
Gregerson, Linda (2003)
Negative Capability: Contemporary American Poetry
, University of Michigan Press
Keller, Lynn, and Cristanne Miller (1995)
Feminist Measures: Soundings in Poetry and Theory
, University of Michigan Press.
Ramazani, Jahan, Richard Ellmann and Robert O Clair, eds. (2003)
The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry
, Norton
Other Relevant Texts:
Altieri, Charles (2003)
The Particulars of Rapture: An Aesthetics of the Affects
, Cornell University Press
Finch, Anne (2010)
A Poets Ear: A Handbook of Meter and Form
, University of Michigan Press
Fussell, Paul (1979)
Poetic Meter and Poetic Form
, McGraw-Hill
Harmon, William (2003)
Classic Writings on Poetry
, Columbia University Press
Preminger, Alex, V. F. Brogan, and Frank J. Warnke, eds. (1993)
The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics
, Princeton University Press
Strand, Mark and Eavan Boland (2000)
The Making of a Poem: A Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms
, Norton
Vendler, Helen (2003)
Poets, Poems, Poetry: An Introduction and Anthology. Rev. edition
, Bedford-St. Martins
Programme(s) in which this Module is Offered:
Semester(s) Module is Offered:
Spring
Module Leader:
emily.cullen@ul.ie