Modern Poetry

Description

This course begins with the study of a selection of English and American poets from the early 20th century who are identified with literary modernism. When these poets found that the conventions of traditional English poetry failed to represent the social and political upheavals of modernity, including the impacts of industrialisation and the horrors of the First World War, they searched for ways to break with the past and make poetry new. Although the defining decade for modernist poetry was the1920s, modernism has influenced much of the poetry in English produced in the subsequent century. With this in mind, the remainder of the course studies the way later poetry has responded to modernist forms, techniques and preoccupations, with particular attention paid to recent poetry from Aotearoa New Zealand and the Pacific.