ENGL421-25S2 (C) Semester Two 2025

Modern Poetry

30 points

Details:
Start Date: Monday, 14 July 2025
End Date: Sunday, 9 November 2025
Withdrawal Dates
Last Day to withdraw from this course:
  • Without financial penalty (full fee refund): Sunday, 27 July 2025
  • Without academic penalty (including no fee refund): Sunday, 28 September 2025

Description

This course takes a broad view of modern poetry. We begin with a selection of English and American poets identified with literary modernism, before widening our reading to encompass poets of other places and more recent eras who have responded in a variety of ways to modernist forms, techniques and preoccupations.

Learning Outcomes

  • an ability to describe and appreciate the structure and texture of major 20th and 21st century poems as works of verbal art;
  • some understanding of the contexts—economic, linguistic, political, cultural—in and around which poems arise;
  • an understanding of poetic careers, within and across bodies of national literature;
  • familiarity with poetic modes and forms (sonnet, elegy, epigram, tribute, etc) as they have changed over the last hundred years, and as they interact with other kinds of language use;
  • a sense of literary history as it proceeds from movement to movement, generation to generation, so that poets and poems make sense in their own right but also as part of a larger international history.
    • University Graduate Attributes

      This course will provide students with an opportunity to develop the Graduate Attributes specified below:

      Critically competent in a core academic discipline of their award

      Students know and can critically evaluate and, where applicable, apply this knowledge to topics/issues within their majoring subject.

      Employable, innovative and enterprising

      Students will develop key skills and attributes sought by employers that can be used in a range of applications.

      Globally aware

      Students will comprehend the influence of global conditions on their discipline and will be competent in engaging with global and multi-cultural contexts.

Prerequisites

Subject to approval of the Head of Department.

Timetable 2025

Students must attend one activity from each section.

Lecture A
Activity Day Time Location Weeks
01 Tuesday 14:00 - 16:00 Beatrice Tinsley 112
14 Jul - 24 Aug
8 Sep - 19 Oct
Lecture B
Activity Day Time Location Weeks
01 Thursday 14:00 - 16:00 Ernest Rutherford 140
14 Jul - 24 Aug
8 Sep - 19 Oct

Course Coordinator / Lecturer

Paul Millar

Textbooks / Resources

Most poems will be available on-line through via quality web resources. Links will be provided in course handouts or via LEARN to all prescribed poems. Additional print texts for supplementary reading will be available via the library.

Course links

Library portal

Indicative Fees

Domestic fee $2,169.00

* All fees are inclusive of NZ GST or any equivalent overseas tax, and do not include any programme level discount or additional course-related expenses.

For further information see Humanities .

All ENGL421 Occurrences

  • ENGL421-25S2 (C) Semester Two 2025