In 1921, the American poet T.S. Eliot wrote, “Poets in our civilization, as it exists at present, must be difficult. Our civilization comprehends great variety and complexity, and this variety and complexity, playing upon a refined sensibility, must produce various and complex results.” Difficulty – what’s difficult to read and understand -- has, since Eliot wrote these words, become almost synonymous with the idea of modern poetry in the U.S. and Europe. But whose work of the period counted as difficult (and why?) and how has that shaped the way canons of Modern poetry have been written? Students in this course will explore the power and the limits of Eliot’s influential assessment, learning to read a range of poetry from the early to mid-twentieth century to understand but also question what Eliot and others meant by “difficulty” and why they valued it, which turns out to be not just a matter of aesthetics, but evidence that poetry was a fertile cultural ground on which played out some of the period’s major struggles over art in its relationship to social life, gender, class, and race. Students learn to think critically and historically about the categories “Modernism” and “modernity” by which writers and literary historians have sought to make sense of the period’s poetry, and the social and political upheavals that saw it come about. We will consider how issues of race, class, gender, nation, and citizenship shape and are shaped by the writing we read, and wrestle with the claims about form, language, and the world that these writers engaged.

There will be an anthology to buy and texts on Canvas to download and print. Writers we read may include Claude McKay, Countee Cullen, T.S. Eliot, Langston Hughes, Marianne Moore, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Jean Toomer, Gertrude Stein, Melvin Tolson, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, among others.

Course Requirements:

Students will probably write short, low-stakes reflection papers (or discussion-posts) and two longer (7-10 page) essays, and give an in-class presentation.