Modernist Monuments: Yeats, Pound and Eliot

Course Description

Summary

This course will provide an in-depth exploration of poetry and critical work of three founding figures of English-language modernist literature: William Butler Yeats, Ezra Pound, and T.S. Eliot. We will also, time permitting, consider works by other major authors of the modernist movement, including Thomas Hardy, W.H. Auden and Gertrude Stein. At its inception, the modernist movement seemed to promise "a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history" (T.S.Eliot). What became of this initial impulse as the modernist movement continued to mature? Students will write critical papers and participate in weekly close readings of key texts.