This assignment explores modern poetry. Firstly, specify several recurrent traits in Victorian and/or Romantic poetry that modernist poets felt they had to rebel against.

Modern poetry.

Literature 5; 2021/22 Choose ONE of the following questions from any section. Your essay must be 2500-3000 words in length (there is NO 10% rule). Please use the question as the TITLE of your essay. Please support your answer with quotations from the primary text[s] you are analyzing. A certain amount of research into the scholarship on your topic is necessary. Please use at the very least, FOUR secondary sources. Any fewer will negatively affect your grade. Secondary sources include monographs and articles in academic journals (both online and print), by academics, philosophers, theorists, and translators.

Modern poetry.

Brief references to dictionaries, encyclopaedias, and other source materials to document historical facts and other information that merely supports your argument should be considered separate from the four secondary sources. Please do not use Schmoop, Sparknotes, Gradesaver or any other quick fix. Do NOT quote from lectures or PowerPoints. The essay should be typed double-spaced in 12-point following MLA conventions with regard to footnotes (if used) and Bibliography/Works Cited. You should consider consulting the Oxford English Dictionary online for the historical meanings of keywords, and also the MLA International Bibliography to identify relevant secondary works.

Modern poetry.

Both the OED and the MLA bibliography are among the databases in the Digitale Bibliotheek of the UB. If in doubt about formatting issues, you should consult Purdue University’s Online Writing Lab for citation information at https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/747/01/ You might consider consulting the Oxford English Dictionary online for the historical meanings of keywords, and also the MLA International Bibliography to identify relevant secondary works You CANNOT complete the final essay on the same author as the group presentation UNLESS that author is considered alongside a second author (this is possible in section F below). https://youtu.be/-zlz35C0QBI

Modern poetry.

ESSAY QUESTIONS A: Modernist Poetry (Stevens and Bishop) 1) ‘Make it new’ (Pound). ‘It must be abstract’ (Stevens). ‘No ideas but in things’ (Williams). How do such manifesto pronouncements bear upon the formal and thematic properties of modern poetry? 2) Specify several recurrent traits in Victorian and/or Romantic poetry that modernist poets felt they had to rebel against. In what ways did they seek alternatives? Use the contrast to develop an essay on the Modernist project as a whole. 3) ‘No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists’ (T.S. Eliot).

Modern poetry.

Engaging with this quote, discuss the relationship between Modernism and tradition in the work of either Wallace Stevens or Elizabeth Bishop. 4) ‘Bishop lets us know that every detail is a boundary, not a Blakean microcosm’ (David Kalstone). Engaging with this quote, explore the significance of perspective in Elizabeth Bishop’s poetry. 5) ‘They were those that would have wept to step barefoot into reality.’ (‘Large Red Man Reading’, Wallace Stevens). Engaging with this quote, discuss the relation of Stevens’ poetry to questions of religious or aesthetic transcendence.

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