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From the course by University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Modern American Poetry

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University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Modern American Poetry

44 ratings

Twelve experienced faculty members from across the United States present their analyses of ground-breaking modern American poets in richly illustrated video lectures. The course highlights both major poets—from Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson through T.S. Eliot, H.D., Amy Lowell, Hart Crane, Langston Hughes, Muriel Rukeyser, and many others—and influential movements. The course mixes historical overview with close readings of individual poets and poems. Most courses give only one instructor’s point of view. This one matches the diversity of US poetry with lectures by a score of talented faculty. They bring their special perspective to the material while also presenting a coherent view of more than fifty years of US poetry. Throughout the course the lectures are illustrated with vivid images of the events, people, and places mentioned in the poems themselves. Readings by both the poets themselves and experienced faculty highlight the texts. On screen displays of text and quotations make it easy to follow the material. This is a course that takes advantage of the medium to bring you sights and sounds that would be difficult to incorporate in classroom lectures.

From the lesson

Module 4

Modernism's Legacies

Introduction4:29

Emily Dickinson's "We Learned the Whole of Love"18:31

Wallace Stevens's "Large Red Man Reading"27:41

Harryette Mullen's "Sleeping with the Dictionary"33:18

Meet the Instructors

Cary Nelson
Jubilee Professor of Liberal Arts & Sciences
English Department

[MUSIC]

I'm Al Filreis.

You're about to join me as I work through fairly close readings of three poems

by American poets.

One each by Emily Dickinson, Wallace Stevens, and Harryette Mullen.

You'll be watching one discussion recorded as a video for each poem.

Joining me in these discussions are Lily Applebaum, Dave Poplar, and Camara Brown.

All three are regular denizens of the poetic community that convenes

at the Kelly Writer's House here in Philadelphia.

Of course we could have chosen three poems that form a narrative or topical sequence.

We could have chosen three poems that make instant sense as a threesome or

form a progression through the literary history of modernism.

I suppose one can see in these three poets the broadest movement

from the 19th century through the 20th to the 21st.

And that's instructive in itself, for sure.

Emily Dickinson the proto-modernist.

Wallace Stevens the modernist, or as one might say the high modernist.

And Harryette Mullen, a post modern poet who shares poetic methods with

allitory poets, Oulipian poets, language poets, conceptual poets,

avant-garde movements that have come from various forms of post modernism.

So again, one might be able to view the three poems and the three discussions

as a quick tour of the proto modern, the modern, and the post modern.

But that was not our main concern when choosing these three poems.

Our concern was to teach ourselves, and we hope you, something about the meta poem.

The meta poem is poem, of course, about poetry.

A poem that is somehow aware of itself as a thing made of letters and words.

What we wanted to do here was to choose three poems different in so

many other ways that are each somehow about reading or about writing.

Poems about the reading of poems.

Poems about poets reading.

Poems about themselves.

Poems that use reading as an allegory for loving.

Poems that cannot be understood topically or thematically unless first,

one understands how they are about themselves, about the words they deploy,

about the love or loving of words as they are being written about.

As Harryette Mullen puts it, the secret acrostic of a lover's name,

a name you will discover as you read the very poem encoding that secret

in its alphabetical existence.

What Wallace Stevens in Large Red Man Reading calls the literal characters.

So we urge you to watch the three videos in the order in which we made them.

First on Dickinson's poem, We Learned the Whole of Love.

Then on Stevens's poem, Large Red Man Reading.

Then on two pieces of Harryette Mullen's book Sleeping With The Dictionary.

So read the poems first of course, and

during the video discussions please note that our method of working through close

readings of the poems implies that we don't have the final word on them.

That you are seeing us,

witnessing us indeed in the act of finding what will suffice to understand them.

Since the poems are about reading, and we are reading collaboratively, the already

iterative process that's written into the poems by poets interested in reading and

writing extends to the process of our reading them too.

And this is, for me at least,

one of the great pleasures of working with poems that are supposedly difficult.

[MUSIC]

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