LIT 492-0
( Elective ) Special Topics in Literature: Poetry of the Present
The poetry of the present comes After. After the great syntheses of the High Moderns-Yeats, Eliot, Pound, Stevens. After the devastations of two World Wars. After the total crises of mind in which human rationality could seem compatible with the madness of Auschwitz and human creativity could devise the destruction Hiroshima. "After such knowledge," as T.S. Eliot asked, decades before the full force of the question would reveal itself, "what forgiveness?" In this course we will read deeply in the strong work done by American poets after WWII, including poems by Robert Lowell, Allen Ginsberg, Elizabeth Bishop, George Oppen, Sylvia Plath, Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery, Allen Grossman, Susan Howe; all of them in pursuit of answers to two difficult questions: First, Can there be a poetry of the present? How can poetry represent the individual and social urgencies of our moment without either refusing the present by taking refuge in the authoritative cultures and solutions of the past, or overleaping the imperfect present for the visionary perfection of an imagined future. And the second: How do poets make sense of the thing that happens only one time, or to only one person? Deprived of the confidence that we are players in a history that progresses toward triumph, or part of a species with a blessed fate and a certain future, how do our poets (and how can we) come to value or grant significance to the singular person: to my life, my family, my turmoil, my perception, my mind? Counts toward the American Literature and Comparative & World Literature specializations.
