ENG 373 - Studies in Modern Poetry: Poetry and Politics

“For poetry makes nothing happen,” W. H. Auden famously declared, a statement often held up as a disavowal of poetry’s political power and purpose. But the line doesn’t stop there: Auden adds an emphatic “it survives,” going on to describe poetry as “A way of happening, a mouth.” Poetry may not cause things to happen, but it gives voice to important ideas that often don’t find expression in everyday discourse.  “It is difficult / to get the news from poems,” writes William Carlos Williams, “yet men die miserably every day/ for lack/ of what is found there.”

This survey of modern poetry will investigate relationships between poetry and politics. How, when, and why has poetry played a role in national politics? How can poetry help us interrogate the politics of race, class, gender, and sexuality? Beginning with Walt Whitman’s declaration that “The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem,” our survey will take us to poetry of “the Great War,” through modernism and the politics of the “New Negro” and “New Woman,” to the rise of Fascism and leftist political poetry of the 1930s, WWII poetry, the Civil Rights and Black Arts movements of the 1960s, first wave feminism of the 1970s, and continue on to contemporary developments in queer poetry, eco-poetry, spoken word.

…when we speak we are afraid
our words will not be heard
nor welcomed
but when we are silent
we are still afraid

So it is better to speak
remembering
we were never meant to survive.

                          - Audre Lorde, from “Litany of Survival” (1978)
 

Satisfies the historical approaches requirement for the English major.
Satisfies a requirement in the Gender & Sexuality Studies major or minor.
Satisfies a requirement in the Global Literary Theory interdisciplinary minor.
 

Prerequisites & Notes
No prerequisites, but a willingness to speak, even when you are afraid, is required.