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Poetry Week 3: The Meaning of Innovation

Poetry Week 3: The Meaning of Innovation. Or: What’s so “free” about free verse?. Reminders. Be reading ahead! Poetry Presentations next week !. Week 2 Recap. What is meaningful about art? Timelessness?/History?

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Poetry Week 3: The Meaning of Innovation

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  1. Poetry Week 3: The Meaning of Innovation Or: What’s so “free” about free verse?

  2. Reminders • Be reading ahead! • Poetry Presentations next week!

  3. Week 2 Recap • What is meaningful about art? • Timelessness?/History? • Keats: the “sylvan historian” tells of “human nature” – passions and relations that transcend history… or do they? • Form of Power? • Browning: The representation of the Duchess in art is a way of “limiting” her (her smile was much more dynamic in life) • Composition? • Auden: Suffering’s human dimension is made visible in the formal composition of works of art/literature • How does language work (in relation to these ideas)?

  4. Week 3: Modernist poetry & “the New” • Early 20th Century – period of relentless formal innovation – the avant-garde • Ezra Pound: “Make it new!” • Virginia Woolf: “On or about December 1910, human nature changed.” • Modernism reflecting the contemporary moment • So what is so “new” about modern poetry? • And how do we interpret this “newness”?

  5. Week 3: Modernist poetry & “the New” Literary Tradition? • It is a mistake to read modernist poetry as making the past irrelevant • Many of its innovations are meaningful for how they significantly revise or “break the rules” of existing conventions Language Experiments • It is worthwhile to think of modernist poetry as an “experiment” in language • Modernist poets attempted to stretch the possibilities for meaning and writing, often by breaking reader’s expectations for how language “should” work and trying to make things meaningful in different ways.

  6. William Carlos Williams so much depends upon a red wheel barrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens.

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