Detailed Course Description:This course will survey some of the most influential and representative poetry produced in Great Britain during the twentieth century. This is a very rich literary period, and any approach is necessarily quite selective. While we will not restrict ourselves to any one theme or approach, we will attempt to address the following topics with some regularity: 1) British poetry in the context of declining imperial power; 2) textual construction of British identity, as culture, community, and individual; and 3) the strangely tight relationship between poetry and difficulty (i.e. where do particular poets fall in the spectrum of accessible verses difficult/experimental poetry, and what are the advantages and disadvantages of this choice?).
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