This course involves intensive study of the poems of Yeats and Eliot (as far as I know, the two greatest English language poets of the 20th century), and intensive reflection on the techniques of reading that we will be using. In recent decades, the notion of “the poem itself” has become deeply suspect; it is thought that there is no poem itself because poems are whatever interpretive schemas make of them; or else that there is no poem itself because the poem is transected by historical and political forces that pull it in diverse directions, and which were not under the control of the poet. The notion that interpretation should submit itself to the poem, rather than submitting the poem to it, is thought to be “formalism,” a dimly understood bogey that is thought to be based on naïve notions of various sorts, and to reflect reactionary political views. Usually “formalism” is identified with the New Criticism. This course will propose to you that this whole complex of ideas is confused and mistaken. The New Critics, for example, can be mistaken for formalists only by someone who has no idea what formalism is. The Russian Formalists, by contrast, really were formalists; unfortunately, hardly anyone talks about them. Strangely enough, their fundamental notion was not form but technique. They were not interested in the poem as “verbal icon,” but in the social reservoir of acquired and accumulated know-how into which poets are apprenticed, and the impersonal productive process by means of which poems are then crafted as verbal artifacts, on the basis of this know-how. We will read Yeats and Eliot using a sort of “neo-Russian Formalism.” I call it “techne theory.”