For the most part, the poetry we shall be reading spans the period from the 1940s to the present, with dead poets among the living. To speak of it as poetry after modernism may suggest historical sequence, but not necessarily a stylistic or conceptual break from the traditions defined earlier in the century by Pound and Eliot, Stevens and Williams, who were in various ways divided among themselves, not to mention divisions within that, as with Williams and Pound, and the later Stevens, gave sustenance to the postmodern. There were departures, to be sure, but also continuity, with a second meaning to after, in the sense of emulation, with modernist “technique” as second nature, including the ethos of paradox and ambiguity, or what Allen Tate defined as “tension” in poetry. As articulated by the New Criticism—which sponsored a sacramental or moral view of language, while institutionalizing the heroic figures of high modernism—this ethos inspirited the poetry that was also burdened by it, resisting it, contending with it, or with various degrees of subtlety, directness, cunning, making its peace or declaring independence.

Of the various movements after modernism, some came with manifestos and there were, indeed, claims of a decisive break or breakthrough, with one or another narrative of the death of modernism or summary judgment of its repressive formalism — reducing thus to one dimension (as often in theory and cultural studies) the modernist narrative itself. There were, all told, various modernisms, shading over — even in a single poet, such as the vorticist Pound — to the avant-garde. We’ll not be rehearsing the variants, though we shall perceive them now and then through more contemporary practices, indebted to modernist poetry but passing as oppositional. Keeping track of every movement since the end of World War II is not quite on the agenda, but some will be considered in passing, from the confessional poetry of the fifties through projective verse and open field to, maybe, the syntactical extremities of l-a-n-g-u-a-g-e poetry.

The reading will be done not in an anthology but in a series of single volumes, selected or collected poems, with a probable emphasis on early and middle periods, which first suggested that something distinguished was happening. We’ll be reading, then, about eight poets, and among those being considered (also subject to change) are Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, George Oppen, Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Robert Creeley, John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, and Susan Howe.