IThis course will look at early-20th-century poetry in relation to literary tradition, linguistic innovation, history and politics, and artistic movements, all in the service of an effort to more fully understand and appreciate some of the strangest and most wonderful poems in the English language. We will concentrate on five canonical poets of “high modernism,” T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, and William Carlos Williams, with possible supplements from Yeats, Frost, Stein, H.D., and Auden, among others. Reading will be mostly the poems themselves, enhanced by a smattering of essays, manifestos, and critical works.