This free, not-for-credit online course, the sixth installment in the multi-part HarvardX Poetry in America series, explores a diverse array of American Modernist poets and poems.  While “Modernism” is notoriously difficult to define, the movement spanned the decades from the 1910s to the mid-1940s, and the poetry of this period marked a clear break from past traditions and past forms.

Throughout this module, we will encounter such poets as Robert Frost, T.S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, Langston Hughes, William Carlos Williams, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Claude McKay, Dorothy Parker, and Wallace Stevens.  We will study how these poets employed the language of rejection and revolution, of making and remaking, of artistic appropriation and cultural emancipation, in creating an American poetic tradition that was new and different. Traveling to the homes and workplaces of Robert Frost and Wallace Stevens; to the Poetry Foundation in Chicago, where the institution of American Modernism was born; and even exploring the River Thames in the London of Eliot’s The Waste Land, we will see the sites that witnessed—and cultivated—the rise of American Modernism.

ENROLL NOW

Before you begin, you can get a head start on Poetry in America: Modernism using the Module 6 Reading List.

We also invite you to explore the following resources to learn more about American Modernism:

ONLINE RESOURCES

• Modern American Poetry Site (MAPS), University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Department of English
• The Modernist Journals Project, Brown University and the University of Tulsa
• The Voices and Visions Series, Annenberg Foundation [See materials on Hart Crane, T.S.Eliot, Robert Frost, Langston Hughes, Marianne Moore, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, and William Carlos Williams]
• The Modernism Lab at Yale University
• Modern & Contemporary American Poetry (ModPo) with Professor Alan Filreis
• English 310: Modern Poetry with Professor Langdon Hammer, Open Yale Courses

BOOKS

Relevant Books by Module 6 Guest Discussants

• Counter-revolution of the Word: The Conservative Attack on Modern Poetry, 1945-1960, Alan Filreis
• Modernism from Right to Left: Wallace Stevens, the Thirties, & Literary Radicalism (Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture), Alan Filreis
• Wallace Stevens and the Actual World (Princeton Legacy Library), Alan Filreis
• The Broken Tower: A Life of Hart Crane, Paul Mariani
• William Carlos Williams: A New World Naked, Paul Mariani
• The Whole Harmonium: The Life of Wallace Stevens, Paul Mariani
• Robert Frost: A Life, Jay Parini
• Kenneth Fearing: Selected Poems (American Poets Project), Robert Polito

More Books on Modernism and American Modernist Poets

• Quantum Poetics: Yeats, Pound, Eliot, and the Science of Modernism, Daniel Albright
• Putting Modernism Together: Literature, Music, and Painting, 1872–1927, Daniel Albright
• The Art of Twentieth-Century American Poetry: Modernism and After, Charles Altieri
• Painterly Abstraction in Modernist American Poetry: The Contemporaneity of Modernism, Charles Altieri
• Wallace Stevens and the Demand of Modernity: Towards a Phenomenology of Value, Charles Altieri
• Modernism: A Very Short Introduction, Christopher Butler
• Marianne Moore: Imaginary Possessions, Bonnie Costello
• Shifting Ground: Reinventing Ground in Modern American Poetry, Bonnie Costello [See Chapters 1-3]
• Planets on Tables: Poetry, Still Life, and the Turning World, Bonnie Costello [See Chapters 1-2]
• Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s, Ann Douglas
• Rhythm and Race in Modernist Poetry and Science: Pound, Yeats, Williams, and Modern Sciences of Rhythm, Michael Golston
• Hart Crane and Allen Tate: Janus-Facus Modernism, Langdon Hammer
• Art in Theory: 1900-2000, edited by Charles Harrison and Paul J. Wood
• The Cambridge Companion to American Modernism, edited by Walter Kalaidjian
• A Homemade World: The American Modernist Writers, Hugh Kenner
• The Pound Era, Hugh Kenner
• Modernist Quartet, Frank Lentricchia
• A Genealogy of Modernism, Michael H. Levenson
• The Poetics of Transition: Emerson, Pragmatism, and American Literary Modernism (New Americanists), Jonathan Levin
• Cambridge Introduction to Modernism, Pericles Lewis
• Stone Cottage: Pound, Yeats, and Modernism, James Longenbach
• Modernist Poetics of History: Pound, Eliot, and the Sense of the Past, James Longenbach
• Wallace Stevens: The Plain Sense of Things, James Longenbach
• Solid Objects: Modernism and the Test of Production, Douglas Mao
• Poets of Reality, J. Hillis Miller
• The Trouble with Genius: Reading Pound, Joyce, Stein, and Zukofsky, Bob Perelman
• Institutions of Modernism: Literary Elites and Public Culture, Lawrence Rainey
• T. S. Eliot and Prejudice, Christopher Ricks
• American Moderns: Bohemian New York and the Creation of a New Century, Christine Stansell
• Made in America: Science, Technology, and American Modernist Poets, Lisa M. Steinman
• Wallace Stevens: Words Chosen Out of Desire, Helen Vendler
• Harriet Monroe and the Poetry Renaissance, Ellen Williams
• Cambridge History of American Literature (Vol. V), Andrew Dubois, Frank Lentricchia, Irene Ramalho Santos, William Cain
• Modernism and Copyright (Modernist Literature and Culture), Paul K. Saint-Amour

Featured Partners

HarvardX

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Harvard

Harvard University is devoted to excellence in teaching, learning, and research, and to developing leaders in many disciplines who make a difference globally.

Poetry Foundation

The Poetry Foundation elevates poetry, and promotes communities of poets through Poetry magazine, readings and events, partnerships and programs.

Nautilus

Nautilus is a different kind of science magazine that delivers big-picture science by reporting on a single monthly topic from multiple perspectives.

The Aspen Institute

The Aspen Institute is an educational and policy studies organization based in Washington, DC.

The Nantucket Project

The Nantucket Project celebrates the richness of the human experience through storytelling.