2020/21

The module provides a critical overview of some of the main currents and writers of poetry in English worldwide since the end of the Second World War. It covers a broad range of formal and linguistic approaches, a variety of poetics, and very different understandings of the relation of poetry in the period to belief, to society, to cultural dynamics, to the sense of self, and to thought. Evolving beyond the heyday of Modernism, poetry has used language from the plain to the intellectually dense, from high to demotic or dialect; it has found subject matter in religion and myth, in history and in the contemporary scene, in the nature of self and affect, in the natural and the manmade worlds, and in the paradoxes of the act of writing itself. Poetry has honoured its age-old debts to society but at the same time has insisted more radically than ever before on its autonomy. The module emphasizes that important poetry in English now originates from many places in the English-speaking world, not only in the traditional centres of the UK and the US.