Literature history with reading list

Analyze the function of political and patriotic verse in Revolutionary-era America.

Explain the influence of neoclassicism on early American poetic forms.

Analyze the Connecticut Wits' attempts to create American epic poetry and establish a national literary tradition.

Compare early American poetic nationalism with contemporary British neoclassical traditions.

Identify deistic conceptions of nature in the poetry of the Early Republic.

Analyze how poets like Philip Freneau began to express early Romantic attitudes toward nature, departing from neoclassical conventions.

Analyze the defining characteristics of American Romantic poetry and its differences from European Romanticism.

Analyze the formal innovations and thematic concerns in William Cullen Bryant's nature poetry.

Identify the core philosophical tenets of Transcendentalism as expressed in Emerson's essays and poetry.

Explain the influence of German Idealism and Eastern philosophy on the themes of American Transcendentalist poetry.

Examine the relationship between nature symbolism and spiritual insight in Transcendentalist verse.

Analyze the expression of radical individualism in the poetry of Emerson and other Transcendentalist writers.

Analyze the characteristics and cultural function of the 'Fireside Poets' (Longfellow, Whittier) in antebellum America.

Analyze Longfellow's use of meter and narrative structure in creating accessible poetic narratives.

Analyze Poe's theory of poetry as articulated in 'The Poetic Principle' and 'The Philosophy of Composition'.

Examine Poe's use of sound devices, repetition, and musicality to create emotional effects.

Compare Poe's aestheticism with the moral and didactic approach of the Fireside Poets.

Analyze the use of poetry as a tool for social change in the work of abolitionist poets like John Greenleaf Whittier.

Analyze Whitman's revolutionary use of free verse and its relationship to democratic ideals.

Explain Whitman's concept of the poet as a national bard and democratic spokesman.

Analyze the prosodic features of Whitman's long lines, catalogs, and their rhythmic patterns.

Examine the structure and key themes of 'Song of Myself'.

Analyze Whitman's treatment of the body, sexuality, and the democratic self in his poetry.

Analyze how Whitman constructs a new, inclusive model of American identity in his poetry.

Analyze Dickinson's innovative use of common meter and her variations on hymn forms.

Examine Dickinson's use of compression, ellipsis, and unconventional syntax.

Analyze Dickinson's use of dashes, capitalization, and punctuation as key semantic and rhythmic devices.

Analyze the recurring themes in Dickinson's work: death, immortality, nature, and consciousness.

Compare Dickinson's private, experimental poetics with Whitman's public, expansive voice.

Explain Dickinson's influence on the development of 20th-century lyric poetry.

Identify the principles of Imagism as articulated by Ezra Pound and H.D. (Hilda Doolittle).

Analyze the use of precise imagery and the elimination of ornamental language in Imagist poems.

Examine Pound's concept of 'direct treatment of the thing' and its influence on modern poetics.

Analyze the influence of East Asian poetry forms (e.g., haiku) on Imagist aesthetics.

Compare Imagist aesthetics with the conventions of late 19th-century Symbolist and Georgian poetry.

Analyze the transition from Imagist brevity to the longer, more complex forms of High Modernism.

Analyze the use of fragmentation, juxtaposition, and allusion as primary structural devices in High Modernist poetry.

Examine the 'mythic method' as a way of ordering contemporary experience, particularly in Eliot's 'The Waste Land'.

Analyze the function of persona, irony, and multiple voices in the poetry of T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound.

Identify the function of key literary and mythological allusions in a selected section of 'The Waste Land'.

Examine Pound's use of the ideogrammic method in selected Cantos.

Analyze how Eliot and Pound engage with literary and historical tradition to respond to a perceived cultural crisis.

Analyze the cultural, social, and historical contexts of the Harlem Renaissance poetry movement.

Analyze Langston Hughes's incorporation of jazz rhythms and blues structures into his poetry.

Examine the treatment of racial identity and 'double consciousness' in the verse of W.E.B. Du Bois and Countee Cullen.

Analyze Countee Cullen's synthesis of traditional English poetic forms with African American themes.

Compare different aesthetic debates within the Harlem Renaissance regarding the use of folk traditions versus 'high art' forms.

Analyze William Carlos Williams's principle of 'no ideas but in things' as a localist response to High Modernism.

Examine Williams's development of the variable foot and triadic line in his later poetry.

Analyze Wallace Stevens's philosophical meditations on the relationship between imagination and reality.

Analyze Marianne Moore's use of syllabic verse and the incorporation of quoted text as formal principles.

Contrast the formal innovations of Stevens and Moore with the methods of Eliot and Pound.

Trace Whitman's influence on the development of modernist free verse in the work of William Carlos Williams.

Analyze the defining characteristics of Confessional poetry, focusing on its treatment of taboo personal experience.

Analyze the relationship between formal control and autobiographical intensity in the poetry of Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath.

Examine the oral, performative, and anti-establishment qualities of Beat poetry.

Analyze Allen Ginsberg's use of the long line, anaphora, and prophetic voice in 'Howl'.

Compare the institutional positions of 'academic' Confessional poets and 'counter-cultural' Beat poets in the 1950s-60s.

Analyze the influence of Whitman and William Blake on the Beat poets' formal and thematic choices.

Analyze the aims and aesthetics of the Black Arts Movement as a successor to the Harlem Renaissance.

Examine the poetics of the New York School, focusing on its urban sensibility and conversational tone.

Analyze the emergence of diverse multicultural voices (e.g., Native American, Chicana) in American poetry from the 1970s onward.

Identify the theoretical goals of the Language Poetry movement and its critique of the lyric 'I'.

Analyze the use of disjunction and procedural methods in late 20th-century experimental poetry.

Examine the 'New Formalist' movement as a reaction against the dominance of free verse.

Analyze debates about accessibility, difficulty, and the social function of poetry in the late 20th century.