Langdon Hammer's Modern Poetry course at Yale (ENGL 310) turns to the early work of Elizabeth Bishop, framed as a late point in modernism's arc. Hammer opens with Bishop's essay "Dimensions for a Novel," tracing how she reworks Eliot's idea of tradition from "Tradition and the Individual Talent" into a theory of literary construction. He then reads through three poems in sequence: "The Map," examined as an early statement of Bishop's interest in geography and the making of imagined worlds; "The Gentleman of Shalott," treated as a meditation on perception and self-division; and "Sandpiper," read as a late reflection on finding coherence in an unstable world. The lecture moves poem by poem with close textual attention, building toward a picture of Bishop's poetics of observation. Recorded in spring 2007 as part of Yale's Open Courses program.