Langdon Hammer closes his Yale course Modern Poetry (ENGL 310) with a final lecture on Elizabeth Bishop, centered on her poem "Over 2,000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance" and her ambivalence about home. Hammer situates Bishop within the modernist idea that poetry takes over work once done by religion, tracing connections to Frost, Eliot, Stevens, and Crane. He turns to Bishop's "Visits to St. Elizabeths" as a formal challenge to modernist ambition, pairing it with Auden's claim that "poetry makes nothing happen." The lecture works through comparative readings of Pound, Marianne Moore, H.D., and Auden before arguing that Bishop and Auden ultimately present poetry as an answer to modern alienation, a way of renewing human community through communication. As the last session of the course, it functions as a synthesis of the poets studied throughout the semester.