Langdon Hammer opens his Yale course on modern poetry (ENGL 310) by laying out the semester's readings and requirements, then moves quickly into the poets themselves. He traces how poems by Eliot, Moore, and others first appeared in small magazines like Blast, Broom, and The Criterion before comparing those versions to their later book publications, showing how context shapes a poem's meaning. Photographs accompany introductions to Robert Frost, T. S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, and Wallace Stevens, giving faces to the major figures of early twentieth-century English-language poetry. Hammer moves poet by poet, sketching biography and literary stakes rather than close-reading individual poems in depth, setting up the discussions to come. Recorded in Spring 2007 as the first lecture in Yale's Open Courses series, it functions as a roadmap for the course and a first survey of the modernist poets students will spend the semester with.