Modern Poetry
Modern Poetry examines the major American and British poets writing between roughly 1918 and 1940, including Marianne Moore, Robert Frost, T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, and Ezra Pound. The course tracks how the poetic image evolved after the disillusionment of World War I, as poets rejected inherited language systems tied to nationalism, religious transcendence, and formal rationalism, drawing instead on Symbolist tradition, new theories in linguistics and anthropology, Freud, and even Chaplin's films to rethink how images carry meaning. Students read closely across this body of work, tracing the idea of the poet as a kind of language priest and poetry as a stand-in for ritual and faith. Materials from MIT OpenCourseWare include a syllabus, reading list, and assignments; the course is free to audit with no certificate offered.