English 166

Special Topics: Contemporary British and Irish Poetry

Other Readings and Media

All readings will be available in a course reader and/or online.

Description

This course will survey British and Irish poetry from the past sixty years. It is a large and multifaceted body of work, and much of it remains under-read, especially in the U.S. We will consider the development of a late modernist and postmodern aesthetic among contemporary British poets, the ways in which this wonderfully various canon (or set of overlapping canons) registers and reinflects the double crucible of decolonization and globalization, and the disparate pressures (historical, cultural, literary-historical, formal) at work within the poetry.  

We’ll read poems by, among a few others, W.H. Auden, Dylan Thomas, Louis MacNeice, Stevie Smith, Philip Larkin, Thom Gunn, Roy Fisher, Ted Hughes, W.S. Graham, Basil Bunting, Geoffrey Hill, J.H. Prynne, Tom Raworth, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Thomas Kinsella, John Montague, Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon, Michael Longley, Medbh McGuckian, Eavan Boland, Eileán Ní Chuilleanáin, Paul Muldoon, Ciaran Carson, Tom Leonard, Craig Raine, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Geraldine Monk, David Dabydeen, Tony Harrison, Denise Riley, Carol Ann Duffy, Jackie Kay, Simon Armitage, Grace Nichols, Maggie O’Sullivan, Caroline Bergvall, Catherine Walsh, Randolph Healy, Alice Oswald, Kathleen Jamie, Jen Hadfield, Daljit Nagra, and Keston Sutherland. 

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