BA English Literature and American Studies

This course unit will look at how poetry generations can be understood through debates and positions on poetics formulated in journals and anthologies, and what they reveal about their poetic and social moments, and the ways in which arguments about poetry respond to and shape a century’s debates about the representation of war, gender, race and political change as well as reflecting contemporary debates about artistic function and form.

We will consider:

- What’s the point of a poetry anthology/journal?

- How does any given anthology/journal represent modern and contemporary poetry?

- What values inform the choice of poets and poems?

- How is the anthology organized?

- Are an anthology or journal’s politics more important than the poems?

- Does intended audience determine the content?

- Are anthologies marketed differently to individual collections?

- How important is an editorial?

- Do anthologies/journals last?

The course will study important British anthologies of the past century. Students will give fifteen-minute presentations on each anthology under study.

Classes will consider the work of poets included, enabling us to read and respond to significant modern and contemporary poetry.

   •    Introduce students to a range of significant modern and contemporary poets, journals and poetry anthologies.

   •    Develop critical skills in thinking and writing about poetry.

   •    Develop students’ ability to hone their own writing skills in a critical and scholarly context.

   •    Develop students’ ability to offer useful feedback to other writers.

   •    Encourage students to read and learn from selected examples of modern and contemporary poetry.

• Demonstrate a working knowledge and understanding of the recent history of poetry journals and anthologisation in the UK.
• Show knowledge and understanding of selected examples of contemporary writing, both creative and critical.
• Show knowledge and understanding of the anthology as a genre in its own right, with its own values, ethics and standards.

• Conceive of and assemble a poetry anthology that makes a meaningful intervention into the field.
• Write a scholarly essay that demonstrates understanding of both primary literary texts and secondary scholarly treatments of these texts.

• Read, assimilate and organise a range of contemporary writing and scholarly responses to it.
• Write a serviceable and publishable introduction for an anthology.
• Essay composition, research and bibliography compilation.
• Design/brand an anthology for maximum impact on publication.

•    Produce writing that is stylish, informed and intellectually robust.

•    Formulate a critical response to a variety of genres and forms.

•    Improve creative writing using knowledge acquired.

Jennifer Ashton, ‘Our Bodies, Our Poems’, in Modern Philology Vol. 105, No. 1 (August 2007)

Jane Dowson, ‘Anthologies of Women’s Poetry: Canon-Breakers; Canon-Makers’, in British Poetry from the 1950s to the 1990s, eds. Day and Docherty (Palgrave Macmillan, 1997)

Rachel Hadas, ‘On Poetry Anthologies’, in New England Review Vol. 19, No. 4 (Fall, 1998)

Korte, Schneider, and Lethbridge (eds.), Anthologies of British Poetry: Critical Perspectives from Literary and Cultural Studies (Rodopi, 2000)

Peter Middleton, ’Imagined Readerships and Poetic Innovation in UK Poetry’, in Assembling Alternatives: Reading Postmodern Poetries Transnationally, ed. Romana Huk (Wesleyan, 2003)

Andrew Michael Roberts, ‘The Rhetoric of Value in Recent British Poetry Anthologies’, in Poetry and Contemporary Culture, ed. A. M. Allison and Jonathan Roberts (Edinburgh University Press, 2002)

Robert Sheppard, ‘Review: Elsewhere and Everywhere: Other New (British) Poetries’, in Critical Survey, Vol. 10, No. 1, Contemporary British Male Poets (1998), pp. 17-32

Juliana Spahr and Stephanie Young, ‘Numbers Trouble’, in Chicago Review, Vol. 53, No. 2/3 (Autumn 2007)