SE2591: Four English Poets of the Twentieth Century

School English Literature
Department Code ENCAP
Module Code SE2591
External Subject Code 100319
Number of Credits 20
Level L6
Language of Delivery English
Module Leader Professor Katie Gramich
Semester Spring Semester
Academic Year 2015/6

Outline Description of Module

This module offers the opportunity to make a close study of a range of poems by four twentieth-century English poets, namely Thomas Hardy (1840-1928), Edward Thomas (1878-1917), Ted Hughes (1930-1998), and Alice Oswald (1966-    ). Although very different from one another, these poets share a passionate interest in place, landscape, and the world of nature, and the module’s focus will be on their differing visions of these. All four poets, moreover, have a close connection to the south of England – Devon, Dorset, Cornwall, the South Downs and, in Thomas’s case, to south Wales. We will look at the construction of these specific places in their poems, and the meanings attached to them, for example, the eponymous river in Oswald’s Dart or Cornwall in Hardy’s poems of 1912. Another feature which links these poets is a concern with violence and war, and their effects on the human and natural world: we will analyse their exploration of these themes and consider the gendered aspects of their respective visions. Examining the work of these poets in turn will allow us to explore an alternative tradition of English poetry in the twentieth century, one different from mainstream accounts.

On completion of the module a student should be able to

show an informed knowledge of the characteristics of the four poets’ work; demonstrate enhanced skills of close textual analysis; relate her/his own critical readings of poetry to those of published critics; discuss the poets’ place in twentieth-century literary history.

How the module will be delivered

Timetabled sessions comprise a weekly lecture and two weekly seminars. The lectures will introduce each poet’s oeuvre, contextualize the poetry and provide students with an overview of the field. In the seminars, students are expected to be prepared to discuss the poems and to give presentations and/or lead discussion. Lectures are usually supplemented with handouts, which are also normally made available to students on Learning Central. Audio is used occasionally in this module, as well as Powerpoint. 

WHAT IS EXPECTED OF ME?

Students are expected to attend and participate in the lectures and seminars for all modules on which they are enrolled. Students with good cause to be absent should inform their module leaders, who will provide the necessary support. Students with extenuating circumstances should submit the Extenuating Circumstances Form in accordance with the School’s procedures.

The total number of hours which students are expected to devote to each 20-credit module is 200. Of these, 30 hours will be contact hours with staff (lectures and seminars); the remaining 170 hours should be spent on self-directed learning for that module (reading, preparation for seminars, research, reflection, formative writing, assessed work, exam revision).  There are also additional seminars and workshops that students are able to attend.

Skills that will be practised and developed

The seminars will be used to hone students’ skills of textual analysis and to afford them opportunities to practise presentation and oral discussion skills. Students will also be given the opportunity to write formative, unassessed essays and close readings of poems. This, together with the work done for the assessed essays, will enhance students’ subject-specific knowledge of prosody, literary history, the strategic use of rhetoric, and the deployment of critical discourse. The written and oral practice will enhance students’ awareness of register and will help to improve skills in building an argument.

How the module will be assessed

The module is assessed by means of two pieces of written work. The first, shorter essay is an exercise in close critical analysis of a single poem, which the student is expected to contextualise within the period or oeuvre of the particular poet. The second, longer essay demands a broader view of poetry in the period and gives an opportunity to analyse the work of one or more poets in greater detail. Students will have had an opportunity to submit unassessed, formative pieces in preparation for this assessed work.

Essay (1200 words) = 30%
Approx date of assessment in March

Essay (2000 words) = 70%
Approx date of assessment in May

Assessment Breakdown

Type % Title Duration(hrs)
Written Assessment 30 Essay 1 N/A
Written Assessment 70 Essay 2 N/A

Syllabus content

The module sketches an alternative map of the development of English poetry during the twentieth century. We will pay close attention to the poetry itself, considering the specific ways in which the poets respond to tradition and to the world around them, forging their own idiosyncratic aesthetics.

Week 1 lecture: Introductory: English poetry of the twentieth century

Seminar 1: Thomas Hardy, ‘The Darkling Thrush’

Seminar 2: Thomas Hardy, ‘Domicilium’

Week 2 lecture: Thomas Hardy and the Modern Elegy

Seminar 1: Personal Hardy, ‘The Voice,’ ‘Beeny Cliff’

Seminar 2: Public Hardy, ‘Drummer Hodge’, ‘In Time of the Breaking of Nations’

Week 3 lecture: Thomas Hardy: vision and memory

Seminar 1: ‘Wessex Heights’, ‘The place on the map’

Seminar 2: ‘Lines to a Movement in Mozart’s E Flat Symphony’, Afterwards’

Week 4 lecture: Edward Thomas and the poetry of place

Seminar 1: Edward Thomas, ‘As the  Team’s Head Brass,’ ‘Rain’

Seminar 2: Edward Thomas, ‘Adlestrop’, ‘The Mountain Chapel’

Week 5 lecture: Edward Thomas: vulnerability and the modern sensibility

Seminar 1: ‘Old Man’, ‘The Unknown Bird’

Seminar 2: ‘Roads’, ‘Out in the Dark’

Week 6 lecture: READING WEEK

Week 7  lecture: Ted Hughes – nature red in tooth and claw

Seminar 1: ‘Wodwo’

Seminar 2: ‘Pike’

Week 8 lecture: Ted Hughes – the shamanic vision

Seminar 1: ‘Crow’s account of St. George’

Seminar 2: ‘The River’, ‘Torridge’

Week 9 lecture: Alice Oswald: Dart - voices of the river

Seminar 1: Dart, lines 1-113

Seminar 2: Dart – ‘Sealwatcher’, ll. 1358-1381

Week 10 lecture: Alice Oswald: Memorial – recovering the lost voices

Seminar 1: Listening to Oswald recite the whole poem

Seminar 2: Memorial - extracts

Week 11 lecture: Conclusion and revision

Seminar 1: Writing exercises

Seminar 2: Writing exercises

The main readings for this module are available online via the LION database. Secondary reading includes books and journal articles, some of which are available online.

Essential Reading and Resource List

INDICATIVE READING AND RESOURCE LIST:

Poems by Thomas Hardy, Edward Thomas, and Ted Hughes can be read online via the Literature Online (LION) database (accessible through the University Voyager library catalogue). A good range of Alice Oswald’s verse is also available on LION; however, her most recent collection, Memorial,  is not yet on LION and is listed below. These resources will be supplemented as necessary with photocopies of individual poems. Students should consider acquiring an edition of the work of the poet or poets on whom they wish to concentrate in their longer essay; these are the recommended texts:

Primary

Hardy, Thomas, The Complete Poems, ed. James Gibson (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001)

Hughes, Ted, Collected Poems, ed. Paul Keegan (London: Faber, 2003)

Oswald, Alice, Dart (London: Faber, 2002)

Oswald, Alice, Memorial: an excavation of the Iliad (London: Faber, 2012)

Thomas, Edward, The Annotated Collected Poems, ed. Edna Longley (Newcastle: Bloodaxe Books, 2008) [R. George Thomas’s edition is also good]

Background Reading and Resource List

Secondary material (indicative)

Hamilton, Ian, ed., The Oxford companion to twentieth-century poetry in English (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 1994)

Hobsbaum, Philip, Tradition and experiment in English poetry, (London: Macmillan, 1979)

Howarth, Peter, British poetry in the age of modernism (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005)

Leighton, Angela, On form: poetry, aestheticism, and the legacy of a word (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2007)

Martin, Graham & P. N. Furbank (eds.) Twentieth Century Poetry: Critical Essays and Documents (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1975)

O’Brien, Sean, Journeys to the interior: ideas of England in contemporary poetry (Tarset, Northumberland: Bloodaxe Books, 2012)

O’Neill, Michael and Madeleine Callaghan, Twentieth century British and Irish poetry: Hardy to Mahon (Malden, Mass.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011)

Picot, Edward, Outcasts from Eden: ideas of landscape in British poetry since 1945 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1997)

Roberts, Neil, ed., A companion to twentieth-century poetry (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003)

Sampson, Fiona, Beyond the lyric: a map of contemporary British poetry (London: Chatto & Windus, 2012)

Smith, Carrie and Lisa Stead, eds., The boundaries of the literary archive: reclamation and representation (Farnham; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2013)

Individual Poets (indicative):

Thomas Hardy

Mallett, Phillip, Thomas Hardy in context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013)

Taylor, Dennis, Hardy’s metres and Victorian prosody: with a metrical appendix of Hardy’s stanza forms (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988)

Edward Thomas

Hollis, Matthew, The Last Years of Edward Thomas (London: Faber, 2011)

Motion, Andrew, The Poetry of Edward Thomas (London: Routledge, 1980)

Ted Hughes

Bentley, Paul, The poetry of Ted Hughes: language, illusion and beyond (London; New York: Longman, 1998)

Gifford, Terry, The Cambridge Companion to Ted Hughes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011)

Alice Oswald

Howarth, Peter, ‘Water’s Soliloquy: Soundscape and Environment in Alice Oswald’s Dart’ in Neal Alexander and David Cooper, eds., Poetry and Geography: Space and Place in Post-War Poetry (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013) pp. 190-203.

Porter, Max, Interview with Alice Oswald, The White Review, August, 2014, available at: http://www.thewhitereview.org/interviews/interview-with-alice-oswald/


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