Poetic Modernism

(Seminar). Modernism can find its roots anywhere from the fall of Constantinople in 1453 to the turn of the 20th century; and it finds them differently depending on whether one refers to “modernism” or “modernity.” For the purposes of this class, modernism’s beginning will be situated in about the middle of the nineteenth century, in Baudelaire’s use of the neologism modernité to describe the new urban (and colonialist) sensibility that emerged in the Paris of the time, and more particularly in the seismic poetic shifts that then began to take place. And although many versions or trajectories of poetic modernism can be traced, we will attempt to follow a series of lines that tie the French version of it to the emergence of diverse American voices. Poets to be discussed will include Rimbaud, Apollinaire, Ponge, Crane, Hughes, Eliot, Moore, Stevens and Williams.