Module Information

This module introduces students to the extraordinary work of a group of second-generation modernist writers from both sides of the Atlantic, including Basil Bunting, Lorine Niedecker, Charles Olson, and Lynette Roberts, who have been unjustly marginalised or ignored by canon-making critical surveys. Understanding late modernism as the persistence or living on of modernist writing into the three decades after the end of the Second World War (1945-1975), the module has close reading of key texts – such as Bunting’s Briggflatts and Niedecker’s ‘Paean to Place’ – at its heart. Tracing the affinities that late modernist poems have with high modernist texts such as T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and Ezra Pound’s The Cantos, it will also encourage students to discover what is distinctive about modernist poetics in the second half of the twentieth century. To that end, individual sessions will consider the political orientations of late modernist poems, their profound interests in place and geography, as well as their innovative experiments with language and form.