Teaching Modernist Poetry

CHARLES BERNSTEIN Donald T. Regan Professor of English and Comparative Literature, University of Pennsylvania, USAPETER BARRY Professor of English, University of Wales, Aberystwyth, UKAL FILREIS Kelly Professor, Director of the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing, and Faculty Director of the Kelly Writers House, University of Pennsylvania, USADREW MILNE Judith E Wilson Lecturer in Drama and Poetry, University of Cambridge, UKPETER NICHOLLS Professor of English, New York University, USAREDELL OLSEN Course Director, MA in Poetic Practice, Royal Holloway, University of London, UKROBERT SHEPPARD Professor of Poetry and Poetics, Edge Hill University, UKCAROLE SWEENEY Lecturer in Modern Literature, Department of English and Comparative Literature, Goldsmiths, University of London, UKHARRIET TARLO Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing, Sheffield Hallam University, UKMICHAEL H. WHITWORTH Tutorial Fellow of Merton College, Oxford and University Lecturer, University of Oxford, UK

• Series Preface Notes on Contributors Introduction: Pedagogy and Poetics; N.Marsh The Elusive Allusion: Poetry as Exegesis; P.Nicholls Politics and Modernist Poetics; D.Milne Science and Poetry; M.H.Whitworth 'The New comes forward': Anglo-American Modernist Women Poets; H.Tarlo Race, Modernism and Institutions; C.Sweeney Contemporary British Modernisms; P.Barry Modernist Pedagogy at the End of the Lecture: IT and the Poetics Classroom; A.Filreis Reading and Writing Through Found Materials: from modernism to contemporary practice; R.Olsen Experiment in Practice and Speculation in Poetics; R.Sheppard Wreading, Writing, Wresponding; C.Bernstein Early Modernism, Late Modernism, and Interpretative Ingenuity; P.Middleton Index

'This valuable collection touches on a wide range of concerns: how might individual poems be discussed productively in seminars; how can questions of form be related to historical issues; should allusions be tracked down and explicated or should they be left to resonate in readers' minds, opening interpretation up rather than closing it down; to what extent is it reasonable to speak of two "modernisms", the "break" between them being roughly marked by the Second World War; how can teachers address modernism's often reactionary politics and how might pedagogy be radicalised... All the essays published here have valuable contributions to make to these questions, but those by Peter Nicholls, Drew Milne, Harriet Tarlo and Peter Middleton are especially rewarding. This volume will not be of interest to just teachers of modernist history but also to researchers; the emphasis it places on pedagogy is especially useful, but most essays have equally valuable things to say about the history, intellectual range, linguistic complexity and political implications of modernist poetry and its continuing legacies.' - Routledge ABES June 2011