Syllabus

Weeks 1-2            Course introduction and overview: mapping English poetry after the Second World War; from Modernism to postmodernism. We will read a range of poems by Philip Larkin, Wendy Cope, Kieran Carson and other contemporary poets. Background reading: Peter Finch, ‘British Poetry Since 1945’ (article provided by the tutor)      

 
Week 3            The Movement (key poets: Philip Larkin, Elizabeth Jennings, Kingsley Amis)
 
Week 4            Poetry and national identity after the 1950s (Fleur Adcock, Peter Reading, Peter Didsbury, Charles Boyle)
 
Week 5            Study of Ted Hughes
 
Week 6            The history of twentieth-century British women’s poetry (reading: extracts from Vicki Bertram, Kicking Daffodils, and Dowson and Entwhistle, A History of Twentieth-Century British Women’s Poetry); key poets: Stevie Smith, Lavinia Greenlaw, Kathleen Raine, Veronica Forrest-Thomson, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Wendy Cope, Sylvia Plath
 
Week 7            Film: East is East
Study of Carol Ann Duffy
 
Week 8            Contemporary Irish poetry (Background: Yeats and the Irish Renaissance); Seamus Heaney, Nuala ni Dhomhnaill, Eavan Boland (other examples: Mary Dorcey, Paul Muldoon, Derek Mahon, Paul Durcan, Brendan Kelly, Dermot Bolger, Ciaran Carson, Maeve McGuckian). Background reading: Ailbhe Smyth, ‘Contemporary Irish Women’s Poetry’ in Kicking Daffodils; Sean O’Brien, The Firebox- Poetry in Britain and Ireland
 
Week 9            Contemporary Scottish poetry (Example poets: Hugh MacDiarmid, Iain Hamilton Finlay, Edwin Morgan, Douglas Dunn, Iain Crichton-Smith, Robert Newton, Tom Leonard, Liz Lochhead, Jackie Kay, Robert Crawford, Sheena Blackhall, Kate Clanchy, Kathleen Jamie, W. N. Herbert).   Background reading: Douglas Dunn, The Faber Book of Twentieth-Century Scottish Poetry (1993); Helen Kidd, ‘Writing Near the Fault Line: Scottish Women Poets and the Topography of Tongues’ in Kicking Daffodils 
 
Week 10            Contemporary Welsh poetry (Example poets: R. S. Thomas, Gillian Clarke, Owen Sheers, Menna Elfyn); background reading: James Davies, A Swansea Anthology (1996); Dannie Abse, Welsh Retrospective (1997); Don Paterson and David Williams, ‘Scotland, England, Ireland and Wales’ (http://www.thepoetryhouse.org, copy provided
 
Week 11            Working-class and regional poetry (Example poets: Tony Harrison, Donald Davie, Ian McMillan, Sean O’ Brien; Simon Armitage, Geoff Hatterlsey)  
 
Week 12            Study of Simon Armitage 
 
Week 13            Poetry and ethnicity (Example poets: Linton Kwesi Johnson, David Dabydeen, Grace Nichols, Jackie Kay, Sujata Bhatt)
 
Weeks 14/15 Film: Brick Lane
 
International poetry scene (Background reading: Neil Roberts, A Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry, 2001; The Postcolonial Web; Mark Willhardt, Who’s who in twentieth-century world poetry, 2000).  
 
FINAL EXAM