This course is an introductory survey of twentieth- and twenty-first-century American poetry, but we will commence with Whitman and Dickinson, two predecessors and enablers. The emphasis will be on learning to appreciate particular poets and poems, but a recurrent theme too will be poetry’s role in a democracy: is poetry really an esoteric art for the “educated” few, as some imply, or has poetry in the last two centuries played a crucial role in shaping both democratic citizens and a sense of democratic culture? What are the connections between changing poetic forms and the changing ways we re-imagine the form of our communities, our nation, and our relation to the world?

The primary textbook for English 53 is Cary Nelson’s Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry, Volume II, from Oxford. In addition to the anthology, we will use its excellent accompanying website material at http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps.
Other required readings will include Craig Santos Perez’s marvelous and urgent recent book of poems about climate change, Habitat Threshold, plus a rich set of other poems posted on the English 53 Moodle site.