Modern American Poetry: the Imagists and Harlem Renaissance
Studies in Poetry EN 340 / United States Studies IN 250

Dr. Randy Brooks, Ph.D.
Directory of the Writing Major

Millikin University
January 4-10 (TuWTrFSSuM) - Immersion Course 2011

Classroom: Media Arts Center
9:00 am - 3:00 pm

description || videos || textbooks || web sites || assignments || schedule
student poetry 2000 || student poetry 2002 || student poetry 2005 || student poetry 2006 || student poetry 2011

Bethany Tabb	Chuck Trabaris	Crystal McAdam	Diedra Cobb	Kay Combs	Todd Jernigan

Course Description:

Modern American Poetry: the Imagists and Harlem Renaissance is a study of early Twentieth Century poets and their attempts to search for new sources and approaches to writing poetry. Both the Imagists and Harlem Renaissance poets turn away from Victorian models of poetry, seeking a new basis for the art of poetry addressing ethical issues of modernist life including issues of alienation, loss of idealistic expectations, and related questions of nationalism, civil rights and democracy.

For the Imagists, the new approach derives from the power of images based on perception and related experiments by exploring various forms of consciousness through poetry, including Chinese, Japanese, Greek and other traditions of expression. Imagist Poets featured include: Adelaide Crapsey, E.E. Cummings, Ezra Pound, Carl Sandburg, Wallace Stevens, and William Carlos Williams.

For the Harlem Renaissance poets, this is an age of celebration of the black community in Harlem, New York with a new source of their work being the shared black experience and related explosion of expressive arts in song, fine arts and literary arts. In this course we explore how these poets respond to the new milieu through their poetry and poetics. Harlem Renaissance Poets featured in this study include: Arna Bontemps, Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, James Weldon Johnson, Claude McKay, Esther Popel, Anne Spencer and Jean Toomer.

Several days will include a video from the Annenberg/CPB Project:

Ezra Pound: American Odyssey. New York Center for Visual History. Washington DC: Annenberg/CPB Project, 1988. A-V. PS3531.O82 E91988

Wallace Stevens: Man Made Out of Words. New York Center for Visual History. Washington DC: Annenberg/CPB Project, 1988. A-V. PS3537.T4753 W31988

Langston Hughes. New York Center for Visual History. Washington DC: Annenberg/CPB Project, 1988. A-V. PS3515.U274 L351988

William Carlos Williams. New York Center for Visual History. Washington DC: Annenberg/CPB Project, 1988. A-V. PS3545.I544 W61988

TEXTS REQUIRED:

Robert Blaisdell, Editor. Imagist Poetry: An Anthology. Dover Thrift Editions, 1999. ISBN: 0486408752

Nikki Giovanni, Editor. Shimmy Shimmy Shimmy Like My Sister Kate: Looking at the Harlem Renaissance Through Poems. New York: Henry Holt & Company, Inc., 1996. ISBN: 0805034943

Ezra Pound. Ezra Pound: Early Poems. Dover Thrift Editions, 1996. ISBN: 0486287459

Carl Sandburg. Carl Sandburg: Chicago Poems. Dover Thrift Editions, 1994. ISBN: 0486280578

John Sherman, Editor. African-American Poetry: An Anthology, 1773-1930. Dover Thrift Editions. ISBN: 048629604-0

Wallace Stevens. The Emperor of Ice Cream and Other Poems. Dover Thrift Editions, 1999. ISBN: 0486408779

William Carlos Williams. Early Poems: William Carlos Williams. Dover Thrift Editions, 1997. ISBN: 0486292940

Web Resources located at: http://munwfile2.millikin.edu/~rbrooks/MApoetry/index.html

e.e. cummings

Adelaide Crapsey

H.D. (Hilda Doolittle)

T.S. Eliot

Ezra Pound

Carl Sandburg 

Wallace Stevens

William Carlos Williams

Harlem Renaisssance Poets

Gwendolyn Brooks

W.E.B. DuBois

Paul Laurence Dunbar

Langston Hughes

Attendance Policy & Grades

You will not be able to complete this immersion course within the immersion schedule unless you attend all seven days.

Types of Assignments

Informal Quick-Writes, Quizzes, Exercises & Planning Work
Quick, informal assignments will be graded with a simple check-system (+) () or (­) indicating completion of the assignment. These grades indicate that

100% (plus) you have done an excellent, thoughtful writing,
50% (check) you have completed the assignment adequately, or
0% (minus) you have not fulfilled the assignment.

Formal Documents
The other assignments are considered formal which means that they should be printed, carefully edited, revised and designed for maximum effectiveness with the intended audience.

(A+=100, A=95, A-=90, B+=88, B=85, B-=80, C+=78, C=75, C-=70, D+=68, D=65, F=1)

Major Assignments