Annotation
Summer Semester 2025 Course Outline
Course Lecturer: Stephan Delbos, MFA, PhD
This course surveys American poetry from the mid-nineteenth century to the early twenty-first century, emphasizing stylistic continuities and disruptions, transnational influences, and the impact of technology, sociology and politics on the choices poets make with words. Beginning with Walt Whitman, the course examines many of the most significant movements and moments in American poetry and illuminates its continuous evolution between 1850 and 2025. Upon completion of the course, students will have a more comprehensive understanding of American poetry and, hopefully, a deeper appreciation of it.
Requirements
Attendance and class participation
Weekly short responses to readings
Class presentation
Final essay
Optional 2nd essay for a ZK
Attendance: You are required to attend all class meetings on time.
Class presentation: Each student is required to deliver a five-minute presentation on a specific topic, poem, or poet.
Final essay: Students will write a final essay of 2,000 words on one of the poets or topics we’ve covered in class. The subject will be discussed with the teacher in advance. Primary and secondary sources are required. The essay must be typed in Times New Roman 12-point font and double-spaced. Title the essay, number the pages, and staple them together in the top left corner. Late papers will not be accepted without a legitimate excuse. In addition, students wanting to produce a second graded essay for a ZK may do so: required length: 2,000-3,000 words; subjects to be discussed with the teacher. All essays must follow departmental essay guidelines.
School Policies
Course lecturers will fail any piece of work that they feel shows clear signs of having been plagiarized.
Contact details stephan.delbos@ff.cuni.cz
Course Schedule
Week 1: Songs of Myselves: 19th Century Roots and Routes
Selected Readings: Walt Whitman; Mercy Warren; Paul Laurence Dunbar; Ralph Waldo Emerson; Emily Dickinson; Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Discussion: Syllabus review; class expectations; lecture on the roots and routes of modern American poetry; free verse and received forms
Homework: Read and prepare for discussion/presentation
Week 2: Against My Ruin: Mid-period Modernism
Selected Readings: Ezra Pound; T. S. Eliot; Robert Frost; Hilda Doolittle; Amy Lowell
Discussion: What is/was Modernism?
Homework: Read and prepare for discussion/presentation
Week 3: If We Must Die: Black Modernism in Harlem
Selected Readings: Claude McKay; Langston Hughes; Gwendolyn Bennett
Discussion: The African American experience as substance for Modernist poetry
Homework: Read and prepare for discussion/presentation
Week 4: To Brooklyn Bridge: Modernism Strikes Back
Selected Readings: Marianne Moore; Kenneth Patchen; Kenneth Rexroth; Hart Crane; Kenneth Fear-ing
Discussion: The outliers of modernism
Homework: Read and prepare for discussion/presentation
Week 5: The New American Poetry and Cold War Nationalism
Selected Readings: Frank O’Hara; Charles Olson; Robert Duncan; William Carlos Williams; Elizabeth Bishop; Sylvia Plath; Barbara Guest; Helen Adam; Madeline Gleason
Discussion: What was the New American Poetry?
Homework: Read and prepare for discussion/presentation
Week 6: Reassessing the Cold War Canon
Selected Readings: Margaret Atwood; Robert Lowell; Gregory Corso; Thomas McGrath; Dudley Fitts; Amiri Baraka; Robert Creeley; Donald Hall
Discussion: How were poets affected by the Cold War?
Homework: Read and prepare for discussion/presentation
Week 7: Beats, Squares and Rod McKuen
Selected Readings: Allen Ginsberg; Lawrence Ferlinghetti; Ted Jones; Jack Spicer; Stephen Jonas; John Wieners; Rod McKuen
Discussion: Post-war rebellion in American poetry
Homework: Read and prepare for discussion/presentation
Week 8: A Girl is a Girl is a Girl: “Feminist” Poetics
Selected Readings: Eileen Miles; Denise Levertov; Adrienne Rich; Susan Howe; Audre Lorde; Rita Dove; Rachel Blau DuPlessis
Discussion: Poets of second-wave and third-wave feminism
Homework: Read and prepare for discussion/presentation
Week 9: “I HATE SPEECH”: Language Poetry and the Post-Avant
Selected Readings: Lyn Hejinian; Ron Silliman; Charles Bernstein; Carla Harryman; David Bromige
Discussion: What is Language Poetry?
Homework: Read and prepare for discussion/presentation
Week 10: Thinkers or Readers: Conceptual Poetry and Uncreative Writing
Reading: Kenneth Goldsmith; Vanessa Place
Discussion: Uncreativity and textual appropriation
Homework: Read and prepare for discussion/presentation
Week 11: New Formalisms; Gnosticisms
Selected Readings: James Merrill; Nathaniel Mackey; Fred Moten; Peter Gizzi
Discussion: Spirits and forms at the turn of the twenty-first century
Homework: Write final essay proposal
Week 12: “you are in desperate need of yourself”: Social Media and Identity Poetics
Selected Readings: Rupi Kaur; Maggie Smith; Patricia Lockwood; Atticus; Ilya Kaminsky; Danez Smith
Discussion: Digital songs of digital selves: Poetry in the 2020s
Homework: Finish final essay, which is due two weeks after the final class
