LIT097 CM - T.S. Eliot and His Circle

This course offers an examination of T.S. Eliot, one of the preeminent poets of the twentieth century. We will consider the entirety of Eliot’s small output of poems and plays and many of his seminal critical essays, studying his relation to traditions of British, European, and classical poetry and his engagement with philosophical, moral, metaphysical, and religious questions. We will pay special attention to issues of modernism, poetic form, and intertextuality, to the idea of a poetic canon, and to the links between poetry and the other arts (music, painting, sculpture). We will also situate Eliot’s work in the context of the broader sociocultural crisis of modernity in the first half of the twentieth century, as well as in its contemporary literary context, spending time on other poets whom Eliot admired and was influenced by, such as Pound and Yeats, but also on poets who rebelled against his influence, such as William Carlos Williams.

Offered: Every other year

Credit: 1

Course Number: LIT 097 CM