WHAT WILL SUFFICE: INCURSIONS INTO MODER

Beginning with the radical breaks of Whitman, Dickinson, and Baudelaire, this course traces how, over the last two centuries, poets across continents have redefined what poetry can be in the face of modernity, exile, revolution, and personal crisis. Our focus will not be on national traditions in isolation but on the resonances and tensions that emerge when poets in different cultures and eras confront similar questions: What forms can poetry take in times of upheaval? How does exile reshape the lyric voice? When does poetry become a vehicle for revolution? And, in Wallace Stevens’s words, what will suffice for poetry when the theatre of the world has changed so profoundly? We will attend closely to the central issue of translation: how meaning and form shift across languages, and how those shifts shape our understanding of what poetry can do.

We will focus on selections from a single author in each class. Readings and viewings will range from canonical figures such as Emily Dickinson, Pablo Neruda, and Anna Akhmatova to experimental voices like Tristan Tzara, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, and Ntozake Shange, alongside contemporary lyricists like Lana Del Rey and Kendrick Lamar.