In this course, we will explore the works of major poets from the late 19th to the mid-20th century, with attention to significant intellectual, historical, psychological and spiritual dimensions, as reflected in language and form. We will consider, for instance, Whitman’s Transcendentalism, Hardy’s determinism, Yeats’s engagement with Platonism and the occult, Lawrence’s vitalism, Eliot’s and Auden’s very different approaches to Christianity and other matters, and Stevens’s claims for poetry as a new religion. We will reflect on Romantic, Hellenic, Hebraic, and far Eastern traditions in a new context, one informed by trends such as urbanization and major upheavals, such as World War One, the Irish Troubles, and the Great Depression. We will consider diverse ideas about the cultural, aesthetic, and ethical roles the poet can (or perhaps cannot) play in society. This course will also provide an opportunity for comparing the major Anglophone traditions, with an eye to their complex, often neglected interrelationship. After more briefly examining Hardy, Hopkins, Whitman and Dickinson, we will focus on Yeats, Eliot, the War poets, the Harlem Renaissance poets, Williams, Stevens, and Auden, accompanied by some attention to Lawrence, H.D., Pound, Stein, Moore, Crane and Frost. We will also consider the applicability of the term “Modernism” and ask if we must distinguish among a variety of “Modernisms.”