This semester, we will explore the works of major poets of the second half of the twentieth century with attention to significant intellectual, historical, psychological and political dimensions, as reflected in language and form. Poets will likely include the following: later Eliot, later Williams, later Auden, Olson, Lewis, MacNiece, Reed, Jarrell, Keith Douglas, Bishop, Lowell, Plath, Sexton, Berryman, Ted Hughes, Brooks, Baraka, Hayden, Dylan Thomas, Roethke, James Wright, Kunitz, Larkin, Gunn, Ginsberg, Creeley, O’Hara, Koch, Ashbery, Bernstein, Rich, Levertov, Hill, Walcott, Heaney, Hass, Oliver, Gluck, and some younger living poets. We may also consider the contributions of non-Anglophone poets such as Lorca, Mayakovsky, Akhmatova, Levi, Cavafy, Montale, Vallejo, Neruda and Milosz. The work of this period is naturally informed in complex ways by very troubling historical events such as World War II, the Holocaust, and the Stalinist Terror. We consider formalist, biographical, psychological, feminist, sociohistorical, deconstructive and other approaches to the material. In the process, we will debate the merits of terms and categories such as postmodernism, Confessional poetry, the Black Mountain School, the Beats, the Movement, the New York School, and postcolonial poetry.