Teaching Responsibility

LJMU Schools involved in Delivery:

Humanities and Social Science

Learning Methods

Lecture
Seminar
Tutorial

Module Offerings

5108ENGL-JAN-MTP

Aims

1. To introduce students to a range of poetry from different periods, in a variety of forms, and from diverse cultural traditions. 2. To survey the contemporary context for poetry writing, reading, and performance, and evaluate the current status and future direction of poetry in English. 3. To clarify, demystify, and assist students’ understanding of complex and difficult forms of poetry, including works in the modernist and postmodernist tradition. 4. To develop an appropriate critical vocabulary to appreciate and analyse poetry and the techniques that are used to create it.

Learning Outcomes

1.
Demonstrate awareness of a variety of poetry from different periods, from different cultural traditions, and from the world of contemporary poetry publishing.
2.
Show an understanding of complex and difficult poetic texts.
3.
Deploy an appropriate critical vocabulary in the close analysis of poetry.
4.
Make appropriate comparisons and distinctions between the meaning or thematic content of a poem, and its formal and aesthetic effects and techniques.

Module Content

Outline Syllabus:The syllabus will cover a range of poetry in English, especially some major writers not covered elsewhere in the degree (for example in period modules). Indicative authors and topics include: Seamus Heaney and the Beowulf-poet; Simon Armitage and ‘Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’; anonymous lyrics from the Middle Ages; early modern anonymous ballads and street poetry; nineteenth-century dialect poetry; John Clare; Emily Dickinson; Gerard Manley Hopkins; W. B. Yeats; Elizabeth Bishop; W. H. Auden; Sylvia Plath; Philip Larkin; the contemporary lyric; poetry and popular music; performance poetry; contemporary experimental poetry.
Module Overview:
This module enables you to develop a critical vocabulary to enhance your understanding of poetry. You will be introduced to a range of poetry from different periods, in different forms and from different cultural locations. Alongside this, you will learn to identify the aesthetic qualities of different poetic traditions.
Additional Information:This module is intended to speak closely to our Programme Learning Objective relating to the teaching of diversity and race. In the module there will be significant aspects of our de-colonized curriculum, including the study of primary and secondary texts with authors from BAME backgrounds. Poetry Matters is a core module for single honours students (and optional for those taking joint honours) which focuses on how to read, understand, and enjoy poetry. Although it is mostly focused on twentieth-century and contemporary poetry in English, it is not a period-based or thematically-organized module. Neither is it intended as a survey of modern poetry. The writers covered will assist students to appreciate some major developments in the medium over the last century, and will help them to think about the current state and future direction of poetry in English and in English studies. The module encourages students to develop close reading skills, in particular. during and after the 2020 decolonisation curriculum enhancement project, a significant amount of material was added to this course representing a diversified curriculum. BAME authors covered have included but are not limited to Derek Walcott (Nobel prize, 1992), Amanda Gorman (2021 presidential inauguration poem), Daljit Nagra (Forward Prize 2007), Kei Miller (Forward Prize, 2014) Roger Robinson, (T. S. Eliot Prize, 2019), Tracy K. Smith (Pulitzer Prize 2011 and Poet Laureate of the US 2017-19), Linton Kwesi Johnson and several other spoken word, dub poetry, or hip-hop artists, and it is intended that this core module should present a similarly curriculum representing the diversity of contemporary poetry in English in future delivery.

Assessments

Centralised Exam
Essay