English 377: Modern Poetry, Painting, and Music

Alfred Stieglitz, The Steerage, 1907

Course Syllabus

Ezra Pound

Gertrude Stein

Pablo Picasso

T. S. Eliot

W. C. Williams

Wallace Stevens

Hart Crane

Langston Hughes

Robert Creeley

Allen Ginsberg

Sylvia Plath

John Ashbery

Frank O'Hara

Assignments

Joseph Conte's
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English 377: Modern Poetry, Painting, and Music

Prof. Joseph Conte

Fall 1999

This course will address a special, interdisciplinary topic: the relationship of modern poetry to developments in music and the visual arts. Our practice in the classroom will be to consider simultaneously the literary text, art reproductions, and sound recordings, utilizing the technology classroom’s access to the Internet and CD-ROM based materials. In this multimedia environment we will examine the profound effect that the innovations in concert music, the emergence of jazz, and the adoption of new techniques, perspectives, and materials in painting had on the written word. American writers such as Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams, and Wallace Stevens took an active interest in the careers of contemporary musicians and artists, often gathering in New York, London, and Paris to exchange ideas and promote their work. Thus it is a reasonable suspicion that much modern American poetry cannot be fully or easily understood until presented within the context of developments in music and the visual arts.

Any number of juxtapositions and combinations leap to mind, and we will make every effort to experience as many as possible. Williams, an amateur painter, was influenced by the readymades of Marcel Duchamp, and by such painters of the American scene as Charles Sheeler and Charles Demuth. Marsden Hartley was accomplished as both poet and painter. Gertrude Stein traded portraits with Picasso and other Cubists, then collaborated with Virgil Thomson on the operas Four Saints in Three Acts and The Mother of Us All. Igor Stravinsky’s ballet, The Rite of Spring, with its irregular rhythms and harsh dissonance, may (or may not) elucidate T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land ("April is the cruellest month"). Jazz forms have a significant influence on the poetic forms of Hart Crane’s The Bridge and Langston Hughes’s Weary Blues. Impressionist, Surrealist, and Cubist paintings inspire many of the greatest poems of Wallace Stevens. If time permits, we will look and listen to more recent collaborations such as Frank O’Hara’s association with the New York school, Allen Ginsberg’s readings to jazz accompaniment, and John Cage’s experiments in programmatic composition and writing. Other combinations of poet, painter, and musician are possible.

Last Revised on Sunday, October 3, 1999