This course explores the history of anglophone poetry from about 1837 to about 1970, the accession of Victorian through High Modernism to the beginning of poetic resistance to modernism. We shall read outstanding poets, from Britain and the US, such as Whitman, Dickinson, Yeats, Stevens, Eliot, Pound, H.D., Moore ,McKay and other poets of the Harlem Renaissance, Owen, Cummings, Langston Hughes, Geoffrey Hill and others. We shall explore ways modernist poets rethought meter and rhythm in poetry to fashion what we call free verse, and think about both poetics shaped by nation and region and poetics reaching beyond nation to fashion a transnational modernism. Both students with no experience of poetry and those familiar with the genre are equally welcome.