Modern poetry will center on major works in British and American poetry during the period 1885-1945, and will engage with the main intellectual movements and formal literary innovations central to Modernist poetry. We will consider the changing authorial and public perceptions of the functions of poetry ushered in by Modernism, and the changing notions of literary tradition and culture in an era marked by the decline of British Imperial power, and the corresponding rise of the United States to primacy. Among the poets whose work we will study are T.S. Eliot, W.B. Yeats, Marianne Moore, H.D., Rupert Brooke and the poets of World War I, Langston Hughes, Djuna Barnes, Wallace Stevens, Gertrude Stein, W.H. Auden, and Samuel Beckett.