john ashbery continued

A big image of Parmigianino's Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror.

Andrew Marvell's seventeenth-century poem "Tom May's Death," which begins "As one put drunk into the Packet-boat."

A selection of prose by John Ashbery now available online.

The Flow Chart Foundation's fascinating, and necessarily incomplete, catalog of other artists' later responses to Ashbery's works.

The French children's song about the famous bridge in Avingnon, and Walt Whitman's poem "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" (compare both to "Wet Casements").

What appears to be a licensed online video clip of the Warner Brothers cartoon "Daffy Duck in Hollywood," the basis for Ashbery's poem of the same name.

The Univ. of Illinois Urbana-Champaign's Modern American Poetry site has, of course, a page of comments on Ashbery.

Meghan O'Rourke of Slate: How to read John Ashbery.

Images from New York painting during the 1950s: Robert Rauschenberg's Untitled (1955). Larry Rivers' The Accident (1957). Grace Hartigan's The Vendor (1956).

Some of the art-- high and otherwise-- inside Ashbery's house. (Scroll down for more art.)

On Locus Solus, the magazine Ashbery edited from Paris in the early 1960s.

john ashbery

The John Ashbery Research Center, a.k.a. Flow Chart Foundation.

An ample set of writings and photographs about Ashbery's house.

Andrew Marvell's seventeenth-century poem "The Picture of Little T. C. in a Prospect of Flowers."

A very non-academic edition of Ella Wheeler Wilcox's poem "Wishing."

Some poems by John Clare, and some more poems by John Clare, and a short recent review-essay about Clare's work and life.

langston hughes: ask your mama

People named in Hughes's Ask Your Mama (incomplete list):

"Cultural Exchange": Lena Horne, Marian Anderson, Harry Belafonte, Sidney Poitier, George Schuyler, Hughes himself, Ralph Ellison, Shalom (or Sholom) Aleichem, James Baldwin, Leontyne Price, Kwame Nkrumah, Fidel Castro, Sekou Touré, Jomo Kenyatta, Martin Luther King, Rufus Clement, Governor Orville Faubus, Senator James O. Eastland

"Ride, Red, Ride": Castro, Adam Clayton Powell

"Shades of Pigment": Eastland, D. F. Malan, Lotte Lenya

"Ode to Dinah": Dinah Washington, Mahalia Jackson, Blind Lemon Jefferson, (allusion to Vachel Lindsay's "The Congo")

"Horn of Plenty": Katherine Dunham, Bill "Bojangles" Robinson, Eric Dolph, Billy Strayhorn, Nina Simone, Louis Armstrong, Charles Mingus, Richard Wright, Joe Glasser, Goerge Sokolsky

"Gospel Cha-Cha": Erzulie and other Haitian voodoo gods and goddesses, Toussaint L'Ouverture, Marie Laveau, John Jasper

"Is It True": Alan Lomax

"Ask Your Mama": Patrica Lumumba, Louis Armstrong, Nat "King" Cole, Touré, Emmett Till

"Bird In Orbit": Eartha Kitt, Josephine Baker, Richard Nixon, Charlie Parker, Aimé Cesaire, Leopold Sedar Senghor...

The Naropa Institute's group bloggers set out to annotate the whole of Ask Your Mama.

more on adrienne rich

Rich's biographical page at the Academy of American Poets.

"Permeable Membrane," Rich's quite recent essay on poetry-and-politics.

Whitman's "Song of Myself." (For the bit quoted in "Ghazals: Homage to Ghalib," see section 6.)

An introduction to Ghalib and some translations.

John Donne's poem "A Valediction Forbidding Mourning."

Marie Curie in brief, and again with other details.

An interview from the late 1990s.

The poet Miranda Field appreciates Rich's first book of prose, Of Woman Born.

elizabeth bishop and adrienne rich

A simple map: Key West Bight.

A recent photo: lots of boats in Key West Bight.

A Key West resident on the changing bight.

View from a height, through mist, of Petropolis.

Petropolis with surroundings: high terrain.


Queen Anne's lace, close up.

Queen Anne's lace, with "drop of blood."

elizabeth bishop and robert lowell

Bishop sites with potted biographies and reliable introductions: at the Academy, at the University of Illinois, and at the Poetry Foundation.

Barbara Page's Elizabeth Bishop site at Vassar College, and its comprehensive bibliography.

Bishop reads "The Armadillo."

Charles Baudelaire's sonnet "Correspondances"(compare to Bishop's "The Bight").

Elizabeth Bishop at Harvard, with audio of ten poems from North and South.

Also from the Academy, the poet and Bishop scholar Lloyd Schwartz on her recently discovered love poems, and the poet Katie Ford on Bishop and obsession.

Bishop (and Stevens and others) in Key West.

Some of the many letters between Bishop and Lowell. More of those letters, excerpted in The Believer.

Helen Vendler in the New York Review of Books on the new edition of Bishop-Lowell letters: "What was it that made 'Cal' and 'Elizabeth'... so necessary to each other's happiness?"

Dan Chiasson, in the New Yorker, on the new edition of Bishop-Lowell letters.

Christopher Benfey, in the New Republic, on the same book.

William Logan, in the New York Times Book Review, on the same book.

Adam Kirsch appreciates Lowell's last book, Day by Day.

John Palatella, in Boston Review, on Bishop's posthumously published drafts of poems.

David Orr in the NYT Book Review on the same book: "You are living in a world created by Elizabeth Bishop."

Meghan O'Rourke of Slate on the Bishop controversy.

robert lowell

Augustus Saint-Gaudens' memorial to Robert Gould Shaw and the Massachusetts 54th.

A detail from the memorial.

A larger image of the memorial, on Boston Common.

Photos from the 1967 March on Washington. Soldiers vs. protesters outside the Pentagon. A closeup.

Charles V by Titian (click inside page to expand for full-sized image). A journalists' introduction to the same painting.

Lowell at Harvard, with a link to a 1946 reading.

Lowell at the Academy. Audio for "Skunk Hour." (Other audio at Academy site.)

randall jarrell

Some images: RJ in hammock with cat, at his desk, writing, and behind the wheel of a late-1950s sports car.

An entire hour of RJ reading his own poems, with links to individual poems, all from The Lost World.

The Bronze David of Donatello.

Suzanne Ferguson's timeline of RJ's life.

RJ's page at the Academy, and his page at the Univ. of Illinois Modern American Poetry site.

RJ's papers in Greensboro, with a brief bio-- but most of the papers are instead at the Berg Collection in the New York Public Library.

RJ reading aloud "Ball Turret Gunner" and "Eighth Air Force."

Richard Flynn on Jarrell and the 1930s.

On Mary von S. Jarrell's memoir of her husband.

Jarrell's never-completed essay, from 1949-50, about the Bollingen Prize and Ezra Pound.

lorine niedecker

The Friends of Lorine Niedecker.

The tiny town where she spent most of her life.

A Wisconsin museum exhibit with virtual tour and biographical essay.

Her cabin on Blackhawk Island.

Her last house, where she lived with Al Millen in the 1960s.

Some critical writings, including essays by the Niedecker scholar and editor Jenny Penberthy.

Asa Gray and grasses.

more langston hughes

The authoritative Schomburg Institute Harlem Renaissance site.

If Beale Street could talk.

Winold Reiss' "Harlem at Night" (1924).

Aaron Douglas' "Aspects of Negro Life" (1934) (nightlife).

From Pittsburg State University, an elegant Harlem Renaissance guide.

langston hughes

Howard University's big Hughes site, with images of the poet (including the postage stamp).

Hughes' life, briefly, from the Academy of American Poets.

Somewhat recent academic writings on Hughes: none of these online resource lists come anywhere close to working as an acceptable substitute for an MLA bibliography search.

Recorded music.

first stevens lecture, first paper, the number five

If you're using a Harvard server you should be able to download the first paper assignment here, though it's exacty the same thing you received in lecture. (I'll try to put subsequent assignments up on the course blog too, though I will also hand them out in lecture, just as in lower-tech times.)

The children's video based on Charles Demuth's painting based on Williams' poem.

Web resources and major reference works about Stevens.

The Academy's Stevens site.

Stevens in Hartford. A bit more on Hartford. Stevens' favorite Hartford park.

Stevens in South Florida.

A somewhat idiosyncratic Stevens site, assembled by the Stevens scholar and avant-garde critic Alan Filreis.

Downloadable readers' guides to individual Stevens poems, from the critic and novelist Ronald Sukenick (do not rely on these readings alone).

Stevens at Harvard, with recordings of Stevens reading his poems here in 1954.

Stevens' 1954 Collected Poems online. (Does not include posthumously published poems, prose, etc.)

more William Carlos Williams, with audio

The Williams web exhibit at Case Western.

Many recordings of Williams reading his poems (web page menu from Penn).

Williams reading "Overture to a Dance of Locomotives" in 1945 (audio file).

Williams reading "To a Poor Old Woman" in 1942 (audio file).

Williams reading "The Term" in 1945 (audio file).

A word from Shakespeare (compare to "The Term").

The most often quoted sentences from Williams' introduction to The Wedge (1944).

There is something called pitch copper with electrical uses, but Williams is more likely thinking about copper roofing which uses copper sheets and bars.

Discussions (from Cary Nelson's site) of "Young Sycamore," and another version of the Stieglitz photograph that seems to have inspired the poem.

more waste land; william carlos williams

Countess Marie Larisch. A lot more on Countess Larisch.

St Magnus Martyr church, street view. St Magnus Martyr interior (both present day).

Wagner's Rhinemaidens (musical motif). Fan's or student's guide to Das Rheingold.

Words, and information, on other songs and musical excerpts in The Waste Land.

The William Carlos Williams society.

About Grand Central Terminal, which opened in 1913. Grand Central, great hall (contemporary restoration). Great hall with clock. Great hall with people.


Williams' home in Rutherford. Map of Paterson, NJ in 1920.

The Modernist Journals Project, with information on "little magazines." The Others contributors, including Williams, Bodenheim, Kreymborg, Man Ray (1916).

Marsden Hartley, Musical Theme (Oriental Symphony) (1913)

Alfred Stieglitz, Spring Showers (The Sweeper)

Charles Demuth, I Saw the Figure 5 in Gold (1928)

Yale's Langdon Hammer talks about some of the same poems.

eliot: gerontion, the waste land, marina

A flowering judas tree.

A cleanly annotated Waste Land with hyperlinked translations.

A more heavily annotated Waste Land, with more information but a bit harder to navigate.

One page from the Waste Land manuscript (typist and young man carbuncular). Another page. Note the deletions.

Cary Nelson's introduction to World War I, a web exhibit designed for undergraduate modern poetry students.

A quick Eliot biography from the Academy of American Poets, and another (with links to a bibliography and to the speech he gave) at the Nobel Prize site.

t. s. eliot images (1)

T. S. Eliot's family home.

Eliot's later residence in London.

First edition of Prufrock.

A silent crab.

A magic lantern.

syllabus now online

You can download our syllabus by clicking here. You may have to log in with your Harvard ID first.

The syllabus also includes the poems passed out in class today, by Merrill, Armantrout, Brooks, Frost and Moore; we may discuss another one of those poems on Wednesday.

The syllabus does not include the T. S. Eliot material for Wednesday ("Prufrock" and so on): if you didn't get the Xerox today, and you want to be sure you have read it by Wednesday, you'll need to find Eliot's Selected Poems, the book. The most important poems are "Prufrock" and "Gerontion."

links and images, first lecture: 9-15-08

Technical toolkits for describing poems in general, to which you will likely return.

Modernism in the visual arts: cubism and more cubism, some Vorticism by Wyndham Lewis and later some Surrealism by Tanguy.

Modernisms in the visual arts: photography, by for example Alfred Steiglitz (ship steerage) and Edward Steichen (big lathe) and Berenice Abbott (Union Square). And product design (radios).

Visual moderns come to America: the Armory Show.

Jazz on record and in live performance, e.g. Fletcher Henderson, blues, e.g. Bessie Smith, and fine-art adaptations (Bauhaus Band).

Automobiles, airplanes, faster boats and subways and trains.

The Great War: map of Verdun. An air raid. Verdun on fire. Dead people in a trench. (General resource for Great War photography.)

Sigmund Freud.

Modernism and the look and feel of a page: Apollinaire's visual poetry. More of his visual poetry. Blaise Cendrars' Prose du transsiberien: front cover, and final page.

Modernism in New York: Arensberg living room. Arensberg circle: Others magazine writers.

Williams' friends: Sheeler. a Sheeler photograph. Charles Demuth, illustrating Williams' poem.

High Modernism in London: Blast magazine. More pages from Blast.


Lorine Niedecker: her friends in Wisconsin. Her EPC page.

Langston Hughes and other Harlem writing. Langston Hughes, professional writer.

Robert Lowell, right here.

some permanently useful links

This blog contains links and visual aids for Stephen Burt's Modern American Poetry course at Harvard, English 169, taught fall 2009. Most of it will contain links to images and other material used in lectures.

Here (in this first post) are some perennially useful links for readers and students of modern poetry in English-- though they are no substitute for your own analyses, nor for essays, articles, and entire books.

The good people at the University of Toronto maintain the best of the poem-finder sites, with accurate, annotated online texts of many (not all!) famous poems from all periods of literature in English.

Cary Nelson and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign run a fine site with critical and biographical information about the modern poets in Nelson's anthology.

Alan Filreis, who teaches the modern American poetry course at the University of Pennsylvania, has an enormous set of links for students, both to individual poets' resources and to generally useful sites.

Brief but well-organized information about modern and contemporary poets can often be had at the Academy of American Poets site.

Harvard's own Poetry at Harvard site is still in beta-testing mode (and requires a Harvard login) but once you're there you can find lots of useful bits, either about what's in our libraries or about poets and poems with local connections.

For more poems, essays, interviews, sound files, and so on-- aimed less at students and scholars than at a general poetry-reading public-- check out the Poetry Foundation site. And its blog.

For breaking news, new poems, new criticism, and so on-- not so relevant to this course, but relevant to your lives as readers of poetry-- there's also the deservedly popular, slightly combative Ron Silliman blog, and the poems and articles (including a few of my own) you can find at The Page.