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.