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.