| This course is designed to search for the appearances and articulations of cosmopolitanism in the work of modernist and contemporary English-language poets from Britain, Canada, Ireland and the United States. The course will begin by placing cosmopolitanism in the context of regionalism, nationalism, globalization and multiculturalism and with readings of W.B. Yeats’s poetic expressions of Irish nationalism and Wallace Stevens’s singular reaction to the postcolonial moment in his quest for a bleak, American sublime. The course will progress to experiences of the migratory and rootless, the political parable, myth and the question of the universal, and contemporary nationalism in the global context in work of Louis MacNeice, Elizabeth Bishop, Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney, Jorie Graham, Charles Wright, Jan Zwicky, A.F. Moritz, Don McKay, Charles Simic, Medbh McGuckian, Carol Ann Duffy, and Simon Armitage. |
