Including poets from Thomas Hardy and W.B. Yeats to Carol Ann Duffy and Bernardine Evaristo, this course is a romp through the variety of forms, styles, and questions that shaped the modern lyric in England and Ireland. Arising amid and out of global wars, cosmopolitan cultural movements, changing political and national imaginaries, these texts are unpredictable, innovative, stubborn, wry, and complex. W.H. Auden claimed in a poem that “poetry makes nothing happen,” but reading these poets will give you plenty to think about. Prerequisite: One course in English with attribute GFWI.