Modern Poetry (ENGL 310) — Open Yale Courses
by Langdon Hammer · Open Yale Courses
Twenty-five recorded Yale lectures by Langdon Hammer working poem by poem through Yeats, Eliot, Pound, Stevens, Moore, Frost and Bishop. Free video, audio, transcripts and assignments show how a critic builds an interpretive argument from diction, image and form.
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Host Catherine Nichols and guests choose one book for each year of the twentieth century (Nella Larsen's Passing, 1936, Jacqueline Susann's Valley of the Dolls, 1966; Mohandas Gandhi's Indian Home Rule, 1909) and talk about it in its historical and literary context. Tune in to find out what the 20th century was all about.
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Practical Criticism: A Study of Literary Judgment
Richards gave Cambridge students thirteen unattributed poems and published their responses alongside analysis of how readings go wrong: stock responses, sentimentality, doctrinal bias, mishandled rhythm. Serves as a diagnostic account of the interpretive habits that distort evidence-based reading. Source Truth for the entire topic of close reading, and unusually practical for a 1929 text because it is built on documented student misreadings rather than assertion — a reader can test their own responses against the recorded protocols. I
Close Reading for the Twenty-First Century
Princeton guide dividing close reading into five steps — scene setting, noticing, local claiming, regional argumentation, global theorizing — with worked master classes from twenty-one scholars, worksheets and exercises showing how the technique feeds Marxist, queer, Black studies and affect interpretations. The only current book that treats close reading itself as an explicit, teachable procedure and traces it from practical criticism and New Criticism into contemporary methods, including Auerbach and Vendler as case studies. This is the topic's method text; everything else demonstrates the practice on particular genres.