Modern literature and education Literary modernism Postmodernism Feminist literature

Langston Hughes, ‘I, Too, Sing America’. The finest poet of the Harlem Renaissance, Hughes (1902-67) often writes about the lives of African Americans living in America, especially in New York, in the early twentieth century. In an allusive nod to Walt Whitman’s poem ‘I Hear America Singing’, Hughes – describing himself as the ‘darker brother’ – highlights the plight of African Americans at the time, having to eat separately from everyone else in the kitchen when guests arrive, but determined to strive and succeed in the ‘Land of the Free’.
W. H. Auden, ‘September 1, 1939’. Auden (1907-73) had the opposite trajectory to Eliot’s: born in Yorkshire, he emigrated to the United States shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War, and wrote this, one of his most famous poems, on the day that Nazi Germany invaded Poland. The poem earns its place on this list for two reasons: Auden’s was an important poetic voice in the mid-twentieth century, and he wrote about many atrocities, wars, and injustices from the Holocaust to the Japanese invasion of China, but the poem also has an immediacy in being written so soon after the events which plunged Europe, and eventually the rest of the world, into another major conflict. Although Auden disowned the poem, it remains well-loved by many of his readers. It also struck a chord with many people reading it in the wake of the September 11 attacks of 2001.
Allen Ginsberg, ‘Howl’. ‘I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness’, this classic poem of the Beat Generation famously begins. Completed in 1955, ‘Howl’ is dedicated to Carl Solomon, whom Ginsberg had met in a mental institution, and the poem is, in one sense, an extended meditation on mental instability and despair. Are those who we consider ‘sane’ really so? And are those who are branded ‘mad’ really insane? This is the quintessential Beat poem.
Sylvia Plath, ‘Lady Lazarus’. The 1960s was the great decade of Confessional poetry, best typified by American poets such as John Berryman, Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton, and most famously of all, Sylvia Plath. Plath’s poem is about her numerous suicide attempts and addresses this challenging subject matter in a direct and honest way, yet the poem is also technically dextrous and weaves in references to mythology and unlikely poetic frames of reference too.