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The careers of the main English Romantic poets—William Blake, William Wordsworth, Lord Byron, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy B. Shelley, and John Keats—run from 1789 to 1850. We will begin with a few of Blake’s “Songs of Innocence” and “Songs of Experience,” and the “Proverbs” from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Then (violating chronology) we will read Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and “Kubla Kahn.” We will devote the following six or seven weeks to William Wordsworth’s poems: some short lyrics, a few sonnets, then “Tintern Abbey” and “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood.” We will finish our study of Wordsworth with three sections from “The Prelude.” For the second generation of the Romantic Poets, we will start with two poems of Byron and three Shelley poems, and spend the of term on the poems of Keats and a selection of his letters.
I will provide copies of the Blake, Coleridge, Byron, and Shelley poems, and some of Keats’s letters. You will need to have appropriate collections of Wordsworth’s and Keats’s poems. Wordsworth editions, Norton, and Oxford are reliable, and recommended.
Course requirements: regular attendance and participation, weekly in-class scribbles, and a seminar paper. |
