Course Description
Summary
This course provides an immersion into the work of a group of late 18th century and early 19th century British poets and thinkers who reacted against the rationalism of Enlightenment thought, the tumultuous politics of the day, and the birth of the Industrial Revolution by valorizing imagination over reason, mystery over certainty, nature over artifice, and the sensuous over the conceptual, as they aimed in their poetry to capture beauty, authenticity, intense emotion, and the sublime. We will read the canonical 鈥渂ig six鈥 British Romantic poets -- William Blake, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and John Keats -- and also examine the work of several women poets of the time, including Charlotte Smith, Felicia Hemans, and Dorothy Wordsworth, as well as the peasant poet John Clare, who has been described as "the quintessential Romantic poet." We are also likely to consider British Romanticism in the context of analogous Romantic literary movements in Germany and Russia. We will focus both on the structure and rhetoric of individual Romantic poems, as well as on their psychological, existential, political, and ecological dimensions. Assignments will likely include presentations, memorization and recitation of poems, and two critical essays.
