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[Fall 2006]
ENGL W4402x Romantic Poetry
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Prof.
Erik Gray
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| The movement in European
art and thought known as Romanticism arose as both a product
of and a reaction against the Enlightenment of the eighteenth
century. This course begins with an overview of the philosophical
and historical forces that particularly influenced this
new movement, above all the French Revolution and its
aftermath. As we delve further and further into the English
poetry of this period, we will discover the many ways
in which the major authors took old forms that they had
inherited and made them new. Nowhere is this more evident
than in the reflorescence of the many genres that characterize
British Romantic poetry: narrative Romance, which gives
the movement its name and which looks backwards for its
inspiration; epic (like Wordsworth's Prelude), which defies
all precedent by looking inward; and the sonnet, equally
defiant in looking outward, to politics, for its subject
matter. Concluding with the deaths of Keats, Shelley,
and Byron in the early 1820s, the course covers the thirty-five
years of greatest formal and thematic innovation in the
scope of British poetry. |
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WEEKLY SYLLABUS
All readings, except those marked "handout"
are to be found in Romanticism: An Anthology, ed. Duncan
Wu. Parenthetical numbers refer to pages in the anthology.
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| WEEK 1: |
Background to Romanticism;
poems by Milton, Johnson, and Gray (handout)
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| WEEK 2: |
Blake,
Innocence and Experience, Marriage of Heaven and Hell
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| WEEK 3: |
Wordsworth
and Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads, with Preface
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| WEEK 4: |
Coleridge,
Ancient Mariner, lyrics; Hazlitt,
"Coleridge"
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| WEEK 5: |
Coleridge,
Christabel, Dejection; Wordsworth,
Ode
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| WEEK 6: |
Wordsworth,
Prelude
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| WEEK 7: |
Wordsworth,
Sonnets and Elegies
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| WEEK 8: |
Byron,
Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Canto I (handout), Manfred
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| WEEK 9: |
Byron,
Don Juan, Cantos I-II
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| WEEK 10: |
Shelley,
A Defence of Poetry, Major lyrics
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| WEEK 11: |
Shelley,
Alastor; Epipsychidion (handout)
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| WEEK 12: |
Keats,
Isabella, Eve of St. Agnes, Odes, letters
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| WEEK 13: |
Keats,
Lamia, Hyperion, Fall of Hyperion, letters
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REQUIREMENTS
— Two midterm tests: 15% each
— Two 5-6 page papers: 25% each
— Final exam: 20%
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