This course covers the poetry of the English Romantic period, with emphasis on six of the era’s greatest poets: Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, and Byron.
The lectures consider:
- William Blake and his representation of human life reenacting the Fall of Man;
- the celebrated poetry of Wordsworth and Coleridge, who collaborated to define the Romantic movement;
- the styles of Keats and Shelley;
- a consideration of the Romantic satire of Lord Byron and the influence of the "Byronic hero" on subsequent literature; and
- women poets of this era, many recently rediscovered.
The course includes close readings of partial or entire major poems and introduces critical theory on these works and the Romantic movement as a whole.