Advanced course

 

In this class we will close-read and close-listen to English poetry of the Romantic period, starting with the indispensable Blake, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Byron, and Coleridge, but including also less canonized poets writing at the time. While the focus will be on the poetry, we will read excerpts from influential prose works by some of these writers, and ask what binds them together besides their shared historical period. In addition to the works of poetry “themselves,” we will also want to uncover some of the ideological and historical dimensions of the kind of poetry that is responsible for so many of our assumptions, still prevalent today, about what poetry is.

Course requirements include active participation and reading quizzes, in addition to a paper, midterm, and fina