English Romantic Poetry
Course coordinator: Professor Ljiljana Ina Gjurgjan, PhD
Instructor: Martina Domines Veliki
Course title: English Romantic Poetry
ECTS credits: 6
Language: English
Duration: 1 semester
Status: elective
Course type: 1 hour of lecture and 2 hours of seminar
Prerequisites: Introduction to Literature, 4/6 semester enrollment
Course requirements: continuous assessment (midterm and final exam, final paper, class attendance and participation)
Objective: The students will be introduced to the major poets of English Romanticism, as well as their relevant historical, cultural, political and aesthetic milieu. The aim of this course is to encourage students to create their own view of the suggested array of poems through close reading. They will be asked to think about and analyze these poems with the help of a number of critical texts (from more traditional to post-structuralist ones).
Course description: Authors we will read include Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley and Keats. Through reading of their representative poetry we will tackle some fundamental Romantic concepts such as poetic inspiration, memory of the past events, the sublime, deism and mysticism, the relationship between the poetic subject and nature as well as the role played by language. The poetic subject becomes the central topic of most Romantic poetry and it is actualized through a close relationship with nature that acts as either a consoling or a debilitating force. Priority will be given to the Romantic poets of the first generation. These poets often imagine themselves to be responding to the French Revolution. They rebel against social injustice, cherishing feelings for ‘common’ people. Their innovations at the level of subject matter but also of literary form were far-reaching to the point that we could speak about them as being the first ‘modern’ writers.
Weekly schedule:
Week 1: Introduction into English Romanticism. Periodization, formative experiences for Romantic poetry.
Week 2: William Blake - selections from Songs of Innocence and Experience
Week 3: Blake continued – “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell”
Week 4: William Wordsworth – excerpts from the 1800 Preface to Lyrical
Ballads, a selection of poems from Lyrical Ballads
Week 5: Wordsworth continued: a selection of poems from Poems in Two Volumes
Week 6: Wordsworth continued – The Prelude (chosen chapters)
Week 7: Samuel Taylor Coleridge – selections from Biographia Literaria
Week 8: Coleridge continued – “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”, “Dejection: an Ode”
midterm exam
Week 9: George Gordon Byron – excerpts from Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage
Week 10: Byron continued – “Prometheus”, “Fare Thee Well”
Week 11: Percy Bysshe Shelley – “Ozymandias”, “Ode to the West Wind”
Week 12: Shelley continued – “To a Skylark”, excerpts from “A Defence
of Poetry”, Preface to “Prometheus Unbound”
Final paper
Week 13: John Keats: “To Autumn”, “La Belle Dame Sans Merci”
Week 14: Keats continued - “Ode to a Nightingale”, “Ode on a Grecian Urn”
Week 15: final exam
READING LIST:
Primary literature:
Bloom, Harold & Trilling, Lionel: Romantic Poetry and Prose (New York, London, Toronto : Oxford University Press , 1973)
ili Wu, Duncan: A Companion to Romanticism (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001)
Abrams, M. H.: The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical
Tradition (London: Oxford University Press, 1960)
Bloom, Harold: The Visionary Company: A Reading of English Romantic Poetry
(London: Cornell University Press, any edition)
Curran, Stuart (ed.): The Cambridge Companion to British Romanticism (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1998)
Daiches, David: A Critical History of English Literature in four volumes (relevant
chapters) (London : Secker & Warburg , 1992)
Secondary literature:
Abrams, M. H.: Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic
Literature (London: Oxford University Press, 1971)
Bennett, Andrew: Romantic Poets and the Culture of Posterity (Cambridge UP, 1999)
Bone, Drummond: The Cambridge Companion to Byron (Cambridge UP, 2004)
Brisman, Leslie: Romantic Origins (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1978)
Bromwich, David: Disowned by Memory: Wordsworth's Poetry of the 1790s (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2000)
Butler, Marilyn: Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries – English Literature and its
Background 1760-1830 (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1981)
Day, Aidan: Romanticism (London and New York: Routledge, 1996)
de Man, Paul: The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984)
Erdman, David: Blake : Prophet against Empire (New York : Dover, 1991)
Gill, Stephen: The Cambridge Companion to Wordsworth (Cambridge UP, 2003)
Hartman, Geoffrey: Wordsworth's Poetry 1787-1813 (Harvard UP, 1987)
Mellor, Anne K.: Romanticism and Gender (Routledge, 1993)
Morton, Timothy: The Cambridge Companion to Shelley (Cambridge UP, 2006)
Newlyn, Lucy: The Cambridge Companion to Coleridge (Cambridge UP, 2002)
Roe, Nicholas. Wordsworth and Coleridge: The Radical Years (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003)
Reed, Arden: Romanticism and Language (Cornell University Press, 1984)
Wolfson, Susan: The Cambridge Companion to Keats (Cambridge UP, 2001)