Romantic Poetry and Poetics (ENGLM3009)

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Romantic Poetry and Poetics (ENGLM3009)

The unit is designed to give students an advanced introduction to major themes in the poetry and poetics of the Romantic era. Writers studied will include Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Clare, Thomas De Quincey, Felicia Hemans, John Keats, Mary Robinson, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Charlotte Smith, William Wordsworth, and Ann Yearsley. The writers will be studied within their social and political contexts, but the focus will be above all on contemporary developments in conceptions of poetry and poetics, in changing definitions of Romanticism, and in the critical reception of these writers. In addition to selections from the poetry, attention will be paid to major critical and theoretical essays from the period as well as to recent critical discussions of Romantic poetry and poetics.

PREPARATORY READING

Week 1Romantic Poetics (AJB)

Preface to Lyrical Ballads

Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads is widely available. Fiona Stafford’s new edition (Oxford World’s Classics, 2013) is recommended; other good editions are by R.L.Brett and A.R. Jones (2nd edn., Routledge, 1991), by Michael Mason (Longman, 1992), and by Michael Gamer and Dahlia Porter (Broadview, 2008). In addition, the Preface is available in collections of Wordsworth’s prose, in selected editions of Wordsworth’s poetry (eg the Oxford Authors edition edited by Stephen Gill), and in anthologies of Romanticism and Romantic prose. However, please make sure you read the complete 1802 version (or later versions – the revisions after 1802 are minimal).

‘A Defence of Poetry’

The complete version of Shelley’s Defence is available in the Norton edition of Shelley’s Poetry and Prose(2nd edition, 2002), and in Tim Webb’s Everyman edition of Shelley(out of print, but available second-hand from Amazon or elsewhere).

Week 2 Romantic Lyric, Romantic Narrative: Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads (1798) (SC)

See above for editions of Lyrical Ballads. All of the poems from the 1798 Lyrical Ballads are also included in Duncan Wu’sRomanticism: An Anthology (4th edn, Basil Wiley, 2012).

Please be sure to read the following poems: ‘The Idiot Boy’, ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’, ‘Anecdote for Fathers’, ‘A slumber did my spirit seal’, ‘Goody Blake and Harry Gill’, ‘Lines Written a few miles above Tintern Abbey’, ‘Lucy Gray’, ‘Michael, a Pastoral’, ‘Nutting’, ‘Ruth’, ‘Simon Lee, the old Huntsman’, ‘Strange fits of passion I have known’, ‘The Old Cumberland Beggar, a Description’, ‘We Are Seven’.

We will also refer to Wordsworth’s Preface (see above), and chapter seventeen from Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria (1817). Although it is out of print now, there is a good Everyman edition available which you can pick up second-hand from Amazon or elsewhere.

Week 3The Romantic Sublime: Wordsworth, Shelley and Keats(AJB)

In this seminar we will look at the significance of ideas of the sublime for readings of Romantic poetry, particularly the poetry of Wordsworth, Keats and Shelley. Through close readings of passages from these poets we will attempt to come to some conclusions about a) how the Romantic Sublime might be defined, and b) how the concept is put to work in certain poems. Poems that we might consider include (extracts from) Wordsworth’s 1805 Prelude, Keats’s ‘On First Looking in Chapman’s Homer’, ‘On Seeing the Elgin Marbles’, ‘On Sitting Down to Read King Lear Once Again’, ‘Hyperion’, ‘The Fall of Hyperion’, and the odes; and Shelley’s ‘Mont Blanc’, ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’, ‘Prometheus Unbound’, ‘Adonais’, and ‘The Triumph of Life’.

Week 4ThomasDe Quincey (SC)

Please read: Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1822). There is a good edition (of the 1822 version) in Penguin. If you have time also read Coleridge’s ‘Kubla Khan’, ‘Limbo’, ‘Ne Plus Ultra’ and ‘The Pains of Sleep’. Also of great interest are De Quincey’s Suspiria De Profundis (1854), and Charles Baudelaire’s Artificial Paradise (1860).

Week 5How to Write an Essay

Week 6Reading Week

Week 7Romantic Women Poets (SM)

There are a number of useful introductory anthologies of Romantic women’s poetry, but selections tend to be brief or fragmentary. Duncan Wu’s Romantic Women Poets: An Anthology (1997) is probably the best, but now out of print. Buy second-hand, or find online texts through Literature Online (LION) or British Women Romantic Poets, 1789-1832,

Charlotte Smith, Elegiac Sonnets, 3rd edition, 1786, in Romantic Women Poets: An Anthology, ed. by Duncan Wu (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), pp. 67-88.

Mary Robinson, Sappho and Phaon, 1796, in Wu 1997, pp. 108-204.

Felicia Hemans, Records of Woman, 1828, in Wu 1997, pp. 514-572.

Week 8Labouring-Class Poetry: Ann Yearsley and John Clare (JB)

In this seminar we'll explore a peculiar phenomenon of this period - the emergence of labouring-class poetry - and to do so, we'll focus on the first publications of two poets known as the Bristol Milkwoman and the Northamptonshire Peasant. The two volumes we'll be looking at are Ann Yearsley'sPoems on Several Occasions(1785) and John Clare'sPoems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery(1820). Digital facsimiles of both volumes can be downloaded as pdfs from Google books; links are given below. If you'd like to refer to a modern edition, Kerri Andrews' edition of theComplete Works of Ann Yearsley(Pickering and Chatto, 2014) is available in the Arts and Social Sciences Library;The Early Poems of John Clareed. Eric Robinson and David Powell (1989) is also in the library and is useful, but do note that this reproduces manuscript versions of the poems published inPoems Descriptive.
From Yearsley'sPoems on Several Occasions

( read 'A Prefatory Letter to Mrs. Montagu. By A Friend' and as much of the verse as possible, particularly 'To Stella; On a Visit to Mrs. Montagu', 'To the Same; On her Accusing the Author of Flattery', 'Address to Friendship', 'On Mrs Montagu', and 'Clifton Hill'.
From Clare'sPoems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery

(

read the 'Introduction' and as much of the verse as possible, particularly 'Helpstone', 'To an Insignificant Flower, Obscurely Blooming in a Lonely Wild', 'The Village Funeral', 'Harvest Morning', 'Familiar Epistle, to a Friend', 'Dawnings of Genius', and 'To my Oaten Reed'.

Week 9Romantic Ecology (RP)

William Wordsworth, The River Duddon, ‘The Kitten and the Falling Leaves’, ‘The

Redbreast (Suggested in a Westmoreland Cottage)’

Jonathan Bate, The Song of the Earth (Picador, 2008), chapter 8: ‘The Place of

Poetry’ (pp. 205-42)

Ecocriticism is a large body of work and much of it draws on/is drawn to Romantic literature. These poems from Cowper, Wordsworth and Blake (joined with Bate’s chapter, discussing The River Duddon) all raise questions about nature ‘wild’ versus/coupled with nature ‘tamed’. They should help us consider both ecocritical writing and its relation to Romantic writing.. Stephen Budiansky’s book, The Covenant of the Wild: Why Animals Chose Domestication (1992; new ed., 1997) throws useful light on this distinction.

Week 10 Seminar Presentations

Weeks 11-12 Reading and Essay Writing Weeks

AJB – Professor Andrew Bennett; JB – Dr Jennifer Batt; SC– Stephen Cheeke; SM – Dr Samantha Matthews; RP – Professor Ralph Pite;