English 4354: Romantic Poetry

By turns breathtaking, visionary, playful, reverent, ironic, and bitingly satirical, British Romantic poetry (1780s-1830s) reflects brilliantly and critically on the rise of our modern world. Our journey through this poetry will contain three major units about its shaping circumstances and inspirations. In Unit 1, Nature, the City, and the Human Mind, we will consider how Romantic poets faced the rapid reorganization of rural life and crowding of people into cities, and how they felt this altered not only nature, but also human nature—how people think, feel, and live together. In Unit 2, Biblical Poetry and Romantic Prophecy, we will ask how and why, in an age of revolutions, Romantic poets turned to the Bible as a model for their poetry, and how some, as a result, came to see themselves as modern prophets. In Unit 3, Alternative Aspirations and Redemptions, we will evaluate the efforts of later Romantic authors to imagine alternative forms of aspiration and redemption as they came to doubt Christian salvation. In each unit, we will emphasize that the Romantics worked out their major ideas and concerns through intense experimentation with poetic form.