Reading High Romanticism: Blake to Keats

Catalog description

This lecture will focus on the interpretation and appreciation of the most influential lyric poetry written in English in the tumultuous decades between the French Revolution and the Reform Act of 1832. Over the course of two generations, Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, and Keats invented a new kind of autobiographical poem that largely internalized the myths they had inherited from literary and religious traditions. The poet’s inward, subjective experience became the inescapable subject of the poem—a legacy that continues to this day. We will explore ways in which the English Romantic poets responded to the political impasse of their historical moment and created poems out of their arguments with themselves, as well as their arguments with one another. The preeminent goal will be to understand each poet’s unique contributions to the language. Romanticism/Postmodernism: The Question of Literature