Department of English

We will survey romantic, Victorian and early modern poets, seeking to discover and appreciate key aspects of poetry and criticism since 1789. In the first half of the course we will focus on the development of English romanticism in the 1790's, with a primary focus on William Wordsworth, and attention to representative writings by Dorothy Wordsworth, William Blake, Joanna Baillie, and S.T. Coleridge. For the second half of the course we will select key poems from nineteenth century and early twentieth century British poets, including John Keats, Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti, W.B. Yeats and T.S. Eliot. Throughout the course we will do close reading of texts with some attention to versification, in order to understand how poems contain and transform both individual ideas and historical realities. There will be frequent short papers and many opportunities for class participation