Department of English

We will read romantic, Victorian and early modern poets, seeking to discover and appreciate key aspects of poetry and criticism from 1789 through the nineteenth century. Poets may include William Wordsworth, William Blake, S.T. Coleridge, Percy Shelley, John Keats, Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Lord Tennyson, Christina Rossetti, G.M. Hopkins, W.B. Yeats and T.S. Eliot. We also will pay attention to poems and prose by Anna Barbauld, Dorothy Wordsworth, Mary Robinson, John Clare, Felicia Hemans, D.G. Rossetti and Thomas Hardy. 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 three short papers (3 to 5 pages) and a longer paper (8 to 10 pages) at the end of the course. Engl 40 will be completely online, to be taken at your computer. We will have regular web-cast classes on Thursday evenings and we will use an e-mail list-serv for weekly discussions of poems on an asynchronous basis.