Department of English

Fulfills Distribution Requirement III: Arts & Letters

This course will focus on the poetry of the late seventeenth and eighteenth century in Britain that literary historians have labeled neo-classical and its transformation at the end of the eighteenth century in the work of a school of poets and a revolution in consciousness now referred to as Romanticism. We will focus on the work of representative poets from each period and on the difference between the two periods, including especially Dryden, Pope, Swift, Gay, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Thomson, Gray, Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Charlotte Smith, Keats, Byron, and Shelly. A good deal of this poetry deals with London and urban experience, and we will seek to integrate our own impressions and experience of the city with its representation in the works of these poets.