Department of English

This course will examine the "major" poets of the British Romantic period: Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, and Keats. We will also consider several important female poets of the time who have disappeared from our literary canon -- Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Charlotte Smith, Mary Robinson, Joanna Baillie, and Felicia Hemans. By reading these writers in succession, we will be able to understand better the tension-filled literary, social, and political landscape they were attempting to navigate. We will explore questions of canonization, gender, literary authority, urbanization, and economics. This class is discussion-centered and requires active student participation. Several short essays; one longer final paper.