Department of English

This course aims to make the book itself an object of interpretation and a means for understanding Romantic Poetry and Poetics. Rather than being conducted as a survey course in which students read a few poems by many writers, this course will read 5-6 writers in depth; we will read them, furthermore, in the exact forms in which they were read by their peers, paying particular attention to how poems within specific collections speak to one another and deepen each other's meaning. In addition to reading the collections, we will thoroughly acquaint ourselves with the careers of each writer we read, with how their books were received and reviewed, and with the contexts in which they published their books. I plan to choose the primary texts for the course from the books below, and invite students to make known to me if they have any preferences: Anna Letitia Barbauld, *Poems* (1773); Charlotte Smith, *Elegiac Sonnets* (1784); Helen Maria Williams *Poems* (1786); Robert Burns, *Poems Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect* (1786); William Lisle Bowles, *Fourteen Sonnets* (1789); *Poetry of the World* (1790); William Blake, *Songs of Innocence and Experience* (1789, 1794); William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, *Lyrical Ballads, with a few other Poems* (1798, 1800); Mary Robinson, *Lyrical Tales* (1800); Charlotte Smith, *Beachy-Head, and other Poems* (1804); William Wordsworth, *Poems, in Two Volumes* (1807); Lord Byron, *The Prisoner of Chillon and other Poems* (1816); Samuel Taylor Coleridge, *Christabel, Kubla Khan, and the Pains of Sleep* (1816); Mary Shelley, *Frankenstein* (1818); Percy Bysshe Shelley, *Prometheus Unbound and other Poems* (1820); John Keats, *Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and other Poems* (1820); Felicia Hemans, *Records of Woman (1828). This course requires that you have an e-mail account and that you use it. There will be bi-weekly responses, a short paper, a presentation, a final paper, and a final exam.