English: Romantic Poetry and Poetics

Advanced study in 18th- and 19th-century literature. Representative topics: Romantic Poetry and Poetics; Mary Shelley and Her Circle; The Gothic. May be repeated for credit with different content. Topics vary by offering; periodic offering at intervals that may exceed four years. Credit not awarded for both ENGL 3350 and ENGL 5300. Prerequisites: ENGL 1500, ENGL 2000; English major, Secondary Education major with a concentration in English, or English minor; minimum Junior standing.

Prereqs enforced by the system ENGL 1500, ENGL 2000; ENGL majors, minors & SEE majors with concentration in ENGL only minimum Junior standing. PACE students by permission and override

This senior seminar offers an intensive and varied introduction to British Romantic Poetry through the methodology not only of traditional interpretation but of creative and critical poetics. Readings include poetry by major British Romantic poets such as Robert Burns, William Blake, Charlotte Smith, Mary Robinson, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, John Keats, John Clare, Felicia Hemans, and others. The course tries to address the subject of Romantic Poetry with a distinctive vantage. Instead of guiding students chronologically through readings and supplying “context” along the way, the class will focus on helping you enjoy experiencing and analyzing poems up very close, through study of the Romantic poet’s repertoire as a maker of verse, and by studying figurative reading practices that define Romantic Lyric Poetry and have featured in much of its best criticism. As a result, in addition to the poetry we will read a significant amount of important, stimulating (and sometimes controversial) Romantic literary criticism and theory over the course of the semester. Even to a Senior English-Major, it might come as a surprise to learn that there is a whole other methodological branch of literary study outside of the activity that searches for scaffolded interpretative meaning (which is traditionally called hermeneutics)— namely, poetics. Rather than seeking to arrive at a thematic “reading” of a work of literature, taking a critical “poetics” as our approach to Romantic Poetry will help foster a discussion instead about how poetry and poetic meaning are constructed — through philosophical and artistic concepts, literary practice, and specifics of verse technique. The practice of poetics involves a fine-grained attention to describing the features of artworks, rather than pursuing the “hermeneutics” of interpretation to establish a stable basis from which to govern textual meaning. These two ways of engaging with language—hermeneutics and poetics, the cognitive and the performative—are intertwined in any full act of attending to literature. However, poetics has often been bypassed in the academic study of literature. It is well worth our time this semester to try to keep this subject of “poetics” in focus. This senior seminar is a discussion-based course. The course does not aim to provide a full historical survey of British Romantic Poetry, to “cover” as many great poems as possible in a semester. However, each of the three units (“Reading Lyric Figures,” “Reading the Romantic ‘Schools,’” and “Cultural, Historical, and Philosophical Poetics”) is structured so as to move more-or-less from writings around 1790 to writings around 1830 (and in some cases brings in later poems from the later 19th, 20th and 21st centuries). So by the end of the semester we will have traversed the Romantic Period three times! Basic Course Learning Goals — Students will gain reading knowing of a wide variety of major British Romantic poets and poems. — Students will learn about the historical and cultural contexts of Romanticism. — Students will be introduced to the poetics as a distinctive approach to literary study. — In this seminar students will practice and develop scholarly critical writing skills that bring together poetics and traditional interpretation. — Students will practice and develop a relationship to poetry off the page, as sonic and oral performance.