The Romantic age, the period between c. 1770 and 1830, was not only a politically rebellious phase but also rich in literature, particularly in a poetry that departed from previous rules. Among the themes of this new poetry were the miraculous, the fantastic, the monstrous, sublime and beautiful nature as well as the rebellious and solitary individual. We will read and discuss poems and some shorter prose texts by the so-called second generation of Romantic poets, Percy B. Shelley, John Keats and Lord Byron. This course will also introduce students to more general questions of the Romantic Age and of poetry analysis.

This is a block seminar (18, 19, 21, 22 September 2018). Among the text we will discuss are: Shelley: ‘Ozymandias’, ‘Ode to the West Wind’, ‘England in 1819’, extracts from A Defence of Poetry, ‘With a Guitar, to Jane’, ‘To a Skylark’, ‘Music, when soft voices die’, ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’. Keats: ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’, ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, Lamia, The Eve of St. Agnes, ‘Bright Star’, ‘When I have fears that I may cease to be’, excerpts from the Letters. Byron: ‘She Walks in Beauty’, ‘Darkness’, ‘Fare Thee Well!’, ‘Prometheus’, Don Juan: Canto I, Childe Harold: Canto III (stanzas 11-22), excerpts from shorter prose texts.

An outline will be made available. If you want to join and receive the outline, please send me an email by 10 September 2018, suschmid@aol.com.

Recommended background reading: Romanticism: An Anthology, ed. Duncan Wu, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006) (or any other edition – please note that the first edition may not contain the same texts). ‘Introduction’ in Romanticism, ed. Wu, pp. xxx-xlii. The British Library, ‘Discovering Literature: Romantics and Victorians’ https://www.bl.uk/romantics-and-victorians/articles/the-romantics [general background and background on our authors as well as several of their texts].